The State Administrative Capacity Crisis: Reimagining the Public Service of the 21st Century
Key Takeaways
-
State administrative capacity is in decline due to structural and systemic issues:
- A lack of interest in administrative capacity from the public or political leaders.
- Political workarounds that mask underlying systemic inefficiencies.
- Short-term cost-cutting measures that undermine longer term performance.
- Employee protections that protect poor performers while driving away high-potential staff.
- The high turnover of senior public servants.
-
These issues create a number of symptoms of decline in administrative capacity:
- Outdated organisational hierarchies.
- Weak performance management.
- Bureaucracy imposed on staff.
- Traditional approaches to reform are not working.
- Governments should consider more radical reforms by removing poor performers and replacing them with far fewer high achievers alongside flatter organisational hierarchies and streamlined bureaucratic processes.
- This approach will deliver significant savings and increase administrative capacity for the long term.
- The main resistance to reform will come from the unions, making this a reform centre-left governments are unlikely to pursue. However, the potential savings and capacity improvements make it an attractive reform for centre-right governments.
What Next?
How can you support better administrative state capacity?
Introduction
"With bad laws and good civil servants one can still govern, with bad civil servants the best laws cannot help." Otto von Bismarck, 1850.
Otto von Bismarck’s astute words ring truer today than ever before. In an era of complex global challenges, rapid technological change, and increasing public expectations, our government's ability to effectively deliver services and implement policies is under close scrutiny.
State administrative capacity, the government's fundamental ability to accomplish policy goals and deliver services effectively, is under strain. Public administrations are struggling with deeply entrenched structural challenges that undermine their ability to meet the demands of the public. Politicians speak of efficiency, yet the machinery of government often remains largely unchanged, trapped in outdated hierarchical structures, burdened by bureaucratic red tape, and dragged down by poor performers.
This is not merely an academic concern. The decline in state administrative capacity has real-world consequences. It affects everything from healthcare delivery and infrastructure development to technological innovation and crisis response.
In this blog, I will discuss the systemic issues that undermine state administrative capacity and consider whether a radical reimagining of public administration is desirable and achievable.
Background
There is an increasing interest amongst policy wonks (like myself) on both the left and the right around what is known as state capacity - a government's ability to accomplish policy goals and deliver services effectively.
A key dimension of state capacity is administrative capacity, which focuses on the government workforce that implements policies and delivers services.
Historically, there was a general rule of thumb that politicians would get advice from public servants, make decisions and set policies, and the public service would then implement them. It was never that simple. However, the ability of public servants around the world to undertake their role is increasingly being called into question.
In just the last couple of months, we have seen the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the United States seeking to improve administrative capacity, whilst the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, whose government is proposing to get rid of 10,000 civil servants, wrote to half a million officials saying “We know many of you feel shackled by bureaucracy, frustrated by inefficiency and unable to harness new technology. Your talent has been constrained for too long.”
The United States and the UK are far from alone regarding concerns over administrative capacity.
What is causing administrative capacity to decline?
Given the widespread concerns over administrative capacity, how has it reached this point? There are a variety of deeply embedded potential reasons in our governance systems:
A Lack of Public or Political Interest in Administrative Capacity
Politicians and the public are concerned with the quality of services like healthcare, schools and transport. They are much less interested in how administrative capacity enables the high-quality provision of these services. Overall, there is very little sustained pressure from politicians or the public for protecting or enhancing administrative capacity.
The Availability of Workarounds
Politicians can often find workarounds for weak administrative capacity, either by creating ‘missions’, new agencies or divisions to focus on a specific reform with high-quality staff put in place to deliver on narrow objectives. This further reduces the desire for politicians to undertake broader reforms that build more broad-based administrative capacity.
Short-term cost savings are made at the expense of state administrative capacity.
Politicians often make short-term decisions that exacerbate the administrative capacity problem. Two approaches are particularly damaging - headcount reductions and poorly thought through Machinery of Government (MOG) changes.
Ideally, when needing to make savings through headcount reductions, public services would look to remove the weakest performers. However, the exact opposite often occurs. To reduce headcount, governments often put in voluntary redundancy schemes. Unfortunately, the people who volunteer to leave are those confident about getting a job elsewhere, frequently the best people, leaving weaker performers behind.
Governments also seek to reduce headcount through attrition and a hiring freeze. Again, the people who tend to leave are disproportionately the highest-performing staff.
MOG changes also often undermine administrative capacity. Often, smaller agencies or divisions achieving well under one political leader come under pressure to become part of a (struggling) larger department under the logic of economies of scale or strategic alignment.
