Not every problem calls for a chainsaw. Credit: Getty
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.
***
This essay was adapted from the author’s Understanding America Substack.
Oren Cass is chief economist for American Compass and a contributing editor of the Financial Times.
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SubscribeThis article is fine. It’s an enormous task because no Leviathan this complex has ever existed. I would have liked to see a sober analysis of specific risks the author sees but he stayed very general.
When Musk first took over Twitter/X there were months of hitches which delighted his haters. I would expect the same here. The resentment and criticism is already built into expectations. Milei is dealing with blowback and so will anybody trying to overhaul a dysfunctional State apparatus.
I really feel like you are relying massively on a strawman argument to even write this article. I haven’t heard anyone saying that all the problems are easy problems as you claim, far from that. What I have heard is Trump, Musk, and DOGE claiming that much of the waste is so egregious, corrupt, or indefensible as to make a substantial difference to the US budget if it’s cut.
Trump has to obvious problems with the executive branch of Government: it’s too big and too inefficient. Musk has a decent track record of making massive cost cutting changes (from Space X to Twitter) and I am hopeful he will be able to make a substantial difference. Time will tell. But he is not in there to nickel and dime, or to halve the pencil budget for the IRS, he’s in there to see how many agencies, departments and NGOs can be cut completely. If they can cut enough waste to reduce the deficit without increasing taxes or cutting ACTUAL vital government services (of which there are very few in my opinion) then I would consider it a massive political and economic win for Trump and America.
Can you give me an example of any waste that DOGE has identified that “is so egregious, corrupt, or indefensible as to make a substantial difference to the US budget if it’s cut”? I have heard that they have found a lot of it, but I’m not seeing any.
Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row but says progress made
Try the above. Whether Musk has the balls to take on the Pentagon remains to be seen. Doing so is likely to get him murdered. They are the sort of criminals that you like to defend.
All of you seem to forget Tusk is not in the business of biting his own hand. They might mumble about looking at the military’s swollen budget but everyone of these billionaires has massive contracts with the military they do not want evaluated
It’s always a mistake to credit people whose politics you don’t like with mercenary motives. What makes Musk both dangerous and effective is the simple fact that he doesn’t give a f*ck about money.
Do you read the news? Dems are trying to hinder all Musk is starting, but ultimately they will lose. It might take bit longer but they can’t stop it.
You’re ignoring the voters and the upcoming mid-term elections.
Musk promised £2trillion Federal saving in first year during election campaign. As you can immediately guess nothing about ‘hard’ choices. He subsequently reduced that to £1trillion after the election. He’d be lucky to get that in total after 4yrs let alone annually. Yet folks fell for it. You evidently still do.
In some regards it’s painful but helpful he’s only got a chainsaw. Means he’s naffing off his own supporters at a quicker pace.
Spot on with pointing out the straw man argument!
You write “…ACTUAL vital government services (of which there are very few in my opinion)…
But your ‘opinion’ is just that. The reality is that the government has many vital functions. Most things, even the clothes you wear, are more complicated than a cursory glance might suggest.
The reality is that DOGE has already succeeded by any conceivable measure.
To put it mildly: What is conceivable is not exactly synonymous with what one partial observer—you, me, or anyone else—is able to conceive, or believe.
DOGE will fail, or at least fall far short of its bold savings claims, mostly because it has no power to fundamentally change the system that put the U.S. in this debt mess in the first place. As long as members of Congress protect themselves from term limits, the spending will continue unabated. They all grab money for their states to keep their constituents happy and to keep their campaign coffers full. They give voters all the government they seemingly want, without asking those voters to pay the full price of it. They do all this in order to stay in power, often for decades. If we cut the size of the federal government in half by next week, it would only cause a slight stall in our upcoming debt crisis. And economic growth will never be enough to offset the enormous spending binge by Congress the past couple decades.
Part of the reasaon DOGE went after USAID is that it funds a lot of anti-Republican and anti-conservative (and, arguably, anti-American) NGOs. Good riddance! Any genuine charitible work it did can be replicated by private charities, should private individuals feel the cause is worth parting their hard-won dollars for.
