UK Office for Value for Money
As part of Labour’s current spending review, the UK Office for Value for Money (OVfM) was established in October 2024 with the remit of providing ‘advice to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Chief Secretary to the Treasury to ensure that value for money is at the heart of government’s spending decisions.’ Its head, David Goldstone, who has a background in audit and major infrastructure projects, including the 2012 London Olympics, is due to complete his time-limited role in October 2025.
Based in HM Treasury, its stated purpose is ‘Developing recommendations for system reform, informed by lessons learned from the past, international best practice, and the views of external organisations. This will underpin a ruthless focus within government on realising benefits from every pound of public spending.’
March 2025 marked the OVfM’s six-month interval, with the OVfM publishing a series of updates summarising its work so far. One output was a series of responses from HM Treasury to the OVfM’s interim recommendations, including: costing the use of external consultants, an explanation of its interactions with other state entities, clarification of the OVfM’s value for money studies, details of the OVfM’s scrutiny methods, and its methods of ensuring its legacy continues beyond its disbandment.
It is welcome news that the OVfM has an explicit focus on drawing lessons from history, though so far, its public outputs have drawn on history relatively little. As the OVfM embarks on its next six months of investigations, this article is intended to inform aspects of its deliberations, particularly in relation to historical examples of, and interventions in, the UK state’s conception and execution of efficiency, the role of consultancies and overseas comparisons (particularly the United States Department of Government Efficiency; DOGE).
The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Top of any discussion of government efficiency in the English language at the time of writing is DOGE (though the Argentinian President, Javier Milei, complete with chainsaw, likely follows second). On paper, DOGE has a similar role to the UK OVfM, though DOGE’s style is altogether different and one suspects consciously so. DOGE is supposed to be a spectacle.
Indeed, it is hard to keep track of the blistering array of stories and counter-stories circulating about the DOGE, whose initial mission was to cut $2 trillion by 2026. Layoffs, unionization, legal challenges, interplanetary villain billionaires, anti-consultant consultants, constitutional crises, data breaches, row backs, triumphant success, even failure – the story has it all, and will certainly develop further.
That DOGE is headed by Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, makes it even more newsworthy, as does the notion of bringing the reportedly visionary head of giant engineering firms to crack down on alleged government inefficiency. For example, the Economist reported that ‘Elon Musk is shredding America’s government’ and the New York Times that ‘Musk and his allies storm in to reshape Washington’. Mimicking President Milei, Musk also recently appeared onstage wielding a chainsaw.
Reports vary, though it seems Musk may step down, or reduce his hours, as DOGE’s head in May 2025. The entity itself could continue into 2026. But it is not a distinctively American, or even Argentinian, story. Substantial though it is, featuring larger-than-life characters, the DOGE saga is a microcosm of the issues facing many twenty-first-century states. Simply, costs of government have been rising in many countries, including the UK and US: not necessarily due to inefficiency but also due to the complex requirements of ageing societies (e.g. medicine, care and pension funding), historically high levels of national debt and tax, increasing defence and security requirements, plus climate resilience and change mitigation.
How best to achieve efficiency? Over the past three decades, the increasingly common approach to achieving government performance, in the US and many other countries was to employ exterior consultants or advisors to get hard things done. Or, more recently, to establish a kind of government consultancy service (for example the Crown Consultancy Service and Government Consulting Hub). To an extent, both the OVfM and DOGE are therefore a continuation, perhaps amplification, of extant practices.
DOGE-watching
With an eye on their own fragile budgets, and restive voters, overseas commentators have been DOGE-watching, arguing, one way or another, that their countries need an equivalent, though usually friendlier, more patient, with the volume dial turned down several notches. For example, ‘A Dose of DOGE (Sans Elon) Is Just What Europe Needs’ or ‘Australia needs DOGE’. Specifically, in relation to the UK: ‘Britain needs a DOGE government waste cull of its own’, ‘UK chief auditor “open to learning” from Musk’, and ‘Anas Sarwar has said that Scottish Labour will create an Elon Musk-style “Doge”.’
