Good Leadership is Often About Deciding What Government Should Stop Doing

I have spent more than 20 years in New York City government, and one of the biggest changes in how I think about leadership is that I no longer assume continuity is inherently a virtue.

Government is very good at adding things.

A new problem produces a new report.

An audit produces another control.

A new administration produces another initiative.

A new technology produces another system.

A new executive wants another way of tracking something.

A contract expires and the easiest answer is often to renew it.

A position becomes vacant and the first instinct is to replace it.

Most of those decisions probably made sense when they were originally made.

But government isn’t nearly as good at coming back five or ten years later and asking a more uncomfortable question:

Why are we still doing this?

I have learned to ask that question about processes, positions, reports, vendors, technology platforms and even programs I inherited.

Sometimes the answer confirms that something remains necessary.

Sometimes it leads to a better way of doing it.

And sometimes the best answer is:

Stop.

In Brooklyn, I Wanted More Organizations to Have a Chance

One of my earliest experiences with this idea came while working for the Brooklyn Borough President’s Office.

The Borough President had discretionary capital funding that could support eligible nonprofit organizations.

There was nothing inherently wrong with government supporting nonprofit capital projects. In fact, these relatively modest public investments can sometimes have an outsized impact.

What bothered me was the question of access.

Who knows the money is available?

Who knows whom to call?

Which organizations understand the process?

If government simply waits for the organizations already familiar with City Hall to ask for funding, we shouldn’t be surprised when the same types of organizations repeatedly find their way into the process.

I wanted to broaden that.

Rather than treating discretionary capital funding as something distributed primarily through existing relationships, I pushed toward advertising the availability of those funds and soliciting proposals more broadly from Brooklyn nonprofits.

My thinking was straightforward:

If public money is available for a public purpose, why shouldn’t every qualified organization have a reasonable opportunity to make its case?

That also creates the opportunity to evaluate proposals more objectively.

Who genuinely needs the funding?

Where can a relatively small City contribution unlock something larger?

Could a City commitment help a nonprofit obtain matching funds from another source?

Is there an unusual capital need that the organization can’t reasonably address on its own?

What community benefit would the investment produce?

Those are better questions than simply asking who requested money first or who already knew how the process worked.

I wasn’t trying to eliminate discretionary capital funding.

I was trying to stop treating the existing way of distributing it as inevitable.

There is also an important governance principle behind that.

The more broadly government advertises an opportunity and the more objectively it evaluates proposals, the less room there is for public resources to become politicized.

Sometimes stopping something doesn’t mean eliminating a program. It means stopping the way we’ve always administered it.

That lesson has followed me throughout my career.

We Were Spending More Collecting Money Than We Were Collecting

Years later, I encountered a much smaller example that taught me essentially the same lesson.

Around 2011, we were administering government-issued cell phones under a model where employees could be charged back for personal usage.

On paper, it sounded responsible.

Taxpayers shouldn’t pay for personal calls.

But enforcing that principle required someone to review usage, identify personal calls, calculate amounts, notify employees, collect money, reconcile payments and maintain records.

Meanwhile, unlimited cell-phone plans had become available for roughly $32 per month.

Eventually, I compared what we were recovering with what we were spending administering the recovery.

The employee resources devoted to the process were costing approximately $2,000 per month more than we were collecting.

We were spending more money collecting money than we were collecting.

We could have improved the spreadsheet.

We could have created another control.

Today, perhaps we could use AI to identify the personal calls.

All of those solutions would have missed the point.

The process itself no longer made economic sense.

So we stopped doing it.

We moved to unlimited plans. Employees received a simpler benefit. The administrative work disappeared. Government saved money. Ultimately, there was no reason to preserve a staffing line merely to administer work we had eliminated.

That experience reinforced something I had started learning earlier:

Before improving a process, ask whether the process should still exist.

I Think Government Needs More Zero-Based Thinking

The same philosophy applies to budgets.

I believe strongly in the logic behind zero-based budgeting—not necessarily as a rigid exercise where every agency literally reconstructs its entire budget from zero every year, but as a management discipline.

Every recurring expenditure should periodically have to answer:

Why do we still need this?

Too often, government budgeting begins with last year’s spending and asks what should change.

I think we also need to ask what deserves to continue.

That difference sounds subtle.

It isn’t.

If we spent $1 million on something last year, that doesn’t establish that we should spend $1 million again.

The expenditure should have to survive today’s facts.

What are we buying?

Who uses it?

What value does it produce?

What happens if we reduce it?

What happens if we eliminate it?

What has changed since we originally approved it?

Those questions become particularly important in technology.

Why Are We Still With This Vendor?

I deal with technology contracts and procurements where incumbent relationships can last for years.

Eventually, familiarity itself can start masquerading as justification.

The vendor knows us.

Our employees know the platform.

Our data is there.

The system works.

Renew it.

I don’t think that’s enough.

When a major renewal comes across my desk, one of the questions I increasingly ask is:

Why are we still with this vendor?

That isn’t an accusation.

The incumbent may ultimately be the best option.

But I want to know why.

What happens if we change providers?

What would another provider charge?

What capabilities would we gain or lose?

What is the migration cost?

What is the transition risk?

