The thing about a chainsaw is that it’s really great for some tasks — say, chopping up a tree — and really bad for others — say, performing surgery. We don’t “support” or “oppose” chainsaws, we try to ensure that they are used appropriately. As Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency wreak havoc across the federal government, polarising everyone into “pro” and “anti” camps, we are mostly failing to draw these necessary distinctions between useful and harmful applications. Yet The Wall Street Journal’s report on Musk’s struggle to find and trim waste is instructive.
The Journal dives deep alongside that great white whale of government “waste, fraud, and abuse” known as “improper payments”. People with no experience in public finance are often appalled to learn the federal government makes more than $100 billion in improper payments each year. Some believe they have come across some extraordinary, untapped opportunity. The payments are improper, after all. If we stopped making them, look how much we would save.
But improper payments don’t persist because no one has thought to stop them. They persist — despite waves of legislation to document and reduce them, and concerted efforts to recover as much as possible after the fact — because a federal government that spends more than $6 trillion annually, often through programmes that require self-reporting of eligibility or run through partnerships with state agencies and private providers, is sometimes going to make payments that it shouldn’t. Reducing them is hard and comes with costs — fewer improper payments, for instance, often means more inadvertent refusals of proper payment. You know who is really good at avoiding improper payments? Your health-insurance company.
A DOGE dedicated to the hard work of making government more efficient could make headway on this problem. But it would take time and effort, the development of expertise, and collaboration with a whole host of parties with interests of their own. (It might also help if Team Trump hadn’t just fired the inspectors general of most of the agencies where the payments occur.) Likewise, enormous opportunities do exist to reduce federal headcount. A DOGE focused on reducing headcount could do that. But doing it in a way that makes the government more efficient would require knowing what work does need to be done in various agencies, who is doing what, and who is or isn’t doing it well.
Instead, DOGE is haphazardly cutting expenditures without even knowing what they are. My favourite example is cancelling the legal research tool used by the Securities and Exchange Commission, seemingly because it is labelled similarly to a newswire service. Suffice to say, that won’t make the SEC more efficient. As for actual savings, those aren’t materialising. DOGE attempted to post a rundown of $16 billion in savings achieved, but the largest item on the list, an $8 billion contract, turned out to be an $8 million contract that cost roughly $1 million per year.
To reduce headcount, DOGE is firing just about anyone with a “provisional” status — typically newer hires who are thus easiest to fire — which is the opposite of an efficient approach. This will reportedly include most staff hired with expertise in artificial intelligence and those working to rebuild domestic semiconductor-manufacturing capacity. The White House just announced it is cancelling the Presidential Management Fellows Program, which is specifically designed as a pipeline for the kind of high-quality talent that a more efficient government should want to attract.
One peculiar line of argument holds that all this should be celebrated for its disruptive effect, perhaps because it helps to reassert control over the bureaucracy, shoves opponents off balance, puts bad actors on notice, and so on. But none of that is in evidence. If anything, the frequent missteps have weakened political support, armed opponents with ammunition, and reduced the likelihood of durable progress. That so many actions have been reversed, employees rehired, and estimates restated further suggests sloppiness, rather than a plan. And the closer the process gets to more sensitive and popular functions of the government, the greater the risk of a more catastrophic backfire.
I think something much simpler is probably going on, which is a fundamental failure to distinguish between easy problems and hard ones. Some challenges are the straightforward result of policy choices. If you want a different result, just make a different choice. Let’s say the federal government is spending enormous amounts on foreign aid and channelling much of it to progressive NGOs, and you want to cancel all that. You can, in fact, do it. There will be disruption and controversy, but if you’re willing to stomach all that, there’s an “easy button” that you can press. Let’s say agencies are putting employees through DEI trainings, and you want them to stop. Press the button.
Let’s even say millions of illegal immigrants are pouring over the border because the previous administration has made it national policy to welcome them in. Yes, the media and the experts will insist that this is an intractable and multifaceted problem driven by forces like climate change. But you really can just change the policy. And if it was the policy creating the problem, changing it will indeed deliver border security overnight. Many people will look extremely foolish. You will have a major victory to savour.
Identifying such situations, and pushing the button with gusto, has been one of the keys to President Trump’s broad appeal. Where most political figures worry about the downsides and the blowback and lean toward half measures and gradual phase-downs and compromises, Trump relishes tuning out all that. You don’t have to agree with his objectives. You don’t have to agree with the cost-benefit analysis that leads him to choose the unflinching approach. But you do have to concede the internal coherence — there is a plan, and it is accomplishing what he wants it to accomplish. Some of DOGE’s work falls clearly within this framework, and Trump’s supporters are understandably delighted.
But other parts don’t. Many of the most intractable problems in government are hard problems. They aren’t just a matter of choosing policy, but depend upon reforming process or grappling with painful tradeoffs. We don’t have improper payments because some president issued an executive order encouraging them. We have them despite everyone’s desire to end them. We have an enormous budget deficit because we have committed to providing generous health and retirement benefits to hundreds of millions of Americans but not to raising the tax revenue necessary to cover the cost, and changing either side of that equation is politically unpopular.
The mistake that some in the administration seem to be making, with DOGE a prime example, is to assume that all problems are easy problems, solvable by edict, or by just doing the opposite of what has been done before. Insofar as the constraints are technical, the strategy is likely to make things worse. Insofar as there are tradeoffs, disregarding them is going to waste enormous amounts of political capital.
This is why most administrations proceed down parallel tracks: a Day One agenda of policy changes that can be achieved by executive order, and a “first 100 days” agenda that anticipates time for appointees to be confirmed, plans to be created and vetted, and balls to start rolling. Compounding excess faith in the easy button, the many false starts and stalled initiatives of the first Trump term have further heightened the pressure to make everything a Day One project, and the result has been both rapid positive progress in the areas amenable to it and a widening morass elsewhere. (One notable exception is the Department of Defense, where Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed the Pentagon to identify 8% in achievable savings over each of the next five years that could be reallocated toward new defence priorities. That’s how strategic budgeting and improved efficiency is supposed to look.)
The good news is that Trump has historically shown himself highly attuned to what is politically achievable and what is politically unwise, and he seems unlikely to allow DOGE to run wild beyond the point of diminishing returns. Musk has shown no such judgement. Which likely puts an expiration date on his time in the president’s favour.
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This essay was adapted from the author’s Understanding America Substack.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
