What DOGE Could Have Done

Done right, cutting staff actually can be a part of getting better outcomes. Part of.

Before the inauguration, many (myself included) hoped that DOGE could bring a certain kind of positive disruption, something that would challenge what increasingly felt like an untenable status quo and create room for something new. That hope was mistaken, but it sprang from a place of real need, a need that has not remotely been met.

I’m interested in how that need is being met, and what we can learn from it. One place to look is Louisiana’s Department of Education, the only state education agency in the country to have achieved gains in both fourth-grade reading and mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2017 and 2024.¹ This is the kind of meaningful outcome that is the true measure of state capacity. It’s not the number of staff or the size of the budget, but evidence of the thing people want out of government. In this case, it’s schools that do a better job of educating our kids. In fact, the Louisiana’s DoE story shows one awkward truth the DOGE-hopefuls instinctively knew: that sometimes less money and less staff actually do help create the conditions for better outcomes.

But it also shows how wildly off the mark the DOGE approach was. To paraphrase John Kamensky’s line about Reinventing Government’s shortcomings, you can’t eat dessert first. (He meant you should first cut the work by rightsizing procedure and streamlining priorities, then cut the workforce.) Better government is possible, but it’s hard work. Thoughtful frameworks, persistently and responsibly applied, help.

I’m flattered that in Julia Kaufman and Kunjan Narechania’s telling of the Louisiana story, that framework is one Andrew Greenway and I described in our Niskanen paper “The How We Need Now.” I want to be crystal clear that all the work Julia, Kunjan, and many others did happened long before our paper was written. If there are parallels, you could almost say they invented the framework and we wrote it down, entirely unaware of each other. Kaufman and Narechania map LDoE’s four key actions directly onto the four pillars Andrew and I described: the right people focused on the right work, with purpose-fit systems (in Louisiana’s case, the modest but effective “Super App”) and test-and-learn frameworks (feedback loops and classroom observation). The parallels are close enough that reading their paper is a bit uncanny. But they’ve also extended the framework in at least one important way, and identified a gap in it that I want to address.

The road to incoherence is paved with good intentions

What Louisiana’s Department of Education accomplished is impressive. The state is tied for the highest child poverty rate in the nation, 39th in per-pupil spending. But when the Urban Institute adjusted the 2024 NAEP results for student demographics, Louisiana ranked second in the nation in both fourth and eighth grade reading.

To understand how they got there, let’s start with a few decades back.

State departments of education have been accreting complexity since 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act dramatically expanded federal funding for K-12 schools. More federal money meant more federal programs, and more programs meant more offices: a Title I office for schools serving low-income families, a Title II office for teacher quality and professional development, a Title III office for English language learners, an IDEA office for special education, etc. State agencies mirrored this structure, building parallel offices to manage each funding stream, each office with its own requirements, its own monitoring apparatus, its own theory of what districts should be doing. When No Child Left Behind arrived in 2001, it layered a performance management apparatus on top of the compliance infrastructure that already existed, rather than replacing it. By the time John White became Louisiana’s State Superintendent in 2011, the state had both systems running simultaneously, largely disconnected from each other.

What this meant in practice was that most Louisiana districts completed more than 50 separate grant applications to receive state funding, each submitted to a different office, each with slightly different goals. Literacy targets, for instance, might appear in applications for Title I, Title II, bilingual education, and special education funding, with each framed differently, and each monitored by a different team. As one state official put it, there were 600 people on staff and about 300 of them were emailing districts about something. This is incapacity masquerading as capacity. You have the people, but what they’re charged with doing is collectively incoherent.

As with most dysfunctional bureaucracies, the vast majority of the people were doing a great job at the jobs they were asked to do. Each office was executing its mandate. The Title I team was doing Title I. The literacy office was pursuing literacy goals. Each was doing so thoroughly and diligently. But they were doing the wrong jobs. The dysfunction wasn’t a product of incompetence or bad faith. It was the predictable output of a structure that had been built incrementally, program by program, the result of decades of well-intentioned federal legislation.

The implementation chain keeps it together

What LDOE did starting in 2012 included cutting the workforce roughly in half, from 600 to about 300. State officials later noted that the central office workforce reduction was “helpful to coherence because they created an environment where there just weren’t as many people out there saying what they wanted to say.” So: workforce reduction, positive effect on outcomes.

