In a breakthrough achievement for bureaucratic innovation, federal agencies have successfully created the perfect self-sustaining ecosystem: a consulting industrial complex so elegantly designed that it feeds exclusively on itself while producing nothing but recommendations for additional feeding.
The system reached peak efficiency this month when the Department of Administrative Optimization hired Synergy Solutions Group to evaluate whether the department should continue hiring Synergy Solutions Group to evaluate its hiring practices. The resulting $2.3 million study concluded that the question was both urgent and complex enough to require a follow-up engagement, preferably with a firm experienced in evaluating evaluation processes.
Photo: Department of Administrative Optimization, via s3.amazonaws.com
The Beautiful Simplicity of Circular Logic
"What we've created here is a masterpiece of self-perpetuating expertise," explained Dr. Jennifer Walsh, a senior partner at Synergy Solutions Group and the architect of the federal government's current consulting strategy. "Our initial study in 2012 identified that agencies were making too many decisions internally. Our follow-up studies have consistently confirmed that this problem is getting worse, which proves our original analysis was correct."
The approach has proven remarkably successful. Since 2012, federal spending on external consulting has increased by 340%, while internal decision-making has decreased by roughly the same percentage. Agencies now routinely hire consultants to determine whether they need consultants, then hire different consultants to validate those recommendations, then hire the original consultants to implement whatever the validation consultants validated.
A Case Study in Excellence
Consider the simple question that launched this consulting renaissance: should the General Services Administration digitize its paper records? What began as a straightforward yes-or-no inquiry has blossomed into an eleven-year, $47 million consulting engagement that has successfully transformed a binary question into a complex ecosystem of subsidiary questions.
Photo: General Services Administration, via i.pinimg.com
"The beauty of the process is how it reveals the hidden complexity in seemingly simple decisions," noted Tom Richardson, the GSA's Director of Strategic Consultation Coordination. "What started as 'should we scan our files' has evolved into fundamental questions about the nature of information, the meaning of storage, and whether digital really exists or if it's just very small physical."
The project has generated 23 separate studies, including a $4.2 million analysis of whether the agency's paper records want to be digitized (results inconclusive), and a $6.8 million study of the psychological impact of digitization on the paper records themselves (ongoing, with preliminary findings suggesting the paper is "ambivalent but professionally curious").
The Methodology Behind the Magic
The consulting process follows a elegant three-step cycle that has been refined over decades of practice. First, agencies identify a problem they could solve internally. Second, they hire consultants to confirm that the problem is too complex for internal solutions. Third, they hire consultants to solve the problem, who inevitably discover that the problem is actually several interconnected problems requiring additional consultation.
"It's like a beautiful dance," observed Dr. Walsh, whose firm has been hired by seventeen different agencies to optimize their consultant-hiring processes. "The agencies need expertise, we provide expertise about needing expertise, and everyone wins. Especially us, but also everyone."
The system has achieved such efficiency that Synergy Solutions Group now maintains a dedicated Federal Recursion Division, staffed entirely by former federal employees who specialize in explaining to their former colleagues why their former colleagues can't do their former jobs without external help.
The Expanding Universe of Expertise
What makes the system particularly elegant is how it grows organically. Each consulting engagement produces recommendations for additional consulting engagements, creating what economists call a "positive feedback loop" and accountants call "a very good business model."
The Department of Homeland Security, for example, hired consultants in 2018 to streamline its consulting processes. The consultants recommended hiring additional consultants to implement the streamlining recommendations, plus backup consultants to consult on the implementation of the streamlining consultants' consulting recommendations.
Photo: Department of Homeland Security, via www.onairdesign.com
"We're now consulting on our consulting about consulting," explained DHS Deputy Administrator for Consultation Management Sarah Chen. "It sounds complicated, but the consultants assure us it's actually quite simple once you hire the right consultants to explain it."
The Pilot Program That Pilots Itself
The crown jewel of this system is the Federal Consulting Optimization Pilot Program, which has been piloting the pilot process for pilot programs since 2019. The pilot program pilots whether pilot programs need consultants to pilot them, using consultants who specialize in piloting consultant pilots.
"We're essentially running a pilot to determine if we need a pilot," explained Program Director Mark Stevens, who was hired as a consultant to manage the pilot program that hired him. "The early results suggest that we definitely need a pilot, but we're piloting whether those results need validation through additional piloting."
The pilot program's budget has grown from $800,000 to $12.4 million, though officials stress this represents a pilot-phase budget for piloting the full pilot, not the actual pilot budget, which will be determined by consultants once the pilot pilot concludes.
The Consulting Singularity
Experts predict the system is approaching what Dr. Walsh calls "consulting singularity" – the point at which the federal government consists entirely of consultants hiring other consultants to consult on consultation consulting.
"We're maybe three years away from achieving perfect bureaucratic efficiency," Dr. Walsh noted. "A system where every decision is made by someone who specializes in making that exact decision, overseen by someone who specializes in overseeing decision specialists, and validated by someone who specializes in validating oversight of specialized decision-making."
Until then, agencies will continue following the proven three-word strategy that has guided federal consulting for over a decade: "When in doubt, outsource the doubt."
