When Trimming Around the Edges Isn’t Enough

photo credit: pedrosimoes7

When you read the paper or listen to governments speak about their plans to make up for budget deficits, you realize that they’re playing a phony game. It’s all about trimming around the edges. Take a few thousand from the printing supplies budget line, cut a few travel expenses, and maybe eliminate some positions due to retirement or attrition. On paper, that may reduce the gap. However, what has government really been doing to fundamentally change the way it does business.

Let’s take a hypothetical example. A city has a budget of $400M. It’s revenues are $350M, leaving a deficit of $50M. In order to close that gap, the city starts to trim around the edges, making small incremental cuts. Department heads all say that they are too important to be cut. If we cut police, who will protect the children. If we cut the fire department, who will save the children. If we cut parks and recreation, where will the children play. So eventually, the city will cut things, shift current needs to the future, and play accounting with the budget and claim that they successfully closed the gap. Until next year. Rinse, wash, and repeat.

What if we started with the premise of “if we had $350M to build government, how would we do it?” If we can just take a blank slate, and build things from the ground up, how would it look? Do we need as many departments, scattered across the city? Do we need to build processes to control $20 transactions?

If you simply flip the problem on the other side, it suddenly changes the ball game. This would be a very interesting case study if a government entity can find a way to build from the ground up.