Government is Not Broken. It Is Starving.

Walk into almost any city hall in the country and you will see the same scene. A line at the counter. A resident with a folder of paperwork and a tight voice. A receptionist trying to answer the phone while helping someone in front of them. A back office where a handful of people are juggling permits, budgets, complaints, and crises that never make the news. From the outside it looks like a machine that does not work. From the inside it feels like a machine that has been stripped for parts and still expected to run at full speed.

We talk about government as if it were a single, lumbering creature. We say it is broken, bloated, lazy, corrupt. We treat that as a diagnosis. It is really a shrug. It lets everyone off the hook. If government is somehow broken in its nature, then nothing can be done except to complain about it and maybe vote a different set of faces into the same empty chairs.

What I see, as a local elected official and as a volunteer who rides a fire engine, is something much simpler and more uncomfortable. Most of what people call broken government is just understaffed, undertrained, overpromised government. It is a capacity problem. We have loaded cities, counties, schools, and special districts with responsibilities and then refused to give them the people and tools required to meet those responsibilities at the level modern life demands.

In the fire station this shows up as the call that comes in when the crew is already on another call. You can write lofty mission statements about response times, but if there are not enough trained people in the building, the second patient will wait longer for help. No slogan changes that. Only bodies on the rigs and staff on the clock.

In city hall it shows up as the email that sits unanswered for a week. It is easy to imagine a faceless bureaucracy ignoring you. It is harder to imagine the actual reality, which is often one planner or one clerk trying to process a stack of permits, respond to a dozen residents, sit through a meeting, update a spreadsheet, and learn a new software system that was never properly rolled out. When that person misses your message, you do not see the workload; you see disrespect. Over time that gap becomes cynicism, and cynicism becomes a story you tell about your town.

Capacity is not the same as money. Communities can spend a lot of money without building capacity. They can put up buildings, hire consultants, and announce programs that look impressive in a press release. Capacity is more boring and more fundamental. It is people, trained and supported, who have the time and tools to do the work they are responsible for. It is a permit clerk who can explain the rules in plain language. It is a public works crew that has enough staff and equipment to actually fill the potholes and stripe the crosswalks. It is a dispatch center where the next 911 call does not bounce around because no one is free to answer.

For years we have preferred illusions over investments. We pass mandates that sound good because they promise safety, fairness, or accountability. We rarely pause to ask what it will take, in hours and people and competence, to make those promises real. When the results fall short, we do not usually repeal the mandates. We blame the people on the front line and layer on new expectations. The gap between what we say and what we staff only grows.

To be clear, there are real failures in government. There is waste. There are bad decisions and complacent leaders. There are agencies that cling to old ways out of habit or fear. None of that disappears just because we talk about capacity. But if we pretend the main problem is moral weakness or ideological rot, we will keep applying the wrong medicine.

Think about how you experience the private world. You get a notification when a package lands on your porch or when a rideshare driver turns the corner on your street. You can track the pizza on your screen from the oven to your door. Then think about how you experience your city. A street closes on your block and you find out when the crew shows up. A major project breaks ground and you see the construction fence before you ever see a clear explanation. A new recreation program launches and fills before you even know it exists. That is not because public servants do not care. It is because they are trying to run a twenty first century communication system with twentieth century staff levels and tools.

On the finance side, I see another, quieter expression of starvation. Many agencies technically balance their budgets every year while hollowing out their workforce. Positions are left unfilled. Hiring freezes become the new normal. Training budgets are the first thing to go. The result looks lean on paper. It feels brittle in practice. The community still expects the same level of service. The shocks keep coming, from storms to cyber attacks to pandemics. The people inside the system have less and less margin to absorb those shocks.

There is also a cultural element. For a generation we have rewarded leaders who cut staff as a sign of toughness and efficiency. We have made it easy to celebrate the closure of a department or the elimination of a position, and much harder to defend the act of adding people. We have not told a simple truth out loud, which is that good government is labor intensive. It takes people to inspect buildings, to maintain parks, to answer calls, to analyze data, to teach children, to enforce rules fairly, and to show up in person when something goes wrong.

The alternative is not some futuristic artificial intelligence that runs the city from a control room. The realistic alternative, if we do not invest in capacity, is a thinner and thinner layer of exhausted people who are asked to be both human shield and scapegoat for systems that cannot deliver what was promised. That is not fair to them, and it is not fair to the residents who rely on services that are too important to fail quietly.

So what would it look like to take capacity seriously.

It would start with honesty. Local leaders would stop pretending that everything can be done faster and cheaper with fewer people. They would say out loud that if you want your permits processed in days instead of months, someone has to be paid to do that work. If you want a firefighter to arrive at your door in six minutes instead of ten, that means more firefighters, more training, and more hours funded. If you want clear and timely information about projects and policies, someone has to write, translate, design, and send those messages.

It would mean designing budgets around service levels, not just categories of spending. Instead of asking departments to trim a percentage, councils would ask what it would take to offer a specific quality of service and then decide, in public, whether they are willing to fund that standard. Residents would be invited into that tradeoff. Do you want shorter response times, safer intersections, and more reliable trash pickup. If so, here is what that costs. If not, here is what will slip.

It would mean rebuilding pride and pathways into public service. Right now we rely heavily on the people who are already inside the system, grinding through their days, holding things together because they care about their communities and their coworkers. We should be reaching out to the next generation and saying that this work matters and that we intend to treat it like it matters. That means competitive pay, modern tools, clear expectations, and leadership that shields staff from political theater so they can focus on results.

It would also mean giving public workers simple, usable technology that does not make their lives harder. A lean staff cannot afford clumsy software. Every minute spent wrestling with bad systems is a minute not spent helping a resident or solving a problem. The point of technology in government should be to return time and attention to human beings, not to produce dashboards that no one has the capacity to maintain.

Underneath all of this is a larger question about democracy. When people experience government as slow, confusing, and unresponsive, they stop believing that collective action can solve problems. They turn inward. They turn against each other. They become easy prey for anyone who offers a story that says the whole thing is rigged and cannot be saved. The health of a democracy lives in the mundane interactions between residents and their institutions. A call returned. A sidewalk fixed. A hearing where the explanation actually makes sense.

I do not believe government is broken beyond repair. I believe we have starved it in quiet ways and then acted surprised when it staggered. The next decade gives us a choice. We can keep demanding more from fewer people until the best ones burn out and the rest give up. Or we can decide that if we want competent, humane institutions, we have to build and staff them like we mean it.

Budgets express our values. So does the headcount behind the counters and in the trucks. If we want a different experience of government, we do not need a miracle. We need to feed the thing we keep insisting is already dead.