Your title points to your problem. DOGE has already succeeded in shining a spotlight on the issues. Many would have no idea how bad it is were it not for that. Now pressure for change can increase.
If one followed your advice, it would take decades to solve the problems. We’re not interested in waiting anymore. That’s the old failed way. I’d rather them fire people we have to hire back than piddle around like business as usual.
Some illumination and some cuts both needed and warranted. But what it’s also showing is it’s not as straight-forward as the WWF boys claimed and involves key political decisions and probably formal law changes too. A good thing as folks are infantilised by thinking simple solutions to complex problems exist. Going through the curve of grasping that crucially important.
Politicians use slogans that fit into sound bites which simplify complexities, and Trump is certainly a master at this. Most people know that reality is not so simple. The problem, however, has been going on too long and there are too many entrenched interests to pick around the edges. Most Americans do fine when government stays out of the way. The safety net is there for the rest. There’s plenty of cutting that needs to be done, whether through executive action alone or congressional.
You seem to assume Trump understands the complexity in the first place, and then from that position simplifies for the purpose of good comms. I think that SR is a quite a fallacy and I’d doubt in truth you even think he does.
A Chainsaw is though good for chopping up wood and we all tend to enjoy the spectacle, the noise, even the smell of diesel. It’s pretty useless though when it comes to putting bits of wood back together. That takes a craftsman.
Let’s see how much this really saves and watch for the marketing to be well ahead of the actual.
What Musk and Trump are doing is following a methodology you see quite often in business. Cut everything and then re-instate those things that you subsequently find out you should not have cut. It’s actually often a less wasteful and much quicker process than the alternatives.
Musk is better at this sort of thing than anyone since Henry Ford – including Jack Welch, and he was no slouch. Meanwhile your credentials for pontificating on the topic are …?
Firing all the staff involved in looking after your Nuclear stockpiles and then racing to reinstate them once you’ve grasped what you’ve done I would contend a little wasteful at best.
Fine in some ways Musk uses that approach with his own Businesses. He absorbs the risk. V different here.
Musk can be forgiven anything having cancelled Rory Stewart’s gravy train. Stewart, who took a salary of £314k pa from a charity largely financed by US taxpayers, without actually doing anything much for it, is the perfect embodiment of the parasitism that you defend so enthusiastically but which, in reality, is destroying our society and economy.
A good thing as folks are infantilised by thinking simple solutions to complex problems exist.
Actually, simple solutions often do exist. For example: if you don’t want to bring down half a century of grief on your own countrymen, don’t invade Iraq for reasons purely of personal ambition and vanity. Most of us could see that quite clearly in 2003. Not so your hero.
Every necessary corporate restructure creates gaps that later need to be re-filled. Fortunately the “good people” that accidentally get culled will typically find their way back into similar – and often better – jobs elsewhere. Sometimes you have to just “rip the plaster off”.
As has been happening in NZ, the government recently slashed lots of public sector jobs in the aim of cost cutting. However in a surprise to absolutely nobody, they then spent the entirety of the money saved plus lots more on private contractors to carry out the work that was previously done in house.
Cost cutting and reform are good things when done properly, simply slashing budgets with no forethought as to which services are actually needed is idiotic
Of course.
It won’t take decades but it will take at least one decade if it is done properly, which means removing Musk from the process at this point.
“That so many actions have been reversed, employees rehired, and estimates restated further suggests sloppiness, rather than a plan.”
I think people have grown cynical of plans – because nothing ever happens. Ideally, you want to cut only the fat. If you act fast and cut some bone, there’s nothing stopping you from reversing direction. Forever plans achieve nothing.
Once you close an agency like USAID or the CFPB it’s not possible to just bring it back. It’s easy to destroy, but hard to build.
