Skip Descant/ Government Technology
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan politely pushed back last week on calls to slash government and cautiously answered a question about the planned federal Department of Government Efficiency during the recent GovAI Coalition Summit.
Mahan, who leads the city in the heart of Silicon Valley, played it safe last week when asked what plans by the incoming Donald Trump administration to cut government spending by billions of dollars might mean for public-sector organizations.
“I’m going to try to reflect in this in a way that won’t get me into too much trouble,” Mahan said in the final session of the GovAI Coalition Summit* last Thursday at the San Jose Convention Center, blocks from City Hall.
“On the one hand, I would say, sometimes critics of government throw around words like ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ and just assume that there’s a ton of it,” he reflected. “I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the reality inside government.”
Mahan was responding to questioning by moderator Phil Bertolini, chief delivery officer for e.Republic**. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Silicon Valley heavyweights Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head up a new effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, for short, a commission to reduce the size of the federal government. Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy has government experience, nor has either specified where cuts may come from. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, will lead a new House subcommittee that will partner with DOGE to address what has been characterized as runaway wasteful spending.
For his part, the San Jose mayor called attention to — and defended — the work of public-sector workers, but also offered space for considering efficiencies, innovation and updated thinking.
“My experience in government over the last nearly four years now has been that you have incredibly dedicated, incredibly hard-working people doing their utmost to deliver high-quality services to people to make their lives better,” Mahan said. “So I think we have to be careful about being precise about what it is we’re trying to change — where the innovation and where the reform needs to happen.”
Mahan, a former schoolteacher, has experience in the tech-driven Silicon Valley private sector. He worked his way up to become CEO of Causes, a startup that helped people raise awareness and funding for nonprofits, then helped co-found Brigade, a nonpartisan platform aimed at helping voters discuss issues. Mahan reflected on the structural differences between government and the kinds of tech startup culture guiding the thinking of figures like Musk or Ramaswamy.
A government department or agency doesn’t “have the creative destruction of say, Silicon Valley, where [a startup can] come up and displace an incumbent, and then start again,” Mahan said, adding that layers, processes and even regulation can become inflexible and difficult to change. He pointed to public policy like the California Building Standards Code or the California Environmental Quality Act — major pieces of public policy drafted to protect the environment and public welfare, which have also been used to inhibit development.
“The temptation, the tendency, is to just add more rules,” Mahan said. “I think this is a healthy thing for us to be talking about. I do think in our own way, and in our own agencies, we need to be willing to go back and re-engineer and reimagine processes with the customer in mind, and take into account the new tools we have at our disposal.”
“I’m a big fan of that reimagining and re-engineering,” the mayor continued. “But it shouldn’t come from a place of ‘government is a problem.’”
*The GovAI Coalition Summit was hosted by Government Technology in partnership with the GovAI Coalition and the city of San Jose.
**Government Technology and Industry Insider — California are part of e.Republic. This article first appeared in Government Technology.