No, Jared Kushner, the Government Should Not Be Run Like a Business

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law who is also his senior advisor, has been tapped to run the White House Office of American Innovation, ostensibly a task force with a mission to improve government efficiency, which will, in reality, almost certainly serve as just another way to justify the destruction of the federal government and its services.

Kushner is positioning the new office as "an offensive team" — an aggressive, nonideological ideas factory capable of attracting top talent from both inside and outside of government, and serving as a conduit with the business, philanthropic and academic communities.

"We should have excellence in government," Kushner said Sunday in an interview in his West Wing office. "The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens."

And Kushner has already made clear why the government should not be run like a business, and not run by people who believe otherwise. Citizens are not the government's customers. In a democracy, citizens are the government's bosses.

That is but one—though the most important one—of many reasons why the government shouldn't be run as a business, no matter how many Republicans insist otherwise.

Kushner is not likely to succeed, for reasons Ronald Klain details in a terrific piece for the Washington Post. Notably:

[T]here is no way to make the government more efficient if you don't believe in the government and what it does. Trump has already announced that his goal is to collapse Obamacare; should we expect Kushner's Innovation Office to build on USDS work to make HealthCare.gov better and faster? Will Kushner really focus on fixing the veterans' health-care system — or boost Republican efforts to privatize it? Does he want to find new ways to track and report environmental risks — or is the goal to make it easier to pollute? Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon's stated mission of "deconstructing" the government is at odds with any genuine effort to "reconstruct" it — and it's easy to guess which is the true aim of the White House.

The Trump administration is lying, again, to the American people. In most businesses, people who lie to their bosses get fired.