DOGE, Action Bias, and the New Deal

Put aside whether you think DOGE is good or bad. What interests me is why it hasn’t happened before in my lifetime.

As I watch what’s happening at DOGE, I can’t help thinking about the idea of an action bias.

I’m aware DOGE is disruptive and controversial. Put aside whether you think what the Republicans are doing is good or bad. How you feel about that probably has a lot to do with your priorities. Republicans naturally cheer these efforts because they’re dismantling programs important to their opponents. Democrats are outraged, seeing an onslaught against priorities they believe are necessary, that they spent decades putting into place. At its heart, it’s is the same debate we’ve been having for the better part of a century. Democrats build government advancing priorities they think critically important. Republicans think this government is a mistake, so they rip it down. That’s the fight over the New Deal and Great Society. It’s the fight over Ronald Reagan. It’s the fight between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Democrats think these laws and programs are good, and dismantling them is immoral. Republicans think the laws and programs are immoral, so dismantling them is good.

Also put aside whether you think what DOGE is doing is legal, prudent, or even Constitutional. Republicans will have to battle that out in the courts. As a former practicing lawyer, I have nuanced views on this that no one looking at it politically will like, along with a little “pox on both your houses” attitude about the imperial presidency. Both parties invested too much lawmaking authority in the president that Constitutionally isn’t his, and then both complain when the president unilaterally undoes what they have done. The courts will have to sort this out, and absolutely will.

The question that interests me, however, is why this hasn’t happened before in my lifetime. Why has no president sent teams into every government agency and program, tearing through them to ensure whatever they’re doing is what we think they’re supposed to do? Why didn’t Democrats do a DOGE? Why didn’t Barrack Obama make overhauling government with a fine tooth comb a centerpiece of his agenda? Why didn’t Republicans under Bush and Cheney, who loved to talk about cutting government, do it? Why didn’t Biden’s White House do it just last year? (I don’t want to hear about Clinton and Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative either, because that amounted to close to nothing.)

It’s not like anyone thinks government is working. No one I know, on the left or right, truly thinks government agencies or programs are remotely what they should be. I’m not just talking about cutting budgets or saving money, but properly carrying out their missions to make life better for Americans. I’m done with excuses that the government is a battleship that moves slowly, that the federal bureaucracy is obstinate and doesn’t listen, or that it’s hard to undo laws once they’re passed. It’s obviously possible, because a handful of twenty-five-year-old software engineers are doing things every wise counsel in Washington told me is impossible and it’s barely been a month.

We need to talk about action bias, and about the New Deal.

REMEMBERING THE NEW DEAL

When I hear about how government moves slowly and can’t do things, I think about the New Deal. I don’t just think about the programs most people remember like Social Security, the SEC, or financial relief for the Great Depression. I think about the screw-ups and the messes.

The Great Depression was more horrific than you imagine, with unemployment reaching 25% while GDP shrunk about a third. This lasted years, and government floundered unable to spark a recovery. By the time Franklin Roosevelt won in 1932, he and America were desperate to end the suffering. He launched a flurry of crazy, experimental efforts at the wall to see what might stick. A lot of it, honestly, was insane.

You probably learned in school that the New Deal was a program to inject Keynesian stimulus into the economy. That did happen, but it wasn’t what Roosevelt’s advisers were trying to do. The New Dealers vaguely knew about Keynes and his ideas, but were mostly following an economic theory that now sounds crazy—the way to end the Depression was to jack up prices. As the theory went, the problem was firms didn’t have enough money to hire more workers. The solution was to hike up prices, which would make firms profitable, which would allow them to hire, which would fix unemployment and end the Depression.

At a time in which Americans were going hungry, the government therefore did things like paying farmers to slaughter pigs and burn crops to make food less affordable. They paid farmers to leave fields fallow, which naturally led to them kicking sharecroppers off their land while continuing to farm the rest, decimating the livelihoods of Black sharecroppers across the South.

Let’s not forget the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal’s crown jewel. The New Dealers’ most important idea—modeled on Mussolini’s Italy—was to organize every American industry into great national cartels led by the most powerful tycoons, cooperating with union leaders and government. It empowered these cartels to issue millions of pages of rules micro-managing every facet of production and sale for the purpose of stopping low-cost producers from putting downward pressure on price. Unsurprisingly, these councils abused their power to kneecap innovative firms and harass rivals, requiring the White House to commission a review board under Clarence Darrow. Darrow found so many shocking abuses the White House quietly sidelined him.

There were other bad ideas too, like the controversial “Tax the Rich” bill. There was the Court-Packing scheme, an unconstitutional attack on the judiciary. Don’t forget the political malpractice of Roosevelt’s “purge” of insufficiently loyal Democrats, who mostly got re-elected and returned to Congress quite angry.

These weren’t minor programs. To Americans at the time, this was the New Deal. That’s why it was so controversial, and why many people denounced it as lunacy, corporate giveaways to Roosevelt’s rich friends, an attack on freedom, an anti-democratic coup, or communism. Roosevelt only pivoted to the New Deal we remember after Huey Long started attacking him from the left in anticipation of a primary challenge, promising to tax all wealth over a million dollars and a program to “Share Our Wealth” by making “every man a king.”

Why does nobody remember this? We learn about the New Deal as relief funds, Keynesian stimulus, and Social Security, and not the terrible messes it made. Because the stupid programs like the NRA didn’t last. They disrupted America for a time, and then vanished to be forgotten with other national idiocies like the Alien and Sedition Acts, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Prohibition. The useful programs, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Social Security, we locked in and kept for generations.