Moreover, at the time of writing, Labour Together’s ‘Project Chainsaw’ is gaining traction, with the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labour figures suggesting that while the language may be overheated, necessary change is very real. But not exactly like Musk: ‘We are not Doge’.
These efforts follow a long line of related UK initiatives since the Second World War, if not earlier, and OVfM officials may like to learn more. For example, recent UK Conservative governments included at least three ministerial roles featuring the word ‘Efficiency’ in the job title: Minister for Government Resilience and Efficiency (2017-18); Minister for Efficiency and Transformation (2020-21); Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency (2022). Some may remember David Cameron’s ‘Red Tape Challenge’, launched in 2011. We should also add to this list the older Anglo-American Council on Productivity (1948-52), efficiency interventions in the National Health Service (1950-66), British Productivity Council (1953-73), British Productivity Year (1962-3), and the British Council of Productivity Associations (1973-99).
As noted by the OVfM, we should also include consultancies, both in terms of cost and the underlying assumptions about organisational behaviour that their extensive employment reveals (in the USA, UK and elsewhere). Indeed, astute observers have linked the DOGE to long-term debate about the relations between consultancies and the state, about which there has been a growing, and often critical, analysis and associated historical literature. The appearance of DOGE, attacking state reliance on consultants, raises excellent questions: are consultancies the solution or part of the problem? What is the right organisational and technological mix? How to get projects – anything – done?
With these points in mind, the purpose of this historical policy article is to investigate prior efforts at US federal government efficiency, providing contextualising insights into the historical emergence of assumptions about federal inefficiency, and related aspects involving consultancies, technology choice and organisational influence.
The Gospel of Efficiency
DOGE’s unpredictable style can make it hard to analyse: it has already claimed enormous cost savings; far before meaningful completion or evaluation of its work. Lacking reliable current-day insight, history is an important resource on which we can draw.
Noticing this, historians have admirably risen to the challenge of contextualising DOGE’s activity, highlighting prior phases of US political efforts to increase US government efficiency, particularly the Grace Commission under President Reagan. We could consider even older efforts like Hoover Commission of the 1940s-50s and the Taft Commission of 1909-12 (formally ‘The President’s Commission on Economy and Efficiency’).
Moreover, Musk has personally been compared to powerful historical figures, usually American and with a reputation for tough industrial leadership, including Henry Ford (a century ago, the world’s wealthiest person, also a car producer) and Robert McNamara (former head of Ford Motors, the US Department of Defense and the World Bank). As economic historian Adam Tooze recently observed, Musk is in fact very interested in history, although it is hard to pinpoint consistent, underlying interests or themes. He often plucks examples from ancient or twentieth-century history, and science fiction. We do not yet know where the name DOGE came from – apart from the obvious cryptocurrency reference – though one striking aspect about DOGE is how old-fashioned its name sounds.
That would be because it is old-fashioned. Addressing a conference of Governors at the White House in May 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech entitled ‘Conservation as a National Duty’. In the speech, he called for ‘The wise use of all of our natural resources, which are our national resources as well’. ‘We want to take action that will prevent the advent of a woodless age, and defer as long as possible the advent of an ironless age.’ He concluded that US leaders must address ‘the problem of national efficiency, the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the Nation.’
Roosevelt’s speech on national efficiency and conservation was influential. It prompted President William Taft, taking office in March 1909, to launch an official enquiry into ‘Economy and Efficiency’. It was later described as ‘the most comprehensive and systematic investigation that as ever been made of the national government, if not, indeed, of any government’. Reporting in 1912, the Taft Commission of Economy and Efficiency reported on a wide range of government activity, much related to clerical work and government communications.
The atmosphere of debate about efficiency also prompted a still-famous legal struggle, then dubbed the ‘Eastern Rates Case’. In 1910, the Eastern Rail Road Company of America applied to the Interstate Commerce Commission to raise their prices based on increasing costs. The railroads were challenged by Louis Brandeis, known as the ‘People’s Lawyer’ for engaging in activist progressive causes (later associate justice of the Supreme Court), who argued that increased managerial efficiency could instead keep railroad costs down. Indeed, famously, save a million dollars a day (now over $32,000,000 per day, or over $11 billion annually). High costs were management’s problem, not the public’s.
