Can This DOGE Hunt?
With Musk and Ramaswamy at the helm, will the Department of Government Efficiency inspire real reform or repeat past missteps?
Many of my readers, I suspect, aren’t exactly thrilled that Donald Trump won the presidential election. But here we are. One of his first initiatives — a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — is worth setting politics aside to examine. If DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, can cut through red tape and tackle inefficiency while preserving essential services, it could do more to restore faith in government than any PR campaign ever could. The real question: Will it focus on practical reforms, or will it chase shiny, headline-grabbing distractions?
DOGE has received a lot of media coverage in this post-election season, some of it truly insightful. Here are some highlights worth your time, offered up in the new TL;dr format we unveiled last week.
Despite the logo that Musk shared on X last week, I think this effort should be taken seriously and supported by those of us who believe in the power of good governance. As one of the authors below put it: “If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he needs to see the government not as an enemy to be dismantled, but as an effective and indeed necessary means of doing so.”
First Things First
Writing in The Dispatch, tech writer Will Rinehart points out the obvious, but it’s the right place to start: The U.S. government is massive.
Over the last fiscal year, which ran from October 2023 to September 2024, the federal government spent $6.75 trillion. 😳 🤯 The largest chunk of this went to Social Security ($1.46 trillion); then health ($912 billion), which includes Medicaid; interest payments on debt ($882 billion); Medicare ($874 billion); national defense ($874 billion); and veterans benefits ($325 billion).
Emoji emphasis mine
So, the good news is it shouldn’t be hard to find places to cut. The bad news? President-elect Trump has taken cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table. That said, there’s still reason for optimism. Looking at the name of non-governmental “agency,” it’s about efficiency and that doesn’t just mean cost-cutting.
Why Fewer Bureaucrats Isn’t the Answer
Writing in Persuasion, political scientist Frances Fukuyama highlights that slashing government jobs could make inefficiencies worse. For example, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversees $1.4 trillion in spending with just 6,400 staff. Cutting these positions wouldn’t eliminate fraud — it would amplify it. Instead, DOGE should target smarter regulation, not mass layoffs.
Here’s a chart that shows how the federal workforce has waxed and waned over the past four presidential administrations.
Deregulating the Regulators
Bureaucracy itself is over-regulated. Fukuyama explains why: “Americans have never trusted the government, and over the decades have piled up a mountain of rules that bureaucrats must follow.” Layers of rules — like the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), which contains hundreds of pages of rules that government procurement officers must follow before they can acquire anything from an F-35 fighter to office furniture — stifle innovation and efficiency. DOGE could take a page from Silicon Valley by giving government workers more discretion and evaluating them based on results, not risk avoidance.
Clearing the Backlog of Existing Ideas
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has over 5,000 open recommendations to improve efficiency, accountability, and transparency across federal agencies, with potential savings of $106–208 billion. Inspectors General have another 14,000 suggestions. Here’s one example Rinehart gave: In 2014, a delayed and over-budget Air Force project to update GPS satellite software revealed a bureaucratic quagmire. A convoluted Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) had been added to a simple protocol, causing system failures. When questioned, the ESB was said to be a “requirement” from Congress. However, tracing its origins revealed it started as a suggestion in 1990s guidance on the Clinger-Cohen Act, which encouraged interoperability. Over time, this suggestion became codified as a rigid requirement through layers of interpretation — from federal enterprise architecture to specific Air Force contracts.
Tackling Fraud
Fraud costs the government up to $521 billion annually, according to the GAO. Small, targeted efforts — like preventing wasteful pandemic payouts — could yield significant savings without gutting programs Americans rely on, Rinehart notes.
Lessons from the Private Sector
Musk and Ramaswamy are no strangers to efficiency, but the public sector isn’t a tech startup. They’ll need to focus on unglamorous reforms, like streamlining permitting, rather than overhauling entitlement programs that are politically untouchable. A great place to start would be the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) for capital projects. Those environmental impact statements required by NEPA “run thousands of pages and take years to write,” Fukuyama writes. When I was working for the City of Round Rock, Texas, we sometimes debated whether taking federal funds for large transportation projects was worth it, given the extended timeframes necessitated by NEPA.