Critical Systems Testing (CST) is a structured process used to identify which components of a complex system are truly essential for overall functionality. The process typically involves removing, disabling, or shutting down various subsystems or components to observe the impact on the entire system. The goal is to determine which elements are non-critical (redundant or unnecessary) and which are indispensable.
Applied to the entire US federal government.
Really? I thought critical system testing was to make sure that a system was reliable and worked correctly on all data. That does not require detailed knowledge of how a system works. You can just put in a wide range of inputs and verify that the output is correct. You can treat the system as a black box.
Optimization is a completely different process. Naive trial and error doesn’t work. You need to have a deep understanding of the system before you can optimize it. There is no way to optimize a black box system. Optimization is very different from testing.
I didn’t see “naive” mentioned as a component of the approach. Likewise, the relationship between optimisation and testing is irrelevant. All changes need to tested (appropriately) and some can only be tested “in the field”.
Naive trial and error is a problem-solving technique where a person or system attempts different solutions without any systematic approach or prior knowledge until a workable solution is found. It doesn’t work with complex systems, as there are too many things to try and it’s too hard to see what effect you cause with any change.
Even if true that doesn’t apply in this case.
That process only works if you keep the disabled components in working order, ready to be reinstated if necessary.
It also tends to miss corner cases (which you might not encounter during a short phase of observation) and thus vastly undervalues resilience in favour of efficiency.
This is something many people miss in this debate: resilience and efficiency are opposing goals. And while private enterprise favours the latter (not least because limited liability let’s you get away with it), government leans towards the former, with good reason.
How ridiculously pessimistic! “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and so far Mr Musk has only had 35. I have every confidence that Mr Musk will lance this festering boil, and his policy of ‘slash and burn’ will be a resounding success.
To make a topical historical analogy, in the spring of 1536 Thomas Cromwell set out to dismantle the English Monastic Church. This parasitical behemoth consisted of some 860c Abbeys, Priories, Friaries and Nunneries and owned about 5 million acres* of England. By the 23rd March 1540** ALL had gone, and with them Medieval England. Cromwell’s genius was to award generous pensions to those who were compliant. For those few who insisted on offering resistance, evisceration was used.
Mr Musk would do well study Cromwell, and when he succeeds we should ask for his help here, to dismantle our plethora of Quangos etc.
*Only the best acres, you don’t give God rubbish.
**The fall of the last Abbey, Waltham.
Mining history for your favorite examples of ruthlessness again? His martyred contemporary Sir Thomas More was a far better man than Cromwell, or any other vicious historical figure most people justly deride. Perhaps you can next announce that you have “every confidence” in Trump and Putin, then do us the favor of saying why.
Yeah and look at where you godless globohomo geniuses are now.
But I do agree DOGE needs more time; this article is premature ejaculation.
Remember when Javier Milei said about his “chainsaw” approach on economy and governance? He said that while poverty increased in the short-term because of his approach, people should brace and prepare for the pain so that Argentina will no longer suffer through eternal economic crisis that have riddled the country before. The situation of the US and Musk right now is basically the same. Even some developing countries may welcome this approach right now because that means less intervention from the US “empire”.
Getting off addictive drugs or even sugar in your diet will cause short term discomfort. Like exercise, studying, or anything one undertakes to improve ones future outlook
Sorry Owen Cass. You don’t get it.
Part of the plan is to create chaos in the bureaucracy so that it is off balance and unable to push back against the president. In the past, no president has been able to “win” against the bureaucrats. I think that was the point of the Brit TV show “Yes, Minister.”
Of course the big problems are government pensions, government health care, government welfare, and government education. But it will take a generation or two to “march through the institutions” and change minds about that.
And, in the meantime, we’ve realised how USAID isn’t what it was, helping the the poor and needy: those both poor and needy, not the poor, and the needy.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clarifies that he received only $76 billion in aid from the United States, not $177 billion
https://www.yahoo.com/news/zelenskyy-ukraine-received-us-76-184337849.html
So, where did the rest go?
And it’s not only Ukraine:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/more-usaid-fraud-billions-us-tax-dollars-are-missing-haiti-relief-projects?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Excellent essay. Very perceptive.