In his case, Brandeis name-checked a certain Frederick W. Taylor whom, Brandeis stated, had been running a ‘scientific management’ efficiency system for several decades with numerous clients. Such grand claims and enormous sums prompted further debate and investigations, with Taylor personally shooting to the fore. By March 1911 the American Magazine referred to Taylor’s ‘Gospel of Efficiency’, a human efficiency equivalent to the nuts-and-bolts factory system with its heavy steam-powered machinery. Taylor rushed out his book Principles of Scientific Management to meet demand for his new-found celebrity. By October 1911, this furore had prompted a five-month congressional hearing into the ‘Taylor and other systems of shop management’ at which Taylor personally testified.
Over a century after his death in 1915, in terms of real-world impact Taylor (1856-1915), by training a mechanical engineer, has been compared to Newton, Marx and Freud. He has been described as a ‘genius’, a ‘liar and capitalist scourge’, and, more recently, a ‘flawed giant’. Taylor’s 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management has been consistently voted the most influential management book of all time; creating the academic discipline of management. Some authors have even described the 1890-1920 period as the ‘Age of Taylor’ and science fiction author Yevgeny Zamyatin imagined a dystopian future in We (1924), in which the entire world was run according to the efficiency principles of Taylor, ‘the greatest genius of the ancients’.
Taylor’s system, often known as the ‘time and motion’ study, usually involved a granular process of timing workers with a stopwatch, implementing incentive bonus systems, aggregating measurement data into index cards, computing data equivalence, reorganising workflows, and integrating into project management and scheduling tools (including the Gantt chart, still widely used, named after Taylor’s assistant Henry L. Gantt). Ideally, the entire structure of workplace authority would also be reorganised around Taylor’s vision of ‘functional foremen’. Taylor’s stance was uncompromising: either total overhaul according to his principles, or failure was announced and blame allocated.
F.W. Taylor and federal efficiency
So what was Taylor’s efficiency role in federal, public sector institutions, and therefore of most relevance to the OVfM and DOGE?
The first likely resemblance is what one might expect, particularly those who have undertaken change management training such as learning Kurt Lewin’s ‘Force Field’ model: that every intervention will meet with equal and opposite resistance.
Indeed, Taylor’s fame was, and is, so considerable that examples of his efficiency interventions are well-known case studies, particularly Hugh Aitken’s Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management In Action (1960). Emerging from the history of technology and labour milieu, and drawing on the newly-deposited Taylor archives at Taylor’s former engineering college, Stevens Institute of Technology, Aitken examined the efforts to implement Taylor’s efficiency system at the Watertown federal arsenal near Boston, MA.
As Aitken showed, efficiency intervention at Watertown prompted enormous labour response and union action, eventually leading to a congressional hearing overturning the use of efficiency and bonus incentive systems in federal establishments until World War Two – thirty years later. Taylor had lost. Aitken concluded, ‘There in microcosm were all the stresses of an industrial society exposed to constant revolution in technology and organization’.
A veritable icon of inefficiency
A lesser-known example is Taylor’s intervention in the US Navy shipyards, described by his 1997 biographer Robert Kanigel as a ‘veritable icon of inefficiency’. To consult the existing research literature, one would think that this case study provides another efficiency expert versus resistant bureaucracy example. In attempting ‘Overcoming Resistance to Change’, ‘potential change agent Taylor’ failed and, so much so, that the Navy shipyards became an ‘unreported failure’. Essentially, the current academic literature argues that Taylor’s intervention was such a disaster that it wasn’t even worth including in the history books.
However, this interpretation misunderstands what really happened and the lessons that can be learnt. Taylor and his associates were initially welcomed, strengthening networks with management and conducting preliminary studies. Letters circulated, including to the White House. Taylor took a week-long boat trip with naval and management men. By 1911, Taylor’s allies were able to promise savings of $12,000,000 a year in the Navy yards (now nearer $400m) and he even wrote a now-long-lost paper on ‘Government Efficiency’ in 1911.
