Government Pays Most for What It Forgets

Why Institutional Memory Is Essential to Effective Reform

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

February 20, 2026

There exists a recurring temptation in American political discourse to simplify the challenges of governance down to a false binary: either government is bloated and broken or it must be made lean, efficient, and by implication, better. But this dichotomy—though politically effective—is intellectually shallow and operationally dangerous. In reality, government bloat and institutional memory often coexist within the same agency, sometimes even within the same division. The hard work of reform lies not in drawing ideological lines between the two, but in distinguishing them, teasing them apart with surgical precision, and preserving the very knowledge that is most difficult to recover once it has been lost.

To call the federal government bloated is, in many respects, fair. Across decades, administrations have layered programs atop one another, launched overlapping initiatives with unclear sunset provisions, and permitted bureaucracies to grow in response to budget cycles rather than strategic necessity. Redundancy, duplicated authorities, unnecessary intermediaries—these are real problems that have long frustrated even the most committed public servants. However, it is a grave mistake to conflate this expansion with purposelessness. Not everything that appears outdated is irrelevant. Not every legacy process is inefficient. And not every long-tenured staff member is a holdover from a bygone era in need of replacement.

Here is the core dilemma: much of what reformers seek to eliminate under the label of bloat may in fact be the last surviving repository of organizational memory. In the rush to optimize, we risk amputating the very limbs that retain balance. The value of institutional memory lies not in its appearance, not in its visibility on a chart or spreadsheet, but in the subtlety of its presence. It resides in the kind of knowledge that only emerges in moments of uncertainty—the quiet recognition of a policy's unintended consequence because it happened once before; the unspoken awareness of how a particular partner agency responds in crisis; the instinct to escalate a risk because, as someone once put it, “this feels like it did before Katrina.”

There is a reason why human institutions, even in the most technologically advanced societies, still rely on people who “remember.” This is especially true in government, where knowledge is often dispersed across systems, buried in informal networks, and communicated orally across generations of staff. The very essence of institutional continuity depends on this lived, relational, undocumented wisdom. And once it is gone, it is not easily reconstituted—no matter how advanced the data systems or how robust the digital archives.

The danger arises when downsizing is executed by formula rather than function. Consider, for instance, the well-intentioned practice of imposing across-the-board cuts—say, a 10 or 15 percent reduction in administrative budgets across all departments. On its surface, this sounds reasonable, even prudent. Every agency shares in the sacrifice. No one is singled out. But in practice, such measures often have perverse effects. Newer programs, still adapting and still supported by flexible staffing models, may absorb the cuts with relative ease. Older divisions, by contrast, whose operational knowledge is concentrated in a handful of individuals—often those approaching retirement—find themselves targeted for attrition. These staffers leave, their successors untrained or absent, and the result is not a more agile agency but a more brittle one.

The cases are many and cautionary. NASA’s post-Apollo drawdown offers one of the most sobering examples. After the moon landing, funding contractions led to widespread departures among senior engineers and program managers. By the time the Space Shuttle program matured, much of the deep technical memory from the Apollo era had vanished. The loss wasn’t just in design; it was in decision-making culture, in the way safety concerns were raised, evaluated, and escalated. When the Challenger disaster occurred in 1986, the Rogers Commission would later observe that communication breakdowns and institutional forgetfulness played as much a role as the faulty O-ring.

The Department of Veterans Affairs offers another illustration. In the early 2000s, reforms aimed at streamlining operations led to the exit of many long-serving claims processors. These were individuals who understood not just how to process paperwork, but how to interpret incomplete documentation, identify fraud, or fast-track the urgent claims of terminally ill veterans. Their departure created backlogs that no amount of software upgrades could immediately solve. New hires required training. The training pipeline lacked depth. And public confidence eroded under the weight of mounting delays.

These are not isolated anecdotes. They are systemic warnings. They teach us that institutional memory is not merely helpful—it is essential. It is not a sentimental relic of the past. It is the operating manual for the present.

We must therefore be extremely cautious in our approach to reform. The goal is not to preserve inefficiency. The goal is to ensure that in our pursuit of a more streamlined government, we do not inadvertently erase the lessons, the relationships, and the reasoning that make governance possible at all. Every agency, if it is to be restructured, must first be audited—not just in terms of finances and output, but in terms of what might be called memory-critical functions. These are the roles, processes, and individuals whose loss would sever the continuity of learning. In business terms, they are the ones who remember why the company’s most expensive mistake was made. In government, they are the ones who know why a flood relief policy was revised in 1997, or why an agricultural subsidy was recalibrated to protect family farms in drought-prone counties.

To lose these people without harvesting their knowledge is to guarantee that the next generation of leaders will repeat the mistakes of the last. And herein lies one of the most profound truths in public life—one that was captured perfectly by Winston Churchill when he said:

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

It is a statement that speaks directly to the role of institutional memory in shaping future vision. The past is not a constraint—it is a lens. And those who refuse to look backward, who dismantle systems without understanding their origins, are condemned to move forward blindly.

We must reject the false choice between bloated government and forgetful government. Reform is possible. Downsizing is possible. But neither can be done well unless we begin with a deep respect for the people and processes that hold our institutional history in trust.

The solution is not to keep every office, preserve every budget line, or protect every program. The solution is to ask, with humility and rigor: What here remembers what we’ve already learned? That is what must be protected, embedded, and passed on.

Because the most expensive part of government is not what we spend—It’s what we forget.