This reminds me of years ago when I got a coveted summer job during college working on what was then cutting edge digital signal processing. We were trying to clean up some old Enrico Caruso recordings to isolate his pure voice, digitally taking out a tinny orchestra and compensating for the resonance of the cone he sang into as a microphone of sorts.
That required some Fast Fourier Transform code and other processing that the computer ran over and over again. Computer time was expensive then so we wanted to optimize the code. That was my first job.
Starting out I thought that would be pretty easy. I scrounged for computer time and started testing, taking out code here and there that looked like it wasn’t particularly important. A few days of doing that seemed to bear fruit, until I took the code to my boss and he tried it on a different dataset and it blew up. Get serious, he said.
So I did. Instead of trial and error I dug into the code and made sure I knew what it all did. I looked for ways to speed up the algorithm. I looked for ways to optimize the machine code the compiler produced. And I found nothing. There was no waste I could find.
So I went sheepishly to my boss and told him that I couldn’t find any code to cut. He said, that’s okay. I knew you wouldn’t. We have everybody start out doing that and it would take a genius to find anything to take out now. But at least now you know you aren’t a genius and you know what kind of coding we are doing so you can do some work that will help.
Too bad Elon Musk wasn’t taught that lesson. He comes in wielding a chainsaw (like Chainsaw Al Dunlap) and thinks he is being constructive instead of destructive. How arrogant. He’s a genius but he’s not using that genius. And we all suffer for it.
Are you suggesting that the federal government is as heavily optimised as that codebase?
Efficiency aside, the federal government does lots of things it shouldn’t do at all. Much of what it does is actively harmful.
A chainsaw isn’t the right tool for pruning bonsai trees, but it’s a good option for clearing dense, impenetrable, thorny woodland.
If the chainsaw doesn’t work, it’ll have to be fire.
What a stupid and future exercise. That probably set you on a career path leading to mediocrity.
Imagine that you just bought Microsoft and you want to cut down the bloated pile of 70 million lines of code that is Windows 11. Surely it would be easy to cut out 10 or 20 million lines of code and no one would notice. In fact, trimming out the fat would make the code run faster and take up less space.
So you just send a couple of engineering interns to each group in Microsoft to start cutting code. The engineers get access to the source code and take a quick look at it and start deleting it and laying off the programmers that worked on the code. They trumpet all the progress they make.
Do you think that’s going to work out?
Ridiculous analogy. A far more appropriate one is “what if you bought a social media company and laid of 75% of its employees. Do you think that’s going to work out?”
Well, it looks like it’s worked out pretty damned well so FAR, if the ongoing (and increasing) success of X is any metric.
The US Department of Defence has failed to audit its finances for the last 7 years and only plans to do so in 2028.This is theft on an enormous scale. The Federal budget deficit exists to feed a corrupt and criminal political class and a bureaucracy that largely votes Democrat. Had that political class been honest, the Federal budget would be close to balance. That political class would have taxed itself and its donors sufficiently to pay for essential programmes. Sometimes you have to see the bigger picture.
As for Musk, the concern is that he will use his power to further his own business interests. There should be no concern that he lacks an eye for detail. His engineering achievements prove that.
Good article with arguably the key line being ‘…fundamental failure to distinguish between easy problems and hard ones’.
You see this all the time. The WWF style of Trump and his coterie means they can’t pause and distinguish – their base can’t do nuance and they’ve not prepared their base for anything complicated. ‘Want another smack-down? well here you go’. Groan.
You see it in the UK too, albeit in general we don’t go in for the WWF style. Nonetheless large tracts of Right and the Far Left can’t engage with hard problems. That’s why they seek a scapegoat. Easier for their audience to absorb and folks unfortunately have a tendency to trust those who tell them what they want to hear.
One upside of Trump is that we are beginning to see the consequences of electing a childish demi-god who’s sprayed contradictory promises everywhere. Alot of sunk-cost in the Putin poodle of course so the scales will never be removed from some eyes, but it doesn’t take everyone to realise what’s happened. Even MAGA waking up to realising they’ve been had.
