Efficiency’s Insufficiencies: Holy Week lessons from Judas and Mary
When the president gave Elon Musk the floor to share about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during the oval office press conference in February, Musk began by saying that the goal of DOGE is to “restore democracy.” He explained that the American people elected Donald Trump to reform the US government, and through DOGE, the president is fulfilling his promise. Federal employees, he continued, are unelected, and the power they have undermines democracy. When asked the first question about public criticism of DOGE, he responded, “you couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate from the public,” referring to the election of Trump and the Republican majority in the House and Senate. On the DOGE website, the subtitle is, “The people voted for major reform.” And although, as of this writing, April 10, 2025, the unfolding of DOGE has recently lost popularity, Americans still like the idea of DOGE.
This is not the first time an administration has tried to make the government more efficient. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump in his first term all signed executive orders or saw legislation passed to reduce waste or hold the government accountable. Notably, Joe Biden made little use of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” narrative in his campaigning and presidency, though he did claim his budget cut waste.
Government is not the only area where we want efficiency. Companies seek efficiency to increase profits, nonprofits and ministries seek efficiency to increase impact, families seek efficiency to manage their households well, athletes seek efficiency to maximize performance. Try going through a day without thinking once about how to be efficient and you’ll realize how much we strive for efficiency.
What is behind our love of efficiency? Does our desire for efficiency grow out of our Christian discipleship and convictions or from other narratives and influences? As Christians, should we desire efficiency? Is it a good that we should strive for?
The challenge in answering these questions is that we lack clarity about the goal of efficiency. We fail to ask the question, “Efficient toward what?” The shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line. That line is what you might call “efficient.” A zigzag or roundabout line would be considered “inefficient” or “wasteful.” But what is B when we are talking about government efficiency? Musk’s final statement in his oval office press conference was illuminating. He said, “At a high level, if you say, How do we increase prosperity? We get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles. And so you increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there’s a higher standard of living available for everyone. That’s the actual goal.” Point B, for Musk, is a higher standard of living for everyone.
How do we measure standard of living? How do Musk, DOGE, the TRUMP Administration – how do most Americans – measure it? Musk’s words are consistent with how many of us across the political spectrum measure collective national prosperity: “the total output of goods and services.” In other words, GDP, Gross Domestic Product. When GDP goes up, we say the economy is “good.” When it goes down, we say it is bad.
But GDP is an insufficient measure of the wellbeing of all. In the past 50 years, as GDP has increased, so has wealth inequality. GDP is also indifferent to what goods and services are produced and how they increase profits. So, we can call the US economy “efficient” and “good,” even if the money is being made off exploitative labor in fields that harm us and the rest of the world – weapon manufacturing, the pornography and sex industry, fossil fuels, and tech companies that increase social isolation, spread disinformation, and damage mental health.
The city where I live, Durham, NC, owes much of its growth to a revolutionary innovation that increased efficiency to give Durham a competitive edge throughout the world: the cigarette rolling machine. The W. Duke, Sons & Co, led by James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, used the machine invented by James Bonsack to drastically increase production of cigarettes. A few years later, Buck Duke consolidated control of his competitors to form the American Tobacco Company, the world’s largest tobacco product manufacturer of its day.
Through the efficient production of cigarettes, Buck Duke built incredible wealth, provided thousands of jobs, and became one of our country’s most giving philanthropists – only to be outmatched by Rockefeller and Carnegie during his time. He increased our country’s GDP. He increased the standard of living for many who worked in the tobacco industry. At first glance, Buck Duke was doing a great thing for the prosperity of all. In hindsight, the end – point B – to which the cigarette-rolling machine increased efficiency, turned out to create one of the largest health tragedies in modern history. A 2022 study by the American Cancer Society found that, beyond tobacco’s cost in sickness and death, the economic cost topped almost $900 billion in 2020, as measured by our customary way of quantifying prosperity: GDP.
When public pressure built against tobacco companies, they counter-reacted by rallying against regulation and undermining the science that showed the dangers of smoking. These narratives shaped public opinion and politics. In the 1980’s, tobacco companies were the leading contributors to political campaigns. They claimed regulation hindered their efficiency and prevented them from being able to contribute to the economy. In an interesting display of efficiency narratives (and their concomitant racial narratives not unlike today’s crusade against DEI), Jesse Helms’s 16-day filibuster in 1983 opposing the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday argued, among other things (like calling Dr. King a leftist radical), that it would be costly to the economy. He finally ended the filibuster in exchange for none other than a tobacco bill.
In philanthropy, the terms of efficiency are usually determined by the wealthiest among us. This is how it works: an individual or family makes a massive amount of wealth through their business(es), they set up a foundation, that foundation establishes giving priorities, then decides where to give. They want to see efficiency, which they largely measure by their understanding of “point B.” Many foundations conduct research and engage in community listening with people who are poor, but overall, giving priorities and decisions ultimately lie with the wishes of the benefactors and their stewards. In North Carolina, four of the ten largest giving foundations come from wealth that can be traced to Duke tobacco; one comes from the proceeds from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with cigarette manufacturers (which include the Duke-spawned tobacco companies).
