The magic key that weeds out government waste, low quality: It's called "competition."
Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, in office in Indianapolis, Indiana from 1992-2000, used competition–not outsourcing of work–to save about $400 million in government costs over 8 years.
That’s an amount of money the equivalant of the complete annual budget the year before he left office.
The result was that Goldsmith invested that savings in multiple property tax cuts as well as helping to rebuild the city infrastructure.
We’ll have a lot more on this success story model for future governance. But for the moment, here’s a video from the AFSCME union perspective, why it bought into competing to bid for its own work against private sector competition.
It was willing to take a large risk going into this under the conditions that no current workers would be laid off and that patronage hires of mid-level paper pushing non union members be let go before a department bid for its services.
Mayor Goldsmith happily agreed to both terms and a revolution was born: a government union and a Republican mayor working together for cost-saving, better government.
Here’s a look:
AMAZING! Indianapolis' AFSCME union competed for its own work
The union made this video promoting what Indianpolis accomplished around 1999.
