For it to be more than a gimmick, its champions need to resolve its purpose, its form, and its disposition toward government.
For it to be more than a gimmick, its champions need to resolve its purpose, its form, and its disposition toward government.
T he Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has drawn lots of loose talk in this transition period before Donald Trump’s second presidency. The concept has the classic markers of a Trump-era brainstorm: Not quite real and not quite not, it was born when a noncommittal remark by Trump drew a half-serious tweet from Elon Musk. Despite its name, it doesn’t look likely to be any kind of department, but it might be a committee that proposes reforms of government.
It could easily turn out to be a big waste of everyone’s time. That’s usually how reform commissions go. But Musk is no slouch. And the idea has drawn the cooperation of an array of tech-sector and entrepreneurial talent, starting with one-time presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is leading the effort with Musk.
There is surely a need for some new thinking about how to combat inefficiency in government. Smart, creative people looking for such ideas sometimes really do find them. And congressional Republicans as well as the incoming administration have gone out of their way to insist they would be receptive.
So maybe the DOGE could have some potential. But to generate more than memes and slogans, it will need to quickly nail down several key particulars about its goals, its structure, and its approach. All of those remain vague for the moment, and getting them right at the outset is vital.
To What End?
For all the talk about the DOGE, its basic ambition is still pretty murky. The arguments for its work, and the promises made on its behalf, have so far been a hodgepodge of libertarian bromides. Above all, its champions seem to have in mind dramatically reducing federal spending, sharply curtailing the federal workforce, and fundamentally reforming federal regulatory policy.
Only the last of these would be worth the DOGE’s time and attention. The notion that a committee of billionaire tech executives with no political experience is going to massively reduce federal spending by focusing on waste is just the kind of banal delusion that causes Washingtonians to roll their eyes at the whole idea of Musk and Ramaswamy’s endeavor. It’s an ambition that mistakes both the nature and the sources of the federal fiscal challenge.
That challenge is fundamentally about entitlement spending, and especially federal benefits to older Americans. All discretionary spending combined — all the money that Congress argues about in its annual spending debates, and all the waste and excess that ensue — has actually declined as a share of our economy over the past half century. But entitlement spending has ballooned. And that pattern is expected to continue.
President-Elect Trump has said that entitlement reform is not on his agenda, and that he opposes any meaningful changes to the benefits provided to older Americans. Trimming at the margins isn’t nothing, and every little bit can help reduce the deficit, but marginal discretionary cuts would soon be swallowed up by growing entitlement spending and could make no serious difference that endures. If the DOGE can’t touch entitlements, it should not be promising serious spending reform, because it cannot deliver any.
And in any case, the sorts of ideas that such a commission might come up with really aren’t what is missing on the spending front. With respect to both entitlements and discretionary spending, good proposals abound in the think tank world, and even in government itself. The Congressional Budget Office regularly publishes a collection of detailed proposals for aggressive spending reductions. What’s missing is the political will.
Spending commissions that have succeeded or at least stood a chance of making a difference in the past have been directed to that lack of will — they have tended to be congressionally chartered, designed to facilitate a negotiated agreement among key factions rather than to surface new ideas, and empowered to make proposals that Congress would be required to vote on.
None of that applies to the DOGE. Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are not exceptions to today’s absence of political will for meaningful entitlement reform but rather examples of how far it reaches. And the DOGE can’t change that, so it should not be promising what it plainly can’t deliver.
Federal employment rolls aren’t the right target either. The federal government actually has about as many employees today as it did half a century ago, even though the government’s reach and scope (not to mention our population and economy) have grown enormously since then.
That’s in part because there are many more federal contractors than there used to be. The DOGE’s champions have suggested they might seek some contracting reforms, and there is room for improvement on that front — even if Elon Musk, whose companies have made tens of billions of dollars through federal contracts in the past two decades, might not be the ideal agent of change. But contracting reform, like civil service reform, is hardly a path to transformative savings and dramatic improvements in government efficiency. That’s just not where the heart of the problem lies. Complaining about federal workers makes for good tweets, but not for significant substantive change.
A more plausible way to direct the DOGE’s ambition is to aim at the inefficiency our government causes, at least as much as that which it embodies. And this would suggest focusing on federal regulation. The scope of such regulation has grown sharply over recent decades — in ways that neither discretionary spending nor federal employment have. The burdens those rules have imposed on the economy have also grown far heavier. Regulatory action is both a domain of slow and inefficient government action and a source of costly inefficiency in the private sector — as rulemaking stretches over years of procedural complexity and creates immense compliance costs and uncertainty for regulated businesses.
And these two problems are connected in a way that the DOGE’s champions should notice. The efficiency-crushing substance of federal regulation has much to do with its radically inefficient forms. Durable changes on this front would have to extend beyond undoing particularly pernicious rules (or ones whose victims are savvy enough on social media to get the attention of the DOGE’s leaders). It is surely worthwhile to highlight some egregious regulatory actions, but it is far more important to shed light on regulatory processes and procedures that ought to be reformed.
