Politics & Power Quote by Donna Shalala

A defensive sentence dressed up as reassurance, Shalala's line is doing battle on two fronts: the ideological suspicion that "government can't do anything right" and the technocratic anxiety that modern public needs are simply too intricate for the state to manage. The repetition is the tell. "Services" is broad enough to sound neutral, almost apolitical. Then she tightens the screw with "Even complex services", a phrase that anticipates the eye-roll and answers it before it lands.

Shalala came up in the worlds where complexity is the point: large universities, federal health policy, sprawling bureaucracies that only look inert from the outside. As HHS secretary in the 1990s, she was associated with the unglamorous but consequential machinery of public health, welfare reform implementation, and the daily grind of keeping systems functioning. In that context, this isn't a starry-eyed faith statement; it's a rebuttal to a storyline. Privatization advocates often frame complexity as proof the public sector must outsource, because markets are supposedly nimble and governments are supposedly stuck in molasses. Shalala flips that: complexity is exactly what government is designed for, because it can pool risk, standardize rules, and operate at scale without requiring a profit motive to justify serving the hardest cases.

The subtext is also a warning: if government fails, it's rarely because it's inherently incapable; it's because it's been deliberately underfunded, politically sabotaged, or asked to perform miracles with constraints no private contractor would accept. The line insists competence is a choice, not a fantasy.