This demonstrates the value of a bias for action.

WHAT IS A BIAS FOR ACTION?

Jeff Bezos says there are two kinds of decisions, and you need to handle them differently.

Most decisions are reversible. You should push those decisions down to the lowest level and allow people to experiment. If things go right, celebrate and lock in the victory forever. If they go wrong, reverse course and try again. Only the small number of decisions that are truly irreversible need careful study, inviting stakeholders, and pushing them to the top to ensure they align with long-term strategy. The mistake is applying the full process to decisions that don’t require it, missing out on innovations and opportunity to avoid mistakes you can afford.

A mistake seems expensive because its costs are up front. A success, however, yields its benefits every year, again and again, forever.

It’s staggering to consider how much our government used to do. It actually used to do things, innovate, and change things to accomplish what the American people needed. It built an entire interstate highway system. It invented the nuclear bomb. It built a rocket and flew it to explore the Moon. It created the Marshall plan and rebuilt Europe.

Consider just a few efforts of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: Medicare; Medicaid; Food Stamps; the Legal Services Corporation; the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration; the National Historical Preservation Act; the Endangered Species Act; Upward Bound; the Office of Economic Opportunity; cigarette labeling laws, motor vehicle safety laws; consumer safety laws; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Department of Transportation. All these things happened in a few years under one president, and it was just a fraction of his program. Now remember how people acted like Obamacare—a medium-sized federal health insurance program that might not even make the Great Society highlight list—was such a monumental governmental achievement we talked about it for a decade.

I’m not saying government should barge ahead stupidly, breaking things. I’m a devout Burkean and believer in Chesterton’s Fence. Most traditions, systems, and institutions exist because they solve real problems you forgot about because they solved it. When you ignorantly tear them down, the problem comes roaring back. I have no patience for the kind of naïve year-zero thinking that caused French revolutionaries to rename the days and months into a new calendar. Never go full Brumaire. At the same time, don’t be King Louis who saw his kingdom collapse and head separated from his body because he refused to recognize that the system he presided over was stagnant, outdated, and no longer worked.

I want an action bias in government, but one grounded in reality. We need to experiment and change things we can afford to mess up. If we get it wrong, and we often will, backtrack and try again. If we get it right, lock it in forever and improve things permanently. This is what America’s Founders did when creating this republic. It’s what Lincoln did waging the Civil War, what Teddy Roosevelt did reforming America for the industrial era, and what Franklin Roosevelt did in his New Deal.

Our problem is none of this has happened for decades because instead of a bias for action, we have such a bias for inaction that anyone moving fast feels like an unsettling revolution.

WHAT THIS HAS TO DO WITH DOGE

I won’t pretend DOGE is going about changing government the way I would have done it. I wouldn’t have appointed a businessman with little government knowledge to empower a group of Silicon Valley kids to go ripping though the federal government without supervision. It’s clearly going to create a ton of unnecessary mistakes that are going to take effort to unwind, and inevitably court the temptation to highhandedly abuse power to punish and hinder enemies. There will be a lot of babies getting chucked out with bathwater. I also expect the courts will end up reversing some of it, putting further strain on our republic.

However, I also won’t pretend this is so far off from what the New Deal did, and we all celebrate that. FDR empowered a group of outsiders, his Brain Trust, with unprecedented power to go ripping through government too. They made many very stupid mistakes. They often committed political malpractice, and even triggered a major Constitutional crisis. We forget about this because they also restored the faith of angry Americans in government, fixed outdated and broken systems, and gave us Social Security.

I wish our choice wasn’t between bad process and no process, china-shop bull or nothing. Yet here we are. My question is why nobody in Washington has done anything like this a better way until now? Why did it take a billionaire outsider to do it? It’s been decades of stagnation, and nobody has moved. Maybe this is what gets people to start to move?

Government involves more irreversible decisions than most enterprises. It can break people’s lives. Taking away someone’s funding can leave them hungry, while the wrong regulation can inject toxic chemicals into our water that make kids sick. (This is why I’m more wary of the administration’s foreign policy moves, which can’t be undone, or firing prosecutors for doing their jobs, which can destabilize checks and balances). For most things, however, there’s room to experiment, try things, backtrack, and fix mistakes.

I fear part of the reason DOGE is freaking people out isn’t because of what it’s doing, but because it’s moving fast and doing anything at all. If you’re someone for whom the system is working, you probably don’t want things to change. When you’ve spent a decade climbing a ladder, you don’t want someone to knock it down when you’re halfway to the top. I further fear these are the same people who could have, and should have, done their better version of this process at any time over the last two decades, but didn’t.

If I were a Democratic Party leader, I would take DOGE not as an assault but a rebuke. Why didn’t Democrats do a version of DOGE when they had the chance? Why did it take a total outsider to Washington like Musk to shake things up? I’m hopeful this might be a catalyst to inject a bias for action throughout government.

In fact, I want to see more and better DOGEs over the coming years—a liberal DOGE, a centrist DOGE, even a progressive DOGE. Let’s prevent irreversible mistakes. When we screw up, reverse course. However, for heaven’s sake do something. It’s better to make mistakes and fix them than to never fix the problems at all.

What do you think about an action bias in government? Join the conversation in the comments.