The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) does not exist and will never exist. But we still have to talk about it.
DOGE is more like a meme than an organized project, much like its namesake, the crypto coin with the adorable doggie trademark.
I predict nothing will come of DOGE. One of its braintrusters, the clownish Trump toady Vivek Ramaswamy, suggested that the Feds could save money on Social Security by simply disenrolling every other beneficiary. These are not serious people.
Like Ronald Reagan, they babble about “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which is not easy to either identify or eliminate. One thing I learned while working for the Feds in the 1980s, every nook and cranny of Federal spending has a sponsor somewhere. That’s why it endures. When political power changes, resources do get reallocated, but it has nothing to do with efficiency.
There have been more serious efforts in the past which all came to naught. One was the Grace Commission. Another was the Kerry-Danforth Commission, which I covered when I worked at the Economic Policy Institute. More recently, with the unfortunate connivance of Barack Obama, there was the Simpson-Bowles Commission. Only the third had any actual power, though not much. The reason is simple. Members of Congress like to have power and do not like ceding it to outside parties.
The other factor is the incentives facing those who lead public agencies. I’m so old I remember Bill Bennett, patron of one-armed bandits, who in his better days was tasked by Ronald Reagan to eliminate the Department of Education. Thing was, once he was Secretary of the Department of Education, Bill decided he liked the Department of Education. Of course it remains with us, thirty years on. It does at least two things I know about that are important. One is maintaining statistics on U.S. education. Another is administering Federal grants for education to state and local governments, including school districts.
I can’t vouch for the value of research on education done within the DoE. I confess to knowing nothing about it. If it’s anything like the treacle that comes out of local school boards, we would probably not miss it. But see above. If it’s there, it’s making somebody happy.
There is a real department of government efficiency. I worked in it for a decade. It’s called the Government Accountability Office (GAO). It has thousands of dedicated employees and offices around the country. It employs experts in a wide variety of fields, not just economists but technologists and scientists as well.
GAO’s mission is to find ways for the government to save money. Underlying this is what I would call a fallacious model of public debt that I imagine reflects an accountant mindset. Originally GAO was known as the General Accounting Office, until in 1994 Newt Gingrich pretended to reform it by changing the name and forcing it to release thousands of employees. Most of these turned out to be in custodial and other support functions that GAO duly outsourced. In any case, my impression is that GAO always treated all of its employees well, direct or contracted out, trying to model good management behavior for the rest of the Federal government.
The national government’s finances do not lend itself to a normal accounting mindset. The national government is not like a family or a corporation. It prints its own money, for one thing, so it cannot go bankrupt. Moreover, the national government is perpetual, for all practical purposes, and it has the power to tax the largest economy in the world. Those attributes afford it the power to borrow extraordinary amounts of money, albeit with limits, indefinitely at very low interest rates.
The other flaw in GAO methodology is the emphasis on spending reduction. A truer approach to efficiency would not neglect ways to increase spending for net increases in the general welfare. The incentives facing analysts are to find ways to cut spending. They can even be rewarded monetarily for findings along such lines. I worked on a project myself that entailed changes in the Medicaid formula that would have saved gigantic gobs of money, but our team got nothing for it. It was too good!
In any case, for decades GAO has been doing what DOGE thinks it’s going to do. It does this by issuing reports. When I began there in 2007 I noted the neutral tenor of the reports’ headlines. If a report had the word “challenges,” the cognoscenti would know that somewhere the shit had hit the fan.
I didn’t immediately realize that the premium was in the contents, the information. GAO is not tasked to do politics. That’s up to our elected representatives, God bless them. GAO, a formally independent agency, is really a tool of the Congress. Its investigations are chosen mostly at the request of Members of Congress. That’s why the DOGgies are unlikely to break it. GAO is very good at maintaining good relations with both parties in Congress. It has just one political appointee, the Comptroller General, who has a fifteen year term and is subject to Senate approval. The current CG’s term is not up until the end of 2025.
Every sentence in every GAO report — I am not exaggerating — is subjected to external fact-checking and review. The reports are bullet-proof and larded with equivocation. Everything is “maybe” and “might.” All the sources are external authorities. Still, the dope is there for anyone who wants it. On top of the reporting is an armor of internal regulations and procedures. I pity the fool who tries to penetrate it.
I was still there in 2016 when Trump was elected. Between the election and New Year’s, by dramatic coincidence management issued a memo without extraneous comment to employees reminding them of the Impoundment Act. This law emphasizes the power to keep spending decisions under the purview of the U.S. Congress. As noted above, people like to keep the power they have. If the new Administration starts monkeying around, I expect GAO will be on the case in its own passive-aggressive fashion.