America’s competence gap reveals a culture of failure — but there’s hope

America is facing a competence gap as both government agencies and private companies repeatedly reveal a laughable inability to perform their basic tasks.

The Secret Service, whose multiple failures in securing former President Donald Trump’s July rally in Butler, Pa., are frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

So is the US Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

American military engineers, who 80 years ago built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, now can’t install a workable floating pier in Gaza.  

A federal program to build EV charging stations around the country is floundering. Nearly three years after legislation was signed to create 50,000 charging stations, only seven had been built — unimpressive results for $7.5 billion.

Our military, foreign affairs and intelligence communities, which produced the disastrous Afghanistan skedaddle, have been repeatedly hacked by the Chinese government while failing to take decisive action against Iran’s terrorism or its nuclear program.

Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the COVID response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude. 

Likewise, FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene was fumbling and slow, as was North Carolina’s.

Even Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign — the one thing you expect politicians to get right — has been inept. 

Her first major executive decision, the choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, has been a bust, from his lies about his military record to his lackluster debate performance; and as revelations about his past continue to appear, her pick may turn out to be catastrophic. 

The political press is full of rumors of campaign infighting, and this weekend, Harris was actually mocked by “Saturday Night Live,” a rarity for a Democrat.

And it’s not just the government: Just look at Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft crew is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. 

The company finally returned Starliner to Earth, but unmanned because it’s considered too unsafe to carry humans. 

Humiliatingly, the Starliner crew will eventually come home on a capsule made by competitor SpaceX.

You might think that people are just getting dumber.

Not so: Despite all this, we can also see flashes of very impressive competence.

Boeing is doing badly in space, but SpaceX is going from one record-setting achievement to another. 

Not only is its capsule going to rescue the stranded Boeing crew, its new Starship spacecraft just had another successful test flight, with the upper stage landing on target in the Indian Ocean while the Super Heavy booster stage returned to the pad where it was caught by two huge “Mechazilla” arms.

Competitors like RocketLab and others are also doing impressive things in space on a smaller scale.

FEMA and the state of North Carolina didn’t distinguish themselves by their hurricane response — but Florida, under the supervision of the very competent Gov. Ron DeSantis, did much better. 

And while military helicopters sat on the ground in North Carolina after Helene’s devastation, civilian rescuers sprang into action, bringing desperately needed supplies and help by land and air. 

Want EV chargers? While the federal government struggles to cough up a handful, Tesla has deployed 27,000 charging units at more than 2,400 charging stations, according to the Department of Energy.

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Microsoft is reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to provide clean power for its data centers.

And while the US intelligence community has been unimpressive, the Israelis scored a huge coup with their pager-bombs that decapitated Hezbollah. 

So what accounts for the difference?

Maybe it’s just a question of priorities.

When competence is rewarded, you get more of it. When the ability to play internal politics is what gets you ahead, then you get more of that. 

SpaceX has clear goals, short deadlines and clear lines of responsibility. Boeing’s culture, once one that revered engineering, has become one that worships byzantine corporate politics — where you’re more likely to get fired over DEI infractions than over job performance.

And it’s not just Boeing; in Oregon, a top forestry official was put on leave after a DEI officer complained he was “seeking only the candidates most qualified for the job,” without emphasizing their “gender and identity.”

Ditto the federal government, which has created a self-perpetuating culture of incompetence: It’s virtually impossible to get fired, and failures often bring more resources to the agency, not less. 

It’s not surprising that places dominated by that spirit do badly. 

Want things to work better? Give people clear missions, high standards — and skin in the game.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.