In what could prove to be an exhaustive process, entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have promised to launch their review of federal agency budgets later this month.
The work will form the core of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE, the mission of which is to recommend up to $2 trillion in spending cuts making up a big 30% of the today’s federal budget.
During the recently concluded presidential campaign, Donald Trump said DOGE, which is only serving in the capacity of an outside advisory group, will help to “dismantle the government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
But even before DOGE makes its first recommendation, some concerns have been raised regarding just how much of the budget is really on the table. “Of the $6.1 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal 2023, $3.8 trillion went toward mandatory spending programs such as the big entitlements Social Security and Medicare,” notes the Washington Examiner.
The publication points out that such program spending is essentially on “autopilot outside the standard congressional budgetary process, making it exceedingly difficult to touch.”
Ray Fisman, a professor of economics at Boston University, penned an editorial in the New York Times saying that the government can’t be run like a business because “businesses and governments do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster.”
Fisman references preventing terrorist attacks in the U.S. as an example: it’s an ongoing effort that requires the cooperation of multiple federal agencies and sometimes a duplication of efforts. “It’s an elaborate job that’s measured by an absence of results,” argues Fisman.
Other economists have pointed out that we’ve been here before: In 1982 the Grace Commission, established by then-President Ronald Reagan, was tasked with pinpointing areas of government inefficiency and waste. “We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds,” Reagan said as the group was launched.
Ultimately, while the Grace Commission did make recommendations that would have amounted to a savings of $242 billion in a three-year period. “The problem then was not that the recommendations were bad, but that they were largely ignored,” notes the National Review.
In an editorial just published in the Wall Street Journal, Wisconsin Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher has suggested that to be the most effective DOGE should first look at how Congress spends money.
“If the DOGE men don’t focus on reforming Congress’s budget process, they will struggle to realize their ambition of revolutionizing the federal government and returning America to fiscal sanity,” wrote Gallagher.
Brian Reidl, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, has said that DOGE could prove most effective by recruiting “management consultants, accountants, I.T. experts, and others to design cheaper and more efficient methods of delivering public services.”
January 3, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