This is also how some of the DOGE’s tech industry know-how could be put to use. Technological innovation in some key sectors (from pharmaceuticals to energy and beyond), and even the emergence of new industries (such as artificial intelligence), require regulators to use new tools in new ways to avoid imposing needless burdens on the economy. The DOGE could help both by proposing some specific instances in which regulatory burdens could be lightened and by proposing new approaches to regulatory monitoring and rulemaking.
The basic procedures that govern and assess federal regulation have not been modernized in many decades, and our expectations of regulatory agencies are now often poorly aligned with their formal missions. Changing that would require both congressional and executive action, both of which would need to begin with new ideas.
There are some proposals out there, of course, but these are areas where an outsider’s eye could be of use, and also where the experience of regulated sectors would be productively deployed. And it’s a task well suited to the attitudes and personalities of the people involved in the DOGE, and to the priorities of the new administration and Congress.
The DOGE’s core purpose should be to show the two elected branches how they might make the regulatory state itself both more modern and less burdensome.
By What Means?
But how exactly would an opinionated committee actually do that? So far, the DOGE is pretty much a bunch of memes and an X account. What should it be in the real world?
This is not a trivial question. For the DOGE to be able to offer usable advice, it will need to define itself either within or outside the structure of the federal government, and be assigned a legal and legitimate role.
There are really only two forms it could plausibly choose from. If it wanted to operate within the framework of the federal government, the DOGE would need to be a Federal Advisory Committee, governed by the arcane rules of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which defines how outsiders can be brought in to advise the government while minimizing conflicts and corruption. If it did not want to be burdened by these challenging constraints, the DOGE would need to operate as a nongovernmental organization with no federal authority or formal government role — essentially, a kind of outside think tank.
If the DOGE’s leaders decline to choose between these options, as they have so far, they risk exposing themselves to serious legal risks and also rendering their work moot and unusable. It isn’t hard to see why they want to avoid choosing: Remaining in that liminal space between insiders and outsiders promises them power without responsibility. But that is precisely why that space is off-limits.
And ultimately, they will probably find that only the role of an outside advisory group is really practicable for them, because the constraints of the Federal Advisory Committee Act will not be a good fit for who they are and what they want to do. I served as the staff director of a federal advisory committee for several years in the early 2000s, and became all too intimately acquainted with that abominable statute. Its restrictions are undoubtedly excessive and make it much too difficult for policymakers to get good information and guidance from outsiders. Pretty much every federal advisory committee eventually lands on the inside joke that its chief recommendation should be that Congress should repeal the FACA. Maybe the DOGE should recommend that too. But as long as FACA is the law, the DOGE almost certainly can’t be a government entity.
In fact, the constraints of the FACA are actually much easier to defend in the case of the DOGE than that of most federal advisory bodies. There is simply no way that any law intended to limit conflicts of interest in federal policymaking would permit the wealthiest man in the world to serve as co-chairman of a federal advisory committee, or would allow the committee’s members and advisers to be tycoons and investors whose businesses receive untold billions in contracts, subsidies, and grants from the federal government and are regulated by the agencies this committee will consider reforming. Whatever you think of the intricate constraints of FACA, any law to govern federal advisory bodies would have to avoid such abject conflict and so blatant an appearance (at the very least) of corruption.
Any iteration of DOGE that sought to operate as a formal advisory body to public officials would face this problem. In this respect, the nearest analogy is not Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission, which many observers have pointed to, but rather Donald Trump’s own attempt, early in his first term, to have billionaire Carl Icahn serve as his official adviser on regulatory issues — a kind of one-man DOGE. The whole thing blew up pretty fast, leaving Icahn facing legal jeopardy and forced to deny he was ever really an adviser at all.
If the DOGE chose to run this risk, or maybe to force a fight over the constitutionality of the FACA statute, it would need to recognize that not only its members and advisers but also its work would be in danger. Any agency that took action in response to a proposal from the DOGE would have to explain the origins of its move, and if the DOGE were to end up in legal jeopardy, such actions might be undone too. Agencies couldn’t easily invent alternative origin stories for their rules — this Supreme Court has shown little patience for such pretexts. So entangling the DOGE’s work with FACA, whether with the intent of creating a controversy or not, would most likely mean rendering the whole effort a pointless waste of time.
Champions of the DOGE should therefore organize it as an outside advisory body — a nongovernmental organization that gathers ideas and provides advice to policymakers, albeit one with unusually good contacts and relationships with the people it hopes to advise. Steering clear of formal lobbying restrictions should be perfectly doable for such a body. And it would also have to stop pretending to be part of the administration — the president can’t appoint its leaders or select its staff, as Donald Trump has declared himself to be doing even though no