However, after much dialogue, and to Taylor’s surprise and dismay, the Navy leadership withdrew their interest in Taylor’s system. This about-face was seized upon by Taylor’s first biographer as evidence of Luddite resistance to Taylor’s visionary genius. Taylor reportedly hated politics, and, according to him, politicians act according to ‘rumors, and “sentiment”, and votes’. Taylor’s vision had been sabotaged by a ‘tactical move in the game of navy politics’. The Navy yards were to remain inefficient.
What happened next is undocumented, and crucial to the unfolding story in government efficiency and outside intervention by famous efficiency experts.
In fact, and most interestingly in the present day, Taylor’s interventions were rejected on a considered technical basis. Anticipating the argument later made by historian of science and technology David Edgerton in The Shock of the Old (2006), that certain individuals and groups are far more impressed by new technology than others, an official Navy report noted,
It does not follow that the enthusiastic pioneer is the best road builder, and, after a very deliberative study of the various systems of management in the large gun factories, I am forced to the opinion that the ‘Taylor-White system’ is an elaboration far beyond the necessities for securing a perfectly satisfactory operation of any large plant. (Report on the Vickers System of Industrial Management, 1912, p106)
The Washington Post was more specific:
The ‘system’ which spends time and hence money in educating bricklayers how to save a fraction of a second in handling bricks is entirely too fancy for this workaday world. Too much system is as bad as none. Enormous sums might be squandered in such a huge establishment as the Navy Department by pursuing fantastic schemes of ‘scientific management’ without improving the service in the slightest degree. (Washington Post, 9 October 1911)
In other words, the naval yards concluded that the much-vaunted Taylor efficiency system, named after the world’s leading efficiency consultant (plus Maunsel White), was inefficient.
The Navy Yards story did not stop there: it was an issue of organizational and technological choice rather than a story of change versus inertia. Instead, the Navy Yards adopted an efficiency system transposed from the Vickers company in Britain (of both ‘Vickers Gun’ and Basil ‘Merchant of Death’ Zaharoff fame). The Washington Post, again:
A very efficient and up to date system of shop management in the works of Vickers, Limited, which, he thinks, might be adapted to naval needs and utilised by the Navy Department with great profit to the government and satisfaction to the workmen. (Washington Post, 9 October 1911)
It was cheaper, simpler, less likely to antagonise labour, and based on real-life experience from a similar manufacturer. Returning from a visit to Vickers’ shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness (site of the current-day BAE Systems shipyard), Navy officials summarised: ‘With all the literature on the subject now available, intelligent managers do not need either the assistance of a genius or the services of an expert’. Taylor’s ‘theories reach into the Utopian atmosphere’, whereas Vickers’ system and methods bear the birthmarks of common sense and simplicity of detail; reducing paperwork to a minimum; starting work phenomenally quickly after orders received; progressing and following up work constantly, intelligibly, and intelligently, and securing results and costs expeditiously and simply. (Report on the Vickers System of Industrial Management, 1912, p97)
Moreover, ‘relief of foremen or shop master mechanics from excessive desk work’. Unlike Taylor’s complex calculations, incentive bonuses were simple and everyone could understand them. Finally, the officials concluded it was important to ‘graft any new features on with least disturbance of the current routine’. The Vickers example was almost opposite to Taylor’s approach. Featuring little in Copley’s 1923 biography of Taylor, and therefore subsequent works, the Navy yards case was forgotten for seventy years.
Agents of change
The intellectual context of debate on Taylor’s impact changed in later decades, prompting subsequent studies to adopt different historical assumptions.
While notions of government inefficiency had existed for a long time, it was not really until the ‘Government is the Problem’ 1980s, that consultancies really burst to the fore as a solution to the apparent government inefficiency problem.
Even though many consultancies in the US, Europe and elsewhere had mushroomed in the prior five decades or so, it was in the eighties that they became reconceptualised as, to quote the title of the UK Institute of Management Consultants’ official history, Agents of Change (1982).
This dovetailed with a burgeoning management literature, and growing prestige of business education, particularly the MBA degree. This also included growing numbers of courses in strategic management, organisational dynamics, and transformational leadership, overlaying education, often in adult education format, in political economy, industrial relations, or industrial sociology.