But that sentence gets the causation backwards if you read it in isolation. The cut didn’t produce the coherence. The coherence made clear which positions were producing noise rather than signal, and then the cut followed.

Before any of the restructuring, LDOE did something that sounds simple and proved to be extraordinarily difficult. They defined what they actually wanted to see happen in classrooms in ways that everyone could understand and contribute to. The goal wasn’t “raise test scores” but rather the specific student experiences that would have to be present before test scores could rise. In reading, it was students engaging with complex texts and writing about them. In math, it was students working through problems and justifying their thinking. These goals were observable, measurable, and specific.

(By the way, I see a lot of plans for improving customer interactions that would benefit from this kind of specificity. “World class customer experience” isn’t actionable. Describing concretely what your users should see, do and feel in their encounters with government helps teams know what to actually change.)

From that vision, they worked backwards through what Kaufman and Narechania call an “implementation chain”: what would teachers need to do? What would principals need to do to support teachers? What would districts need to do to support principals? What would the state need to do to support districts? They named every link and specified every that would be required.

This is where Kaufman and Narechania make their most valuable contribution to the framework Andrew and I laid out. We emphasized the test-and-learn approach — iterate, measure, adjust — but we didn’t fully articulate what has to be true before you can test and learn productively. Their answer is the implementation chain: a concrete, shared map of what every actor in the delivery system needs to do differently, derived from a precise definition of what success looks like for the end user. Without that map, you’re not testing toward anything in particular. You’re just iterating in the dark.

Only then did the restructuring follow, and it followed directly from the chain. They didn’t reorganize around org-chart logic or budget lines. They reorganized around three functions that the implementation chain required: a planning team to build and communicate the vision, a funding team to consolidate all resources behind it, and an implementation team to go into schools and verify that the chain was actually working. The 50+ grant applications became one “Super App” tied to a single unified strategy.

The workforce reduction wasn’t the reform. It was the residue of the reform. Similarly, the Super App wasn’t the reform. It was a tool that enabled the reform.

The How needs a clear What

This case also surfaces something that I think has occasionally been misread about the capacity framework. The framework is explicitly about the How. The best policy is just words on a page unless there is a way to have it make real impact in the world. That’s the how. Andrew and I care about this distinction (and talked about it in our paper) because we think that government needs a strong implementation muscle even when the folks you didn’t vote for are in power. “State capacity for me, but not for thee” doesn’t work. It results in capacity for no one. No one can get anything done, government fails the public, and it’s one more nail in democracy’s coffin. So the how matters, independent of the what.

But what we didn’t quite say is that there’s one critical thing about the what. You have to define clear goals. Louisiana’s story shows that you can’t build an implementation chain if you don’t know what you’re trying to implement. You can’t reorganize around a mission if the mission is fuzzy. The test-and-learn approach is only as useful as the clarity of what you’re testing toward.

I’m not a sailor, but I do remember being taught about tacking as a kid. To sail into the wind, you tack back and forth across it, which looks indirect but gets you there faster than heading straight into the headwind. The How is the tacking. It’s a lot like the build-measure-learn cycle, because you’re constantly adjusting. But if you don’t fix clearly on the point on the shore where you want to land, all that back-and-forth just gets you lost. LDOE fixed their point on the shore — students reading complex texts, students working through math problems — before they tacked. That’s what made the tacking work. I regret that Andrew and I weren’t clearer about this in our paper, and I’m grateful to Kaufman and Narechania for making it so explicit.

Make the right choice the easy choice

One more thing LDOE did that deserves attention: they understood that signaling quality isn’t enough if adopting quality is hard.

They replaced the old curriculum approval process with a transparent tiered review, and published it. They negotiated statewide contracts so districts could buy Tier I materials at reduced cost without going through their own procurement processes. They built professional development opportunities that were only useful if you were using the good materials. They eventually required low-performing districts to use Tier I materials as a condition of funding, but only after enough districts had voluntarily adopted them that there were local advocates for the change.

This is choice architecture, and it’s the opposite of mandate-by-fiat. It assumes that most people in the system want to do the right thing and need the friction removed, not a new rule added. It assumes that the implementer closest to the work — the teacher, the principal, the district curriculum director — is an asset to be supported, not a variable to be controlled.