You are not seriously contending that things could possibly have been any better under the Harris creature, or perhaps even the simply appalling Hilary beast are you?
Better to quite a degree CH. But that doesn’t mean I think Harris much use either. Trump sets a unique bar.
You cannot expect to maintain your clearly-hoped-for aura of sophisticated disdain while relying upon such absurdly simplistic tropes and childish rhetoric.
I hope it’s not just an aura JR. And I’d hope a little more that mere disdain.
Reeeeeing “RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!” is most certainly the mark of “nuance” and “engaging in hard problems” known only to exist within our Left o’Center Betters. Indeed.
If you would:
https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html?m=1
Running a large cost cutting and reorganization exercise at say Tesla or Space X is almost certainly going to require very, very different motivations and incentives to running a cost cutting and reorganization exercise at say the DVLA.
One organization likely has a high percentage of employees who have been educated to a very higher level and undergone an extremely rigorous selection process to get into the organization. They are also paid well. The other organization has little or none of these. Can you guess which is which?
Yeah, great spot that: tree cutting V surgery. Problem with all these smug pieces is their failure to see reality. They offer few solutions only criticism. Trump/USA today is rejecting the decades of progressive neo nonsense, but the brainwashed masses and their writhing defeated leaders can no longer see having believed their own propaganda for so long – the majority rule. Freeloaders are unwelcome. Victim culture is dead, subversives and minorities playbooks are pulped. Could go on and on but like most of these blind authors I’d be wasting time. Inversion of truth and culling of societal fabric of family and tradition must be undone if we’re to return to civility….
At least the US purports to look after their own. Our lot sell us out to China and Islam.
Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has made the study of the federal budget her whole career. Her recent tweet thread on X included this:
“I’ve spent decades studying the federal budget. I know that $7 trillion(!) behemoth inside and out – where the money really goes, and where the savings opportunities lie. So I can also detect [BS]ers who talk tough about trillion-dollar spending cuts without doing their homework.
“It’s the ones who claim most spending goes to undefined “waste,” federal salaries, immigrants, foreigners, Ukraine, or non-working welfare recipients. It’s the ones who claim we can easily balance the budget or cut $1 trillion without specifying exactly what line-items to cut. Or that we can return to 2019 spending levels for each program, which means a 20% inflationary cut, defaulting on the federal debt, and kicking off every senior who has since retired into Social Security and Medicare.
“It’s all hot air and empty bluster. Tough talk without following through on anything substantive. Just wait until you see the final deficit numbers in October.”
Does Jessica know where that missing $100B of Ukraine funding went? Perhaps her decades of study that failed to identify the waste show she’s part of the problem.
There’s no missing $100 billion in Ukraine funding.
Speaking of hot air and bluster, what has she done to prove her claim of understanding govt bloat. X tweets don’t count.
I am not a fan of Jessica Riedl (or Brian, if you prefer) and won’t defend her (or his) qualifications. I just offer the quote as it says well what I have been trying to say, but poorly.
I do agree that it’s childish and simplistic to assume that the existence of waste in government activity is the result of a deliberate desire by bureaucrats to waste money, or even that it results from deliberate fecklessness or apathy.
But that doesn’t mean that governments are not still institutionally culpable for inefficiency and waste. There will be a lot of low-hanging fruit for DOGE to pick in the form of entire policy programs that should never have been a viable use of tax money and those can be cut, as the article says.
But the bigger savings, where the real money is, will certainly be the bloated, bureaucratic and inefficient government machine itself, which if subject to genuine price signals would have bankrupted itself decades ago. To maintain that it is not possible to introduce more cost discipline into this is to admit, basically, that the state is an ungovernable bloatocracy that will inevitably consume the entire annual budget in pensions and salaries, which is both absurd as a proposition and impossible as an outcome.
