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Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.”
As the Department of Government Efficiency embarks to become “The Manhattan Project of our time” that will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” according to President-elect Trump, it should be prepared for a Michael Spinks experience.
I’m rooting for the success of DOGE, as excess has become a standard operating procedure in Washington. The national debt has surpassed $38 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to eclipse $1 trillion annually, making it the fourth-largest budget item. Profligacy is a bipartisan effort, as both parties have shepherded annual debt spending since the turn of the century.
There’s perhaps no better tag team of reformers to attempt to rein in the size and efficiency of government than Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. However, DOGE, which is not an actual government department and has no statutory control over any agency, has a multitude of headwinds that will limit its impact.
Early statements from the pair show little awareness of these constraints, with Ramaswamy recommending a random lottery to lay off 75% of all federal employees, and Musk stating the goal of cutting “at least $2 trillion” annually in spending.
The areas of friction to these goals are numerous.
Given its lack of authority, DOGE recommendations will have to flow through the legislative and executive branches. The incentives for members of Congress to maintain spending levels far exceed those to take courageous austerity measures. To make any meaningful cuts, lawmakers will have to consider entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, something unlikely with a large majority and almost impossible with the five-seat Republican House majority this term.
Further, it’s difficult to imagine Trump—who added $4.8 trillion to the deficit, not including COVID spending and is already supporting raising the debt ceiling—changing course on his historical trend.
The designs of the system will also make DOGE dream fulfillment difficult. Checks, balances and compromise are meant to impede revolutionary movement in our system.
The bloat problem grew over time, driven by a combination of early-20th-century progressive policy and what the book “Crisis and Leviathan” calls the ratchet effect. This “refers to the tendency of governments to respond to crises by implementing new policies, regulations, and laws that significantly enhance their powers. These measures are typically presented as temporary solutions to address specific problems. However, in history, these measures often outlast their intended purpose and become a permanent part of the legal landscape,” according to the Mises Institute. (Think the Department of Homeland Security being created in the wake of 9/11 with the narrow responsibility to coordinate existing agencies, now with a budget of $62 billion).
The lone, but not insignificant, factor DOGE has on its side is the singular force that is Elon Musk. With resources and platform of influence in an age of social media, public pressures exerted on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) might mean some strategic wins are possible. According to Manhattan Institute economic policy expert Brian Riedl, “The focus of the Department of Government Efficiency should be found within its own name: Government Efficiency. Instead of undertaking a doomed ideological quest to eradicate government functions that remain broadly popular with voters, DOGE should focus on combatting true government waste in order to help Washington perform its functions more cheaply and efficiently.”
As proverbially, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” the reality of our debt, deficit and size of government means blunt force is unlikely to be the mechanism by which government is deconstructed.•
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Schutt is co-founder of Homesense Heating & Cooling and Refinery46 and an American Enterprise Institute civic renewal fellow. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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That’s not what Mike Tyson said. Pro tip: Quote marks are used to recount people’s actual words, not your lame paraphrasing.
If you agree that our beauacracy is a “collection of solutions to long solved problems that have become institutionalized”, the process of returning to any degree of efficiency becomes significantly more challenging. Dismantling bureaucratic systems serving past issues takes much more awareness and working knowledge than the incoming leadership possesses. Neither party has shown the degree of sheer will or capacity for this. And no one knows the unintended consequences of these changes or how to reasonably address the fallout. It’s often the people how genuinely need the service the most that pay the price. Those with sufficient personal resources usually escape much of what is done in the business of the economics of politics and government.