10 Programs in the Crosshairs
Chris Edwards of Cato offers some low-hanging fruit for cuts:
K–12 public school subsidies
Urban transit subsidies
Foreign aid
Green subsidies
Broadband subsidies
Public housing, rental subsidies
Junk food subsidies
Farm subsidies for the wealthy
Community development grants
Reducing Federal Medicaid costs
Yet, these 10 relatively straightforward ideas for cuts would face fierce resistance from Congress, interest groups, and the public. That said, it’s a debate worth having, according a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined, “The Musk-Ramaswamy Project Could Be Trump’s Best Idea.”
None of this will be easy. Lawsuits will proliferate. Mr. Trump’s own cabinet officers will resist cuts in their budget and regulatory sway. The iron triangle of the bureaucracy, interest groups and Congress will conspire to portray every decision as a threat to public health and safety. The press will pile on.
But the attempt to tame and shrink Leviathan is worth the toil, and it’s essential to liberating Americans from the tyranny of the expanding administrative state.
The task ahead is monumental. DOGE must balance bold ideas with practical realities. Having a deadline helps give the initiative urgency, a wonderful thing. It will finish work by July 4, 2026, according to a Trump statement. “A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” he wrote.
Lawsuits, political resistance, and public skepticism will mount, but small wins — streamlined processes, fraud reduction, and a dent in the GAO backlog — could restore faith in government one step at a time.
Why It Matters for Local Government
Local governments often bear the brunt of federal inefficiencies, from permitting delays to regulatory compliance like NEPA. If DOGE succeeds, it could trickle down to empower cities and counties to act more swiftly and effectively. That’s good news.
What are some efficiency initiatives that have worked in your local government shop? Share in the comments or drop me a line.
Gov Overtime: Hits & Misses
A handful of items highlight why I think the public will welcome some needed government reform. These stories give everyone in government a bad name.
When Justice Goes Nuts: The Curious Case of Peanut the Squirrel: In a saga that could only come from the intersection of government regulation and viral fame, Peanut the Squirrel — a social media star and beloved rescue animal — was seized and euthanized by New York officials to test for rabies, sparking national outrage. Peanut’s owner, Mark Longo, claims a bureaucratic tangle turned well-intentioned wildlife laws into a nightmare. What began as licensing suggestions for proper wildlife care snowballed into a hardline enforcement that left Peanut and Fred, a rescued raccoon, dead. While agencies point fingers over who ordered the euthanasia, Longo is left mourning his furry family and questioning whether this was protection — or just plain overkill.
When a Short Walk Turns into the Long Arm of the Law: Apparently, letting your kid walk to the store is now a crime in Georgia. Brittany Patterson, a mother of four, was arrested for “reckless conduct” after her 10-year-old walked a mile to the Dollar General in their rural community. Patterson faces a year in jail. She and her attorney hinted they’re holding off on lawsuits — for now, according to a NewsNation report. Perhaps the real danger here isn’t a mile-long walk but a mile-wide overreach.
It’s Butter Stupidity! So says the lede in the New York Post article on the FDA forcing Costco to pull 79,200 pounds of butter off the shelf because it left “milk” — an “undeclared allergen” — off the ingredient label. It did list cream. Perhaps the real question is whether the FDA is protecting consumers — or just whipping up unnecessary rules.
Read It and Weep: The National Literacy Institute just dropped some brutal stats: the U.S. ranks 36th in literacy, 21% of adults are illiterate, and over half read below a 6th-grade level. Turns out, the real plot twist isn’t in books — it’s that millions of Americans can’t read them.
Chart of the Week
This chart on the media salaries for federal workers is from a Wall Street Journal article on the federal government explained in charts. Given the last item in Gov Hits & Misses, you’d think we’d get better results for our money from the folks at the Department of Education.
Programming note: We’ll be off next week for the Thanksgiving holiday. Enjoy the time with family and friends!
Onward and Upward.