Missouri's insanely bloated government(s)

Forget DOGE. If you want to understand government inefficiency, look no further than Missouri.

Two things are true:

1. DOGE is ineffective, harming Americans, damaging faith in our government at home and our standing abroad, and run by a eugenicist and generally bad person.

2. Government is bloated, and it’s not particularly efficient.

Want an example? Look no further than the counties in Republican-controlled Missouri.¹

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Article summary:

• Missouri’s centuries-old system of county government makes it harder to deliver high-quality services to its residents. Lots of states face similar issues.

• A lack of accountability—no recent public data, few journalists, exemptions from reporting requirements—makes it hard to know why certain counties are so much less efficient than others.

• If Missouri’s Republican supermajority were serious about efficiency, this is the first place they’d look. (But of course, they aren’t serious.)

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We have way too many counties

Missouri has 115 counties, fifth-most of any state in the country. That stat alone indicates serious bloat, but when you dig into the data, you start to realize how absurd it is that Missouri has that many counties:

• 56 counties—nearly half!—have smaller populations than they did in 1900.² (For context, the U.S. population has grown 4.5× in that time.)

• 60 counties have populations smaller than 20,000. Those make up the vast majority of Missouri’s counties that have been shrinking for the last century-plus.

Once upon a time—when James Buchanan was President, and the Transcontinental Railroad was still a decade or two away—this made sense. In the horse-and-buggy era, even if you had paved roads, you weren’t moving faster than 5-8 mph.³ And since hardly any of the country’s roads were paved back then, in practice you were moving even more slowly than that.

In that era, the services that a county provided—everything from surveying to getting licenses to recording transactions to registering births and deaths—you had to be close to your county seat. Otherwise, there was no other way to do any of this without spending days on the road.

The need for this many counties is entirely obsolete

The problem now is that this whole set-up is totally vestigial:

• You can reach your county offices by phone, and 98% of Americans have a phone.

• You can access many records online. 96% of Americans use the internet, and 90% of Americans have broadband internet access.⁴

• You can reach your county officials by email, and well over 90% of Americans have email addresses.⁵

• If all else fails, and you have to go to your county seat in person, you can get there in an automobile, and 94% of Missourians have a personal vehicle. (In rural Missouri, the rates are even higher than that.) You can drive there on roads where the speed limits are at least 50 mph, and usually much higher.

We’ve set up an entire system of government that works really well for people living in 1861, back when Missouri’s newest and least populous county was formed.

But for people living in 2025? We’re still using the exact same structure of government.⁶ It’s costly and it’s not necessary.

Having this many counties is inefficient, wasteful, and dangerous

Here’s a comparison between some of the state’s smallest counties and its largest.⁷

People in rural Missouri make meaningfully less than people in urban Missouri. And across rural Missouri, counties are spending significantly more (as a percentage of county per capita income) than cities.

The system we have now is inefficient, wasteful, and dangerous. This can and should be fixed.

Here’s why it’s inefficient.

There are certain fixed costs associated with running counties: maintaining a county courthouse and paying 13 elected officials,⁸ for instance. If five small counties merged, they could cut these costs by 80%. But the inefficiency is much deeper than that.

Take, for instance, the roads.

• 21% of rural roads in Missouri are in poor condition, the seventh-highest rate in the country.⁹

• Consequently, Missouri has some of the country’s highest rates of rural non-interstate traffic fatalities.

• Even the smallest counties have many 100s of road miles that they maintain.¹⁰

To get roads repaired, counties need to contract out that work. But with so many small counties:

1. Counties are forced to bid against other small counties, meaning that critical work doesn’t get done for longer.

2. Counties lose the critical negotiating leverage with more volume, and they probably end up paying more.

Because of the poor state of Missouri’s rural county roads, people are needlessly dying. With larger counties, we could address those issues faster and more cost-effectively.

Here’s why it’s wasteful.

Let’s compare Missouri’s elected coroners.¹¹

First of all, I have no idea why Clark County pays its coroner so much more, given that it has roughly the same population as Putnam and Sullivan Counties.

Second, I also wonder why Sullivan and Clark Counties, whose collective population is half of McDonald County’s, each pays its coroner more than McDonald County.

Finally, I question whether each of these counties can even find qualified coroners.

Missouri’s statutory qualifications for the position are shockingly lax, requiring no knowledge of what it takes to be a coroner. There just aren’t that many people I’d consider qualified for the role, since there are only 61,000 funeral service workers in the whole country.