Today, our nation’s most wealthy industrialists are in tech. They define the terms of efficiency in business and in philanthropy. It would not be a stretch to say that the shifting political landscape is, in part, the result of challenging their authority to define such terms. Marc Andreesen, a major Silicon Valley tech leader and investor, has said that for years tech companies had an unspoken agreement with the public, which he calls “the Deal.” In “the Deal,” tech entrepreneurs were celebrated for their innovation and wealth-building and congratulated for their generosity to the poor. Democratic administrations were particularly invested in “the Deal,” so it’s no surprise that many tech leaders like Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk voted Democrat during those years.
But over the past ten years, “the Deal” has been “broken” (Andreesen’s terms) as the public has pointed out – much like they did decades ago with tobacco – the human and societal damage that tech companies can cause when unregulated. The public criticism has gone beyond the potential harms of tech’s products, taking on wealth inequality, worker’s rights, and tech leaders’ approaches to philanthropy. Andreesen and others in tech called foul. Like Big Tobacco, tech companies responded by undermining the science and rallying against regulation. In Trump, they found a leader who would deregulate, give them tax breaks, and crack down on narratives – cast broadly as “DEI” – that led to public critique of their business and philanthropy practices. Meta was one of several tech companies that donated to the Trump campaign. Even Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, has fallen in step with MAGA’s vision, ending its DEI programs and its funding for social advocacy, which focused on immigration reform and racial equity. Others found an even more efficient route to regulation and are now in the driver’s seat: Musk, the wealthiest of all tech leaders, is heading the Department of Government Efficiency, and Andreesen is now working with Musk on it, jokingly calling himself an “unpaid intern.”
Musk is tasked to make the government more efficient, just as most Americans wanted. As such, he is defining the terms for efficiency – he is articulating “point B” and rigorously trying to get us there as efficiently as possible. Many critics of DOGE have not critiqued his ends; they hold the same goal – a higher standard of living for all Americans as measured by GDP – but believe that DOGE is counterproductive in accomplishing it.
But it’s helpful for Christians to ask whether we share the same goal at all with DOGE – or with government efficiency initiatives from any administration over the past 40 years. There’s nothing inherently wrong with efficiency. Holding people accountable to waste, fraud, and abuse is good. But efficiency is an insufficient term on its own. In the absence of clarified ends, we wind up praising efficiency in the abstract without full awareness of what it is accomplishing. And if those ends are specified as a “higher standard of living,” we have to ask, is a higher standard of living the goal for Christians? Should our goal for government, as disciples, be a higher standard of living, as measured by a higher GDP?
As we enter Holy Week, the scene where Jesus is anointed at Bethany can teach us something about costliness, waste, and efficiency as disciples of Jesus. In John’s account, Mary takes a jar of costly perfume, anoints Jesus’ feet, and wipes them with her hair. Judas Iscariot, who kept the purse and was known to steal from it, challenges her use of the perfume, asking why it was not sold for 300 denarii to be given to the poor. Jesus says, “Leave her alone….It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me” (John 12:7-8). Judas, who has authority over the purse and over how money is distributed to the poor, charges Mary with a wasteful use of resources. He claims that more efficient management would benefit the poor.
This story challenges our assumptions about efficiency. I resonate with Judas – 300 denarii was a year’s income, and for a movement of followers who preached a Kingdom where the poor are blessed, it seems absurd to use the resources on anointing Jesus’ feet. Yes, Judas’s rebuke was insincere (John points out that he didn’t actually care about the poor but stole from the purse), but Jesus still praised Mary’s act.
When Jesus praises something, we would do well to listen. We might ask, “What was Mary’s end, Mary’s ‘point B’?” It was Jesus himself. It was God. Mary took a straight line through the contemptuous gazes of the onlookers at the dinner party, through all the voices that told her what was proper, through the customary ways of managing resources, and smashed open a jar of perfume over Jesus’ feet, wiping them with her hair, and filling the room with shock and overwhelming fragrance. She went straight to the Creator of all things, the One who would not only give to the poor, but who was the poor and who established a different Kingdom where the poor are released from all the oppression that holds them in poverty. For Mary, “point B” was more than an alternative metric for managing resources. It was Jesus, and her act of getting to Jesus was extraordinarily efficient.
But does this say anything about how Christians should expect the government to be managed? Our Kingdom is not of this world, but we do have a responsibility to participate in society in a way that bears witness to God’s Kingdom. And part of that is to see where our faith aligns and where it diverts from the priorities of the country where we live. The problem with GDP as a measure of prosperity is not that a high output of goods and services is bad. It’s that it’s insufficient. Other measures we use – inflation, employment, consumer spending – have their own inadequacies. God’s vision of prosperity, the biblical vision of shalom, is more robust. It’s a vision where everyone has what they need; where we are in good relationship with God, the earth, and each other; where we are physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy. Shalom is wholeness, goodness, and wellbeing for all. The “standard of living” of shalom may not offer the wealthiest access to luxuries like unlimited travel, toys, and entertainment, but it does offer everyone the goodness of God’s Creation. Mary shows us how to get there, going straight to our Creator, Savior, and Servant King, Jesus the Messiah.