Nevertheless, sorting this out is fiendishly difficult and cannot be delivered without innovation and the sort of approach that is typically only found in growing businesses. It’s not a bean counting exercise in which every cost is driven down to the lowest it can be: that works only so far. It involves a fundamentally new perspective on what an organisation should be doing and how it should do it. It involves very often upsetting established ways of working that teams are used to, which they believe sincerely cannot be made more efficient, but which in the end can be shown to be obstructions to improvement.
Elon Musk himself is good at this sort of thing, and I assume that many of his people are too. The difficulty he faces is that the American government is not an organisation in fear for its own existence, unlike a company facing a choice between bankruptcy or reform. It will be there next year no matter what happens, and it’s this, I think, that will prevent the ambitious progress hoped for. It’s a pity, because the alternative is the inevitable fiscal crisis that even America will face one day if it doesn’t get deficits under control.
You’ll know the old joke about the CEO who complains that 50% of his advertising spend is wasted … but he doesn’t know which half. So let’s chop out a lot of mysteriously labelled government spending. We’ll soon find out if was really necessary, in which case it can be reinstated.
How can you tell if, for example, cutting all foreign aid was a good thing? It can take years to know the full effects of something like that, and it’s hard to know even then.
And when you find out you made a mistake, you can’t reverse it. Things are easy to destroy but hard to rebuild.
Why is the US government extracting resources from its own citizens – at metaphorical gunpoint – and giving them to foreigners? (when not using those same resources to overthrow or destabilise foreign governments).
Any genuine charitable function that USAID performs can be done by private charities.
Since the creation of the Federal board of Education, every metric by which one can measure the outcomes of US’ state education has declined.
Government should only be involved in things that only government can do.
The article should be titled “why I desperately hope DOGE fails or at least does not succeed sufficiently so I can claim that it has failed while not looking a completer charlatan”
I suspect that the number of outdoors people in this discussion is minimal, however those of you thinking of visiting Americas vast National Parks and National Forests are in for some gruesome experiences. No one there to make sure the toilets are pumped out or restock the toilet paper. No one there to assure a quiet adventure or verify all the bikers having a rollicking good time have paid their parks pass.
But more seriously, all you morons rooting Tusk on, better bring a shovel and plenty of water to put your fire out because there will be no one following you out to make sure the forest is safe and no one to fight the inevitable fires because DOGE fired them all. What a pathetic disastrous mess.
It’s always the same. Every attempt to even question the catastrophic inefficiency of state-run services is attacked on the basis of the effect it will have on front line services.
Even though in practice it’s almost never the front-line services that are the problem and which aren’t the focus of the people demanding efficiency improvements.
We saw this in the UK under the so-called “austerity” of the Coalition/Tory years (it was nothing of the sort but lefties do love to screech) – budgets were cut by central planners and the savings were left to be found and imposed by the bureaucrats. Well obviously none of them fired themselves, did they? They fired the front line staff, because they could, because sh*t always rolls downhill, and because there’s no consumer backlash when the public sector operates in a way that would put a private sector entity out of business within a week.
Now JR could you turn your line of sight onto Thames Water, a privatised Utility, and give us the benefit of your wisdom? Was it £77b removed in dividends over the period? Any firings recently? Or more bonuses perhaps? Out of Business within a week you say?
Then maybe the Banking sector after the Crash? Who baled them out and still does? Figures vary a bit but c£130b. What caused Austerity? You may just remember it was something to do with Banks. Within a week you say?
Much smaller but still significant – c£1-2b in fraudulent Covid loans? It’s not public sector employees applying for those was it.
Therefore, and you can see where this was going I suspect, you seem to have a rather large filter on who you might deem the primary charlatans when in fact incompetency and even corruption just as prevalent, if not more so, in the private sector at the tax payer expense.
You really must stop projecting your silly prejudices like this.
The debate here is about saving taxpayers’ money in the context of public sector bloat and inefficiency. Read the article again if you have a problem with this.
If we’re having a debate some other time about how to save shareholders from rapacious and corrupt private-sector managerialists, your views on this might have some relevance.