I’m sure that the coroners of Putnam, Sullivan, Clark, and McDonald Counties are fine people.¹² But statistically speaking, when 1-in-5,600 Americans is qualified to be a coroner, and when a tiny fraction of Americans want to run for public office,¹³ the odds that they live in one of those counties and want to run for office are pretty darn low.

With larger counties, the pool for these technical roles is larger. Training and support for coroners is a real issue; the Missouri Legislature, to its credit, recognizes this. Merging the state’s smaller counties will lead to a larger pool of more qualified people running for office.

We can joke about this with coroners. But when it comes to Prosecuting Attorneys or Treasurers—both elected positions—this is a very real and very acute problem, where (living) people will suffer if we don’t have qualified people in those roles.

Here’s why it’s dangerous.

I already talked about the fact that Missouri’s inadequate roads are literally killing people. This goes beyond that.

• I wanted to run an analysis on whether Missouri’s rural counties were systematically spending more. But I couldn’t do that. Why? Only a small percentage of Missouri’s counties have up-to-date data with the auditor’s office, because for no obvious reason, counties are literally exempt from certain reporting requirements with the State Auditor.¹⁴

• Large swaths of Missouri, like the rest of the country, are increasingly news deserts without robust local reporting. In all of Missouri, there are only 580 reporters, one of the lowest ratios of reporters-to-residents in the country. In the northern part of the state,¹⁵ there are just 30.¹⁶

Why does this matter? Because without good data and without proper reporting, it’s extremely hard to hold all of these local governments accountable—either to responsible spending or to fend off corruption or both.

Who’s reviewing contracts to make sure there isn’t self-dealing? Who’s there to explain why Chariton County is so much less efficient than Linn County, its direct neighbor to the north?

With this much inefficiency, no one is being properly held to account. And the way that Missouri has structured its governments is leading to less efficient spending, less accountability, and more corruption.

This issue isn’t limited to Missouri

I’m using Missouri as an example, but this is true just about everywhere in the country.

Hardly anyone has done anything to reconcile inefficient and outdated county governments in more than a century.¹⁷ I’m more familiar with Missouri than other states, but it’s clear to me that other states are flailing around with the same bloated governments too.

With the right reforms, government can work better

There is a remarkable lack of imagination in government today. Our bloated, antiquated, dispersed systems of government are inefficient, dangerous, and bad for residents.

In the grand scheme of things, does it matter whether a small county pays its coroner $16,000 or $52,000? No, not really.

What does matter: our systems are not well set up to deliver the best services possible to people, around the state and around the country.

This gets at the farce of DOGE: they aren’t doing anything to meaningfully cut federal spending. And unless they improve laws and processes, which they’re not, what they’re doing will make federal programs worse, and people will suffer as a result.

Urban areas have their problems too, something I’ve written about before. Democrats are falling short in making government work well, and that’s hurting Democratic electoral hopes everywhere. People are right to be angry about what they’re seeing in some of the country’s bluest states.

No matter where you are, it’s essential that we do more to make government efficient. Democrats must be talking more about that—especially if the Trump Administration is needlessly barreling us towards a recession.

But since Republicans control Missouri, and since Missouri’s elected Republicans are so keen on attacking government inefficiency, why don’t they show us the way: merge counties and create a better, leaner, more efficient government for everyone.

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1. For the Missourians here: make sure you vote in today’s municipal elections! These are low-turnout affairs and your vote matters a ton. Here’s more information on how to vote.

2. This is the first time I’ve directly used ChatGPT as a reference. I used the “Deep research” functionality, which was pretty cool. (And yes, I spot-checked this to make sure that it’s accurate; as far as I can tell, it is.)

3. The “Amish Safety” page of the Ohio Department of Transportation website as a source for horse-and-buggy speed is one of my all-time favorite citations.

4. With that said: this is less true among rural Missourians, where high-speed internet is generally less available.

5. This data is from 2011, but I couldn’t find more recent data than that. With that said, some less reliable sources have that number closer to 95% today, and that tracks—there’s a lot of stuff in the modern world that’d be hard to do without an email address.

6. It should be noted that because of profound rural population loss in the last 150 years, this set-up hasn’t been necessary for a long while.

In 1900, 6,700 people were living in Carter County, which was at the time the state’s least populous. Today, there are 14 counties with populations smaller than that. It speaks to setting up a system that wasn’t even necessary for people 125 years ago, much less now.