As management academics Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman and colleagues have shown, while historical studies, including that of Taylor, had contained much richness, and painstaking, primary research, upon entering management education these examples became sanitised into short case studies or theoretical models, often decoupled from their original political or ideological content.
The new political and intellectual context of the eighties enabled a refashioning of Taylor’s efficiency interventions, by then long in the past. Studies of Taylor now often framed him as a ‘genius’, whose impact on the world was enormous. Aitken’s Watertown study was republished in 1985 for a refreshed audience, identical except its title, formerly Taylorism at the Watertown Arsenal now changed to the more general and encompassing Scientific Management in Action. This fragment of evidence indicates the confident claim to authority that management studies had in the period.
In 1990, the Navy shipyards saga made a comeback, though transformed from its prior mentions. It was no longer a story of technological or organisational choice, as seen by contemporaries, nor even office politics (realistically, inevitable in any large organisation). As noted above, it was now a case study of exterior efficiency consultants seeking a ‘better navy’, versus a rigid, defensive bureaucracy: change versus inertia. It had been forgotten that Taylor’s change agent intervention failed, because realties were quite different from this simple choice between change or inertia.
Efficiency contested
Without a doubt, the DOGE has pushed debates about government efficiency, indeed efficiency generally, to the fore. However, as Institute for Progress Senior Editor Santi Ruiz recently noted in conversation with New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, different parties often mean different things by ‘efficiency’. The Taylor, and indeed DOGE cases, highlight the importance of how we identify efficiency expertise and how historical narratives of success and failure are constructed. Contemporaries saw the US Navy Yards‘ adoption of the Vickers system as a success story of common sense over snake oil salesmen. It was later recast as the opposite, or purposefully downplayed.
On paper, Taylor and Musk are very different people, with entirely different backgrounds, contexts and life stories. Unsurprisingly, notions and definitions of efficiency have changed substantially. From a practical perspective, Taylor’s 1911 efforts and Musk’s in the present day are very different indeed: Musk is very unlikely to prowl federal government offices in person, stopwatch in hand, or list federal paperwork filing systems in inscrutable detail.
What ties them is a remarkable similarity in language – ‘Government Efficiency’ by name – and an ‘all or nothing’ approach to organisational overhaul. Moreover, the 1980s version of Taylor, transformed from a mechanical engineer to a consultant change agent – a necessary shock to the system – shares a broad conceptual overlap and set of assumptions with Musk: government is inefficient, government employees will resist change, change agents must overcome resistance or smash the organisation entirely.
Conclusion
In his discussion of the ‘Shamanification’ of the tech leader, or even messiah, technology researcher Jeffrey Funk observed that online discussions between self-defined founder-visionaries revealed that, ‘Despite all the self-mythologizing and talk of building, the men in these text messages appear mercurial, disorganized, and incapable of solving the kind of societal problems they think they can’.
Very few serious policymakers in the US, UK and elsewhere would think this description applies to themselves, and indeed it’s probably true. Civil servants currently developing the OVfM, and hopefully reading this, almost certainly won’t.
However, the wrong lesson to learn from DOGE’s travails is that attaining efficiency is simply about message and tone: that with the right communications strategy and less drama, government efficiency will be more successful. In effect, to confirm the underlying conceptual dynamic of top-down efficiency implementation versus inertia or resistance.
A more constructive approach could instead note Bess Glenn, former archivist at the US National Archives and Records Administration, whose study of the Taft Commission on Economy and Efficiency praised the ‘logical fashion of the efficiency expert, first gathering all the facts on current practices’.
As the OVfM already recognises, perhaps current practices, within, or near, the UK government, or from geographically far away, provide good examples to follow. For example, in the present-day UK, this might involve using the National Audit Office (NAO) more effectively, as Tristan Honeyborne has suggested, rather than creating a new, permanent organisation.
Some government institutions are no doubt efficient, just as some private sector ones are inefficient. Realising this, rather than defaulting to historically-invented stereotypes, will hopefully avoid many false economies, dead ends, and impulsive decisions which lumber high-profile organisations and individuals with high costs, low-value delivery and disappointing legacies.