And then I want to go one step further:

What happens if we eliminate the platform altogether?

That question changes the conversation.

Maybe we discover that another system already performs much of the same function.

Maybe the business process that originally justified the software has changed.

Maybe the number of users has declined.

Maybe we are paying for capabilities nobody uses.

Or maybe we discover the platform is absolutely mission-critical.

That’s useful too.

The point isn’t that every incumbent should lose.

The point is that incumbency shouldn’t win automatically.

Sometimes the Real Cost of a System Is Leaving It

Technology also creates a more complicated form of institutional inertia.

Data.

Suppose we decide we don’t want a platform anymore.

Can we extract our data?

In what format?

Can another system ingest it?

How much will migration cost?

How long will it take?

What contractual rights do we have to retrieve it?

And then there is a question I think government sometimes overlooks:

Do we even need all of the data?

Maybe we do.

There may be a legal requirement.

There may be a records-retention requirement.

The information may be operationally necessary.

It may have historical, analytical or audit value.

But I don’t want “we have always kept it” to substitute for answering the question.

If there is a legal mandate, identify it.

If there is an operational need, explain it.

If there is a retention requirement, determine exactly what must be retained and for how long.

Otherwise, organizations can spend enormous amounts of money indefinitely storing, licensing, maintaining and securing information simply because nobody wants to be the person who asks whether we still need it.

The same principle applies to the platform itself.

A renewal should not begin with:

How do we renew this?

It should begin with:

Do we still need this?

Only after answering yes should we determine the best way to buy it.

I Applied the Same Thinking to My Own Budget Operation

I have also had to apply this philosophy to work under my own control.

At one point, different parts of the organization were tracking some of the same capital and expense information.

We were maintaining records and producing reports so I could have visibility into spending.

Eventually, I asked:

Why do I need two units tracking the same dollars?

If there is an independent-control reason, fine.

But duplication isn’t automatically internal control.

We developed a tracker that could update automatically. If I wanted to see object-code spending against the broader budget, I could.

I didn’t lose visibility.

I stopped requiring people to manufacture visibility for me.

We also allowed the capital-budget function to own capital tracking instead of recreating the same information within my operation.

When attrition later provided an opportunity not to replace a position associated with work that no longer needed to be performed that way, I didn’t replace it.

That distinction is important.

I didn’t decide to eliminate a position and then search for work to eliminate. I eliminated unnecessary work, and the staffing requirement changed as a result.

Efficiency and Understaffing Are Not the Same Thing

That doesn’t mean I believe government should endlessly reduce staffing.

Quite the opposite.

My own operation is leaner today than I would ideally like.

When a four-person operation loses one person, it has lost 25 percent of its capacity.

The procurements don’t decline 25 percent.

Contracts still expire.

Invoices still arrive.

Budgets still need to be managed.

Executives still need answers.

That’s why I distinguish very carefully between eliminating unnecessary work and making fewer people perform the same necessary work.

The first can be efficiency.

The second is often just understaffing.

Zero-based thinking should apply to staffing too, but in both directions.

Do we still need this position?

Maybe not.

Do we now need another position because the workload has grown?

Maybe yes.

The objective isn’t a predetermined head count.

The objective is matching resources to work that actually needs to be performed.

AI Shouldn’t Automate Work We Should Eliminate

This is also one reason I am enthusiastic about artificial intelligence while remaining cautious about how government applies it.

AI could probably automate many administrative processes I’ve encountered throughout my career.

But imagine using today’s technology to automate that old cell-phone chargeback system.

AI could analyze the records.

Generate notices.

Calculate the charges.

Track the payments.

Produce beautiful dashboards showing collections.

We could create an extraordinarily efficient system for doing something that made no economic sense.

Automating an obsolete process doesn’t make it less obsolete.

Before asking how AI can perform a government function faster, I want someone to ask:

Why are we doing it?

What happens if we stop?

Deletion should sometimes come before automation.

The Hardest Question in Government May Be “Why?”

I’ve probably become more willing to ask that question as I’ve gotten older.

Why are we producing this report?

Why are two units tracking the same information?

Why are we renewing this vendor?

Why are we maintaining this platform?

Why are we storing this data?

Why does this approval exist?

Why are we replacing this vacant position?

Why aren’t we adding a position where the workload has increased?

Why are only the organizations that already know government getting access to an opportunity?

Sometimes there is an excellent answer.

Then we should keep doing it.

But if the only answer is some variation of “because that’s how we’ve always done it,” leadership requires another question.

What would happen if we didn’t?

That question has followed me from discretionary capital grants in Brooklyn, to cell-phone plans, to budget tracking, to staffing decisions, to multimillion-dollar technology procurements.

It is also why I think zero-based budgeting is more than a budgeting technique.

It is a leadership philosophy.

Nothing should receive a permanent claim on taxpayer dollars merely because government paid for it last year.

Not a vendor.

Not a software platform.

Not a report.

Not a process.

Not even a position.

Every expenditure should periodically have to demonstrate that it still serves a legitimate public purpose.

And when it does, we should fund it properly.

When it doesn’t, we should have the discipline to stop.

Government will always find new things to do.

Leadership means periodically making everything we already do answer the simplest question in public administration: Why are we still doing this?