Americans have a specific relationship to the word efficiency. It functions, in the American conversation, almost as a moral category — a thing that is good in the way that cleanliness is good, or punctuality. Efficiency is how you know a thing is being run well.
DOGE eliminated 317,000 federal jobs in ten months and was described by its supporters as a function of efficiency. The framing worked, in large part, because Americans are primed to believe that large institutions are inefficient, and that the solution to inefficiency is reduction.
From Kenya, watching an administration brand its own citizens as terrorists while protecting the governing class's interests, and simultaneously watching DOGE eliminate the institutional nodes that exist to check executive power, the word efficiency landed differently.
Efficient for whom. That is the question. American things, including the American political conversation, have a particular tendency to answer that question with "everyone," even when the answer is clearly "some."
This is one of the hidden things: the moral vocabulary that makes certain choices look neutral.
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.