7. Lots of footnotes here:

• This is not a scientific or representative sample of counties. More in the body of the article above, but because I was constrained by the data available (since counties are generally exempt from having to submit annual reports with the State Auditor), I tried to present a smattering of small counties to show how they compare to the state’s largest.

• Here’s where I pulled data for each of the counties: Putnam, Sullivan, Clark, Chariton, Montgomery, Linn, McDonald, St. Louis County.

• St. Louis City and St. Louis County are separate counties. This is data for St. Louis County and does not include the City. If you’re curious, here’s a bit more context on why they’re separate.

• Getting really into the weeds: the data for St. Louis County is technically “Expenditures” and not “Disbursements.” The two aren’t exactly the same, but to use the most fitting possible expression, it’s close enough for government work.

• I got per-capita income by Missouri county from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center.

• I did not include counties where there was something (obviously) anomalous going on. Take Caldwell County, for instance—their costs are far higher than you’d expect for a county of its size, but that’s a function of a one-time infrastructure project. (The Little Otter Creek Reservoir, if you’re curious.) However, just about every county spent ARPA money, and while that may be a one-time thing, I didn’t exclude that from the analysis.

Finally: can we get more creative with our county names? Across the U.S., there are nine Putnam Counties, six Sullivan Counties, 12 Clark Counties, 18 Montgomery Counties, and four Linn Counties. There are even two St. Louis Counties.

(McDonald County, while unique, still doesn’t feel very fun or creative. Credit where credit is due: Chariton County is unique and a good county name.)

Give us a Musial County! Or a Ted Drewes County! Toasted Ravioli County, Missouri has real potential as a tourist draw. We should be having way more fun with this.

8. Every county has three County Commissioners, an Assessor, a Circuit Clerk, a Collector, a County Clerk, an elected Coroner, a Prosecuting Attorney, a Public Administrator, a Recorder, a Treasurer, and a Sheriff. (Some of the larger counties have a different set of elected officials. But this is the case in most rural counties.)

In some cases, some of those positions are merged (like Collector and Treasurer). But even still: it’s a lot of elected officials.

9. Two states with higher rates of rural roads in poor condition are Rhode Island and Hawaii, who have very few rural road miles. In terms of rural road miles in poor condition, I’d venture that Missouri is among the highest.

10. There’s more than a little nuance here in what exactly each county is responsible for, between county-urban road systems and county highway commissions and a bunch of other things, but what’s clear is that counties are generally on the hook for some meaningful amount of road repair and upkeep.

11. Here are the sources for Putnam, Sullivan, and Clark Counties, all from 2023.

The most recent McDonald County financials don’t separate out coroner compensation, which is itself part of the challenge here: it’s very hard to do a proper compare/contrast, and it makes accountability really difficult. Instead, I pulled this data from 2021. It’s a few years old, and so I’m guessing that his compensation has gone up, but it doesn’t change the overall story here.

Then there’s a broader question here of why Missouri has elected coroners at all. Even 80 years ago, the state suggested abolishing the position, thinking back then that it may not be necessary. But like the whole infrastructure of counties, it’s managed to hang on.

12. Or maybe they’re not. I have no idea. Maybe I’ll meet them one day.

13. This data is, technically, how many Americans have run for public office, not how many want to. But this is probably the more important data anyway: speaking from experience, there is a really big chasm between thinking you want to run and actually putting together a campaign, no matter what position you’re running for. It’s hard to run for office!

14. This isn’t an attack on the Auditor’s Office, by the way. They do good work, often thanklessly. But they only have 115 employees, and there’s only so much they can do when you think about everything else they have to look at across the state. But the statute that exempts counties from reporting requirements makes absolutely no sense.

15. The “North Missouri nonmetropolitan area,” technically.

16. Two things:

• This includes sports reporters, meteorologists, etc. So there are even fewer political reporters.

• Alarmingly: since I started working on this post, the data seems to have disappeared from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I don’t know why that is. I’ve complained about government data before, but this is the first time I can remember it just disappearing like this. I’ve sent some texts around and have reason to think this might be a function of DOGE cuts, which is pretty unsettling if that’s true. But I don’t know that definitively.) Fortunately, the data is still available on the Wayback Machine.

17. “List of former United States counties” is the Wikipedia page you never knew you needed! But you can use it to see just how seldom anything has changed in the last 125 years.