Why Government Programs Are Not Being Implemented

Many people ask me: "Why can't we implement even the programs that have already been adopted, while we keep writing new ones?"

There are many reasons, which I will try to describe, and all of them relate specifically to implementation. However good the ideas may be, poor implementation can turn a document into something that does not work at all. There are plenty of examples, and there is no point in listing them.

The problem is precisely with implementation, and it has many causes. Without addressing them, it is very hard to achieve anything:

Motivation. I do not put much faith in duty to the country, service to the Motherland and so on. An official is a person like any other who goes to work to earn a living. Perhaps political appointees can be driven by other goals, but those who write documents and put them into practice have spent their whole careers in the civil service and earn their living there. At present they earn however they can: "white" (legal), "grey," "black" and so on. The right approach is for them to earn only "white," which is why a proper pay system and motivation matter here. Pay is currently extremely low, and it cannot motivate people to work properly and earn legitimately. This raises a reasonable question: how can efficiency be improved while pay is raised and motivation is introduced? In this case there will be heavy spending at the first stage, because we first need highly paid people who can build proper processes and cut staff as new forms of remuneration are introduced. It is a very difficult task.

Team. At one time there was a campaign against officials bringing their own teams with them when they moved, but it turned into a political instrument. The influential and well-connected can build teams because they have political approval, while newcomers have no such right and end up with deputies who are loyal not to them but to those above. Without a team it is hard to get anything done, however smart and capable you are. There should be principles for selecting people, but there should be no interference in team-building. At the moment, getting approval for a deputy or a department director is a very difficult process. To some extent, perhaps, this was a way of fighting collusion and corruption, but it seems to me that it affects efficiency and implementation more.

Fear of law enforcement agencies. We have a huge number of law enforcement agencies. It has become very difficult to talk to officials, because not everything is interpreted unambiguously. First and foremost, this is enormous stress for people who are solving huge problems for the country. I am also convinced that corruption is extremely hard to defeat by force alone. For that, income and motivation must match expectations and qualifications, which requires raising pay, introducing motivation systems and putting in place a transparent system of recruitment to the civil service.

Too many layers of management, which badly distort instructions. Ministries consist of committees, which have departments and divisions, and so on. Above the ministers sit deputy prime ministers, and there are also supervisors from the Presidential Administration, and so on. The fewer the layers of management, the faster and more accurate the implementation. It seems to me that our ministries are too large and very hard to manage. We need to reduce their functions by transferring some of them to local authorities, and to break the ministries up into units with at most 2–3 functions each. That would allow us to cut the number of committees, raise the status of the ministries and solve the problem of manageability.