These high-performing divisions or agencies quickly lose what made them successful, resulting in their staff leaving and performance dropping. For example, in the UK, the Department for International Development, which was considered by many as the best department in the world in international development, got merged into the UK foreign office, resulting in a significant loss of administrative capacity.
Employee Protections
To reduce public service headcount, governments often look to pick the lowest hanging fruit - staff with the weakest employment protections. This is what DOGE has done by removing the most recently recruited staff in the US Federal Service. By getting rid of the staff that were easiest to remove, DOGE could be making administrative capacity worse as new ideas and thinking are being removed whilst poorly performing but protected long-serving public servants remain.
The High Turnover of Senior Public Servants
Historically, senior career public servants were relatively insulated from political changes in government. This gave them a long-term aligned interest in the capacity and capabilities of the public service. However, many political leaders now put their own senior public servants in place. Inevitably, these public servants have a shorter-term horizon and less interest in things that require a longer-term focus, such as administrative capacity.
The Symptoms of the Decline in Administrative Capacity
Whilst the reasons above outline some of the issues on why state capacity is in decline, these manifest themselves in several ways in major government departments:
Organisational hierarchies
The traditional hierarchical model, characterised by clear chains of command and top-down authority, has long dominated public administration. While this structure offers advantages, including clarity, orderly communication, and ease of discipline, it also brings significant disadvantages: excessive rigidity, stifled creativity, slow decision making, unclear accountabilities, lack of staff development and inefficiencies.
Successful modern organisations tend to have much flatter structures that increase efficiency, productivity and innovation whilst maintaining clear systems of accountability.
Weak Performance Management
Many public service agencies are poor at developing staff or managing weak performance. This exacerbates the trend for high potential staff to get frustrated and leave, whilst weak performers remain.
Bureaucracy Imposed on Staff
Whilst much media attention is paid to overly bureaucratic processes that impact service delivery and the experience of the public, the administrative state also ties up its public servants in large amounts of red tape. Whilst this is often done with the best intentions, such as to reduce corruption risks, these processes could be streamlined without increasing risks.
How do we move forward?
While DOGE is getting a lot of headlines, its focus is more on individual spending decisions rather than enhancing efficiency through improved administrative capacity. Whilst it may provide valuable lessons for making savings quickly and discipline around spending decisions, I suspect that it will have a limited impact on improving long-term administrative capacity and may be recognised as having made things worse.
Similarly, the UK approach to cost savings is not particularly strategic in terms of capabilities, with politicians pointing to things like cuts to travel expenses and the use of consultants and communications as the way to generate savings. In short, they are taking a business-as-usual approach to civil service capability, a strategy that has continually weakened administrative capacity.
A More Radical Approach
Dominic Cummings, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former Chief of Staff, has long written about state capacity before becoming Chief of Staff. In an interview last year, Cummings said that whilst in government, they were looking at a more radical approach to civil service reform - replacing large numbers of poor performers with fewer high achievers. This approach would save considerable sums of money and deliver better administrative capacity and outcomes.
Would this approach work?
Much would depend on how it is implemented. As well as replacing poorer performers, this approach would need to:
- Create flatter organisational structures with clearer accountabilities.
- Take a bonfire to the red tape holding staff back.
- Increase adoption of technologies to support a better approach, including AI and data handling.
- Put governance in place that can be sustained over a long period to embed the reforms.
- Make available the funding to enable the changes.
- Recognise the scale of the cultural change required and take steps to begin the change and embed it.
- Still deliver the governments priorities whilst making the changes.
Is this a politically viable approach?
For governments of both the left and the right that are short on money (and many are), this is an appealing offering - significant cost savings, a more responsive public service and better outcomes and services. However, this approach will inevitably meet considerable resistance from public sector unions, which may make it a non-starter for many centre-left governments.
However, for centre-right governments, this offers a potential policy that the opposition may be unable to match, allowing them to recycle savings into other priorities. I suspect that once implemented (or in the process of being implemented), any incoming centre-left government would be unlikely to reverse the reforms.
Conclusion
Improving administrative state capacity is difficult but becoming increasingly essential as the demands on government continue to grow.
The traditional approaches to public service reform often undermine administrative capacity, not enhance it. The path forward may require a more radical approach.
Key to this transformation will be political will. Centre-right and centre-left governments must recognise that administrative capacity is not a partisan issue but a fundamental requirement for effective governance.
By eliminating the barriers that hold back high-calibre public servants and removing poor performers, we can create a system that delivers a step change in administrative capacity, whilst delivering significant savings for other priorities.
As Bismarck reminds us, good public servants are the backbone of effective nations. Our challenge is to create the conditions for the public service to excel.