Fortune Archives: The biggest boogeyman in business

“Government efficiency” is a goal we’ve often heard invoked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, most notably in the name of the initiative that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, spearheads: the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE. 

Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to reducing the federal workforce may well be creating grave new problems. But the fundamental concern he says he’s addressing is a longtime bugbear of business leaders across industries: that the government’s regulatory systems are unnecessarily expensive to enforce and byzantine to navigate, and that compliance with those layers upon layers of rules slows down innovation and growth. 

On the eve of Trump’s first election in 2016, Fortune’s Brian O’Keefe published a fascinating explorationof “the biggest bogeyman in business”: red tape. “Red tape is clearly a major source of friction—but is it really strangling business?” he asked. “The answer is less obvious than it may seem.”

On the one hand, he points out, there are plenty of examples to cite of productive projects being delayed for years on end as costs balloon because of onerous regulations, some of which can appear ridiculous when examined. On the other, there’s the need to protect the public—consumers, workers, public health and safety, the environment—that is arguably the government’s most fundamental purpose. 

“Large increases in federal regulation often come in response to upheaval,” O’Keefe writes. “The Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as much of the modern framework for modern financial regulation, was created in response to the Crash of 1929. The social and environmental awakening of the 1960s led to a desire to protect our planet, consumers, and workers, and to a great expansion of the regulatory state in the 1970s.” And the list goes on: The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, prompted the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The Great Recession led to the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau. 

As technology begets ever more complicated branches of our economy, the debate over how to regulate them continues, as Leo Schwartz and Allie Garfinkle show in a Fortune feature published this week. They examine “one of the most labyrinthine cautionary tales in modern tech”—the collapse of a piece of back-end financial technology infrastructure, Synapse, that left $200 million in customer funds frozen.  

Despite the many billions that pass through financial apps and systems, fintech is not regulated with anything like the rigor that traditional banking is, they point out. And, they write, “in this era of shrinking regulation, Synapse could be a canary in the coal mine for the dangers of the wobbly network underpinning fintech apps and their banking partners.”

But again, the solution to that problem is not obvious. Current regulations did not protect the customers of fintech apps who lost their nest eggs in the Synapse collapse. And as Schwartz and Garfinkle write, “Nearly everyone seems to agree that the current system didn’t work.” 

Trump this week signaled that he’s reining in Musk’s aggressive approach to cutting government, saying that he has directed his department heads to use “the scalpel rather than the hatchet.” It remains to be seen whether that approach can solve the vexing conundrum: How much red tape is the right amount?