It’s worth noting that Louisiana’s neighbors have also seen reading score improvements in recent years, and much of the attention has focused on a single change: the shift from whole language learning to phonics-based reading instruction. States that have moved toward evidence-based curriculum have generally seen results. Louisiana moved early and decisively on curriculum quality, and that’s part of the story here.

But only part. Louisiana didn’t just order curriculum change. They built a system that could actually get that teaching into classrooms consistently, at scale, across a state with significant poverty and limited resources. Other states now, including my former home state of California, are following suit. There, for example, Assembly Bill 1454, signed by Governor Newsom last October, is trying to turn California into a Louisiana. It requires the State Board of Education to produce an approved curriculum list of materials aligned with evidence-based practices, funds teacher professional development aligned to those materials, and updates administrator credentialing standards to include literacy instruction support. But it doesn’t address the internal structure of the California Department of Education — the siloed offices, the fragmented funding streams, the incoherent messages to districts. That work doesn’t need to be done by the legislature, but it should be a key priority of the new administration, and Californians should be looking for a leader who gets this when they go to the polls in November. If California or any other state wants to see real results, they can’t stop at the “signal quality” and “align professional development” pieces. They’ll have to reorganize, consolidate grant applications, and build the feedback loops of implementation teams in classrooms four days a week.

Same number, different math

It’s meaningful (to me, at least) that the LDOE cut its central office staff by half. I’ve talked about 50% workforce cuts before. A senior Air Force official once told me that the only way to force meaningful change at the Pentagon would be cuts of around half the budget (I didn’t disagree, but if that ever happens, I hope they talk to Louisiana). And before someone made it clear to him that this was wildly impractical, Vivek Ramaswamy proposed firing every federal worker whose SSN ended in an odd number – again, half. These stories look similar. But they are very different.

DOGE’s theory was that the incoherence was the product of too many people, and that removing people would remove the incoherence. LDOE saw the incoherence as the product of a structure that pointed too many people in different directions. Removing the structure and replacing it with something coherent made some of those people redundant. That’s the correct order of operations.

But where did that incoherence come from in the first place? Baton Rouge didn’t come up with that tangle of programs and incentives and reporting and metrics, Washington did. What LDOE previously did to districts, the federal Department of Education has long done to states. The structure of federal education funding, with its separate offices and siloed requirements, is what state agencies mirrored when they built their own siloed structures. And the great irony is that one more place that’s seen its workforce cut by half is the federal Department of Education.

Sadly, these cuts aren’t likely to bring the kind of coherence that would help every state, the way LDOE’s helped every district. The Trump administration ate dessert first. They are parceling programs out to other agencies, some with little relevant expertise, as part of what the department itself calls its “final mission.” The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees Title I and the Every Student Succeeds Act, has seen cuts across all of its teams. There is no implementation chain. There is no vision of what students should experience in classrooms. There is no Super App consolidating incoherent funding streams into a unified strategy. There is just the cut.

If any administration — current or future — wants to see Louisiana’s results replicated nationally, it should look honestly at its own role in creating the conditions that made coherence so hard to achieve in the first place. That means that while the cuts at the federal Department of Education were the wrong move, simply replacing all those people would also likely be the wrong move. You don’t recover from DOGE with more of what made so many people want them to succeed in the first place.

There is no magic wand. The work takes years and requires, as Julia and Kunjan explain, buy-in at every level, from classroom teachers to state legislators. It’s not that reformers are timid or captured by the institutions they’re trying to change, certainly not in this case. But you are asking everyone in a large system to shift their daily behavior toward a new shared goal, and that requires understanding the goal, trusting that the people asking you to change have thought it through, and having the support to make the change. None of that can be done from afar. And absent a crisis, it takes time. (Never count out crises to speed up alignment, though.)

The need that drove people toward DOGE hasn’t been met. But the answer isn’t simply more staff and more complexity either. Those can’t be our only choices: unmanageable bloat, or arbitrary cuts. Luckily, they’re not. I’m sure Louisiana schools are far from perfect, but if the rest of the country was seeing gains like these, we’d be in a very different place. Maybe if people pay attention to what it takes to achieve them, we will.

1. The stat is from their paper, linked above. Other sources suggest that Alabama may have met those criteria as well, but I haven’t tried to verify which is correct. Either way, they’re doing well.