As it is, your transparent whataboutery doesn’t merit a substantive response.
This guy brings to mind the old Washington Monument ploy used by bureaucrats in the U.S. forever.
Right now, DOGE is just whacking away at the low-hanging fruit. They and everyone else knows that the real cost savings will come from policy changes, which will have to go through Congress. We must make these changes while we have a Republican majority. One example: Why must the FDA re-approve every drug that has already been passed by other countries with standards like our own? Cooperate instead with countries like Germany, UK,and Japan to divvy up the approvals in a one-stop process, and we will save billions at the same time as getting new products to market sooner.
I’ve had the IRS contact me for a $1,500 discrepancy on my return. And you’re saying 100 billion dollars in waste is an acceptable figure?
Everyone loves to gripe about spending; no one wants to do anything about it. And when someone does address it, the Cassandras like this author come out of the closet to tell us why it won’t work. No, it will not be perfect; that is so far from DC’s capability that public expectations will tolerate a mistake or two.
DOGE is pointing out the obvious waste and fraud that any sentient being should be able to notice, which explains the mewling on the left. This portion is to build credibility. Trump has talked of cutting Defense, so there are no sacred cows in his barn. When people see the nonsense associated with USAID, they can only imagine what the Pentagon and Health/Human Services squander.
The argument here presumes a strategy of strengthening the US government. The tactics don’t align. But if the strategy is to weaken, then loot the tactics align brilliantly.
Mr. Cass,
Do you seriously believe what you stated in your article?
DOGE is mining down to the payment system. As the old saying goes, follow the money. Is it perfect, no, but that can be refined as time goes on. And, I imagine it will be.
A payment was made to X, what is the justification of that payment, was the reasoning sound, and were the bucks spent as directed? If not, time to mine down further. An example would be a 1 million grant to a non profit. Mining down only 15% went to the stated cause, the other 85% went to admin costs and subcontractors with their own admin costs. This example is not an outlier, it happens all the time. This needs to be called out as the system is rife with fraud, collusion, payoffs, and money laundering.
I find it hard to believe that folks wouldn’t want that to occur as it is not only good government, but looking after the people’s hard earned tax dollars. This is long overdue and both the Repubs and Dems have stated they wanted to do this, but is was too hard. It isn’t so I would believe there are other reasons for them not mining down.
I am not sure if you are a TDSer, shill, or zealot. Start the conversation if you would like to.
Cass is correct about one thing. So long as government spending trillions of our dollars, improper payments will remain large. DOGE can reduce them but not eliminate them. Hence the great value of the chainsaw in slashing whole departments.
No matter what the problem you will always find people in government or the academy who will say it’s too big to fix, time to move on.
It is really easy to write an article critical of people trying to do something hard especially when someone else has already written one on the same theme very recently.
The only suggestion I could give DOGE with some authority would be: Get rid of the FTC and send all of the FTC staff who work on antitrust casework over to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Basically, strip the FTC’s “rulemaking” processes out of the antitrust enterprise, and let it revert to one entirely organized around court-ordered process.
Relatedly: I would suggest to DOGE to concentrate on programs that maintain administrative, “rulemaking” authority and to put aside agencies that operate out of court-ordered process.
Unfortunately, most agencies operate out of administrative processes. But, having finally whittled away the last of “Chevron deference,” may those same agencies yet become more subject to court-ordered process? May courts no longer be able to dismiss challenges to those agencies by appealing to Chevron deference? Will the volume of challenges start to pick up, thereby restoring some degree judicial review when it comes to administrative agencies?
Meanwhile, can’t anyone articulate why we can’t return federal spending to 2019, pre-COVID hysteria, levels? Basically, what are we getting for spending 24% of GDP on federal outlays as opposed to 20% of GDP on federal outlays?
That extra 4% seems to have funded the bloated NGO Borg-osphere. It’s time to starve the Borg.
The thing about economic pundits is that their worldview provides the framework for their claims. I don’t think American voters are expecting Nirvana, but less waste and corruption in any measure would be welcome.
The gist of this essay is extraordinary: “The federal government spews out trillions of dollars every year, so a few hundred billion misspent here, a few hundred billion misspent there…no big deal!” What planet is this guy living on? Anyone? Anyone?
This is the BEST headline so far, “DOGE will fail.” Exactly correct!
Here in Silicon Valley, FAILURE is the wellspring of innovation. Entrepreneurs embrace and expect failure; ossified bureaucracies and legions of mindless apparatchiks are clinically allergic to any & all failure. Govt bureaucracies inoculate against failure by larding on layer after layer of red tape and moldering bureaucrats. On the contrary, a popular Silicon Valley business aphorism is “learn to fail faster than the competition.”
Failure is not a pejorative or boogeyman but a symphony of progress. DOGE must inculcate the joyful value and practice of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction“—taking deliberate, continuous action to replace status quo practices with technological change and innovation.
For example, the failure-free, $37B [sic] California government high-speed train from Merced to Bakersfield, a scant 164 miles, started 17 years ago, has not laid one mile of track. The program management estimates that “only” $100B more is needed to complete the run by 2033. Meanwhile, Union Pacific and Central Pacific spanned the North American continent in six years, between 1863 and 1869, while facing monumental failures. N.B. Nobody wants to go from Merced to Bakersfield anyway.
Axiom: “DOGE must fail for MAGA to prevail.”
Why do people complain so much about Doge not being perfect? Name one part of the government that is perfect and never makes blunders. Bitching uncontrollably about Doge smacks of selective outrage/hypocrisy/TDS.
Let’s hope so.
I’m so happy that that whole departments are being eliminated. For example, a department of FAA lawyers in charge of dealing with pilots who fly drunk were just fired. Stupid WOKE lawyers who don’t want pilots to have a little fun.
Sure it would be awful if a drunk pilot downs an airplane killing 300 people but Trump, Musk and us super smart independent readers of UnHerd will know it was really illegal immigrants who killed those people.
I love Beer!
How are lawyers the limiting feature in pilots that fly drunk? As a spouse to a pilot, the mechanism which catches them is a pre-flight Breathalyzer. They are terminated with cause on the spot, obviously. An army of lawyers to deal with this situation is hardly required. How common do you think this is? There are many more pressing issues the FAA need to deal with than legions of drink pilots.
Every times I had to effect substantial change at corporate level I came across people like you who advised me it was all too too troubling and difficult and likely to give rise to unexpected negative consequences. I always ignored such advice and never regretted it. Nothing ventured nothing gained.
Write another essay on what government shouldn’t be doing.
And yes the chainsaw is the correct tool for all such.
No, there isn’t. It’s time now for Trump to terminate this stage of DOGE and continue the exercise but in a different way.
What the author writes is generally true. I hope, and it is only a hope, that as Trump’s appointees get into place, DOGE will work with them as an efficiency consultant working inside the agencies, rather than an outsider that can chop but without finesse for lack of inside information and clear avenues of authority.
I suspect that if it doesn’t go that way by late Spring, Trump and Musk may part ways as Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries and other agency heads go to him and make it clear that things have to change..
A lot of the ‘complexity’ here is really just political resistance. Cutting old age payments to recipients who don’t have a birth date (or implausible one) or other crucial information in the file is actually dead simple to do. In the past the media would start screaming about how cruel this was – but the MSM has lost almost any credibility with the people who vote for Trump. Similarly Grump doesn’t care what the NGOs say, and his team of outsiders are not part of the grift themselves.
Lets just do the math based on what Musk did with Twitter. When he bought it there were about 7500 employees. He cut about 80% down to 1500, and then built it back up to something much better, with better potential with it’s current 2800 employees nad improved everything. The US government has about 3 million federal employees. I’m willing to bet that we could do the job with about 1/3 to 1/2 as much.
20% of the people in any organisation do 80% of the work. We can only hope the chainsaw cuts down the right trees.