DOGE is Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem of Government

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are launching a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It shouldn't be looking to improve government efficiency but value.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are launching a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). I would think this would be exactly the kind of thing I’m into. In another life when I worked in the House of Representatives, I was the Budget Committee staffer to a Member serving on the House Budget Committee. This was back when John Kasich was Chairman and we were ambitious about balancing the federal budget. I’m all about making government efficient.

My reaction to this DOGE news, however, was to roll my eyes in saddened exasperation at what I suspect will be another failed endeavor to solve the wrong problem. What few seem to understand about government is our problem isn’t really waste. Our problem is about value. Government too often doesn’t provide value for what we spend because isn’t solving the problems it was put in place to solve.

Until we break out of outdated twentieth-century frameworks and start trying to solve the actual problem, we’re never going to fix what’s wrong.

Many people think government is this behemoth wasting money on big dumb programs like midnight basketball leagues, overstaffed bureaucracies, foreign aid payments to corrupt regimes, and studies of animal flatulence. While such things sometimes do exist, and we should root them out whenever we find them, they’re a drop in the bucket of what government is doing.

Here is some data from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office for federal spending in 2023.

Source¹

The government in 2023 took in $4.4 trillion and it spent $6.1 trillion. Of the $6.1 trillion spent:

• $1.3 trillion went to Social Security payments

• $830 billion went to Medicare payments

• $616 billion went to Medicaid payments

• $805 billion was for defense

• $659 billion was consumed by interest payments on the national debt

Together, just these items totaled around $4.2 trillion, almost the entire amount of revenue the government raised that year.

Each of these items is practically untouchable. No one is cutting Social Security or Medicare payments. No one is cutting Medicaid. Interest payments on the national debt are non-negotiable, since the alternative is a national default and economic catastrophe you can’t imagine. Nobody wants to radically downsize the military. There’s no money in these items to cut, and if there was nobody would cut it.

The remaining budget of $1.9 trillion accounts for everything else the government does. That’s the FBI. That’s food safety and the FDA. That’s the CDC. That’s all the national parks. That’s the cost of managing federal land. That’s the justice system. That’s all the agriculture programs. That’s the Secret Service. That’s the Treasury Department and SEC. Even if you cut everything the federal government does in half, it would be a drop in America’s national budget. Nobody thinks we can cut the entire government by half.

Honestly, there’s just not a lot there that’s possible to cut. That’s why nobody does it.

How about all those wasteful programs you hear about? Politicians like to rail about how they’re going to cut all this government waste, citing examples of outrageous things that sound quite wasteful and dumb. Think tanks regularly publish lists. Journalists write articles. In reality, there’s a lot fewer of those dumb programs than you might think, and most of them are so small they’re a rounding error.

What you have to understand about government is there’s no incentive for politicians to waste money on existing programs. The incentives are all to squeeze existing programs as much as possible to make room for new ones. Politicians don’t get credit for funding things that already exist. They get credit for announcing new things that you might want. That’s why government underfunds everything.

Have you ever been to a government office? It was shabby, right? Our roads and infrastructure aren’t well maintained. Compared to most other nations, our airports look third world. Government workers enjoy comfortable civil service protections because that’s part of hard-to-change civil service laws, but they generally make less than the private sector and don’t get the kinds of perks and expense accounts that are normal for private employers. Government spends just below the bare minimum to sustain everything.

Politicians aren’t rewarded for maintaining things. They certainly don’t get credit for making existing government comfortable. They only get rewarded for new initiatives and projects. Making things work gets them little. What helps them is announcing grand new programs and projects. This is why everything government does—outside of defense, for which real effectiveness matters to the folks in charge—is squeezed to be just sufficiently functional in order to free up money to do other things that benefit politicians.

This is why our roads and bridges and housing projects and bureaucracies all gradually fall part until things get so bad someone can announce a brand-new shiny project to replace them. If programs are truly dumb and don’t have strong constituencies, the incentive is to gut them to free up money politicians can spend on something else.

Back when I worked in Congress, my boss once asked me to go through the budget looking for some offsets to fund another program. Another colleague and I carefully went looking for stupid programs we could cut to reclaim some money. We spent a few days combing through every think tank report and activist group’s list of wasteful programs. Every single thing we found turned out to be either useful, backed by some important interest that believed it was necessary and was prepared to go to war over it, or so tiny it didn’t matter. Everything that sounded dumb to outsiders turned out to be critical to farmers, hotel operators, the manufacturing industry, or so on, to maintain national competitiveness.

I learned if there was any easy money on the table, someone has already targeted it years ago. Everything left is there because it wasn’t possible for someone looking for free money to easily slash.

There’s waste and corruption in government, but it just isn’t found here. It generally happens in one-off appropriation bills and bailouts where vast sums of money are suddenly shifted unaccountably to people or interests important to politicians. It sometimes happens in contracts awarded to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The corruption and waste that really matters isn’t anything stoppable by an efficiency agency.

DOGE therefore sounds like it’s built around the wrong mission. It’s trying to solve the problem people think Washington has, and not the problem it actually has. If it was really possible to just slash a bunch of dumb programs and waste like Jack Welch, someone would have done it years ago. Budget-cutting Republicans have controlled government periodically for years, and Al Gore and moderate Democrats made a big deal out of a similar effort to “Reinvent Government” with a National Performance Review when Bill Clinton was president, and if none of them accomplished anything it should tell you something.

The real problem isn’t wasteful programs we can easily cut. It’s that the government we have provides too little value.

The reason people find government frustrating is because government isn’t good at what it does. It doesn’t spend the resources it has wisely to accomplish the things it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t empower the staff it has to accomplish the things it’s supposed to achieve. It doesn’t spend the resources it has on the right priorities. Instead of doing what’s beneficial for Americans, it’s too often actively obstructive.

Government essentially is public-sector Comcast. It’s a big bureaucracy that’s sort of good enough at doing the things it’s supposed to. It isn’t great at what it does. It certainly isn’t excellent. The reason it isn’t excellent isn’t due to a lack of money. It’s a lack of good management, correct priorities, discipline, and will. This is why few Americans trust government.

What people really want isn’t cutting more of the government they have, but for the government they pay for to actually work. The programs and agencies of government have purposes people want accomplished. They don’t really want to cut the FDA. They want an FDA that works. They want excellent public education that actually educates kids. They want law enforcement that’s competent and fair. They want regulations that make sense and are applied consistently and with reasonable discretion without someone’s misguided ideological crusade attached. They want agriculture programs that help make our food plentiful and safe, and manufacturing programs that help us manufacture things competitively, and economic policy that allows us to innovate and build things.

The fight over the size and role of government was a twentieth-century fight over New Deal and Great Society that ended sometime in the 1990s. That was when America had its big showdown between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich and the American people drew the final line over what they wanted government to do. They decided they didn’t want to expand it with more Great Societies, but they also didn’t want to privative Social Security. They wanted the exact amount of government we have, no more or less. The fight over the scope of government is done, and Americans have since moved on to wanting the government we all agree we’re going to have to actually work.

The fight is now about value and effectiveness. People want the government to accomplish the things it’s supposed to accomplish with competence, excellence, and transparency. They don’t want government that’s lazy or lethargic, or captured by offbeat political ideologies, or in the pocket of powerful constituencies, or not responsive to the people it’s supposed to serve. We don’t need to go down the path of Boeing, cutting costs so the green lines on our spreadsheet go up while doors are falling off the planes. We need to use the resources we’ve allocated wisely to build great roads. We need energized public servants that serve people’s needs. We need agencies that help the nation grow and thrive.

People are tired of government by Comcast. They want government by Apple under Steve Jobs. They want an enterprise of excellence. They want things to work.

Government is perfectly capable of doing this when it wants to. Our military is the best that has ever existed in history because an effective military matters to the people who make decisions. We have an amazing intelligence apparatus. We have a good court system and good financial systems because those things matter to those in power. At the same time, the Department of Veterans Affairs is widely considered a disaster because veterans are a small constituency and, once people finish their service, they no longer have anything left to give. They’re just obligations to meet. Therefore, they don’t matter enough to the people who matter so we half-heart the job of getting them the care we promised.

I genuinely wish DOGE the very best of luck. If it’s possible to make government more efficient, every American should be for it. It’s government’s job to serve you and it should be a wise steward of its resources, using them sparingly and effectively to make your life tangibly better. I just fear yet another effort with which Washington placates outsiders by letting them try to solve the wrong problem instead of directing them to the task that matters.

If I were in charge, I wouldn’t build an efficiency agency. I would create an Office of Government Value, empowered by the White House with full authority over the executive branch. It would review every agency and department to find how it could become more competent at fulfilling its mission. It would root out false priorities getting in the way of national excellence—regulations stopping people from shipping goods to the correct ports, rules getting in the way of building things, long reviews slowing important project or driving up their costs, and lazy incentives and misguided priorities encouraging agencies to think their job is governing people instead of actually helping them. It would make sure the people working there wanted to be there. It would empower them like start-ups empower their teams to accomplish exciting things that matter. I would make government high-status and cool because it was actually effective at improving lives.

That’s an office I would enthusiastically support. I know most Americans would too.

What do you think about the DOGE? Join the conversation in the comments.

1. Source: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727#:~:text=The%20federal%20deficit%20in%202023,percent%20of%20gross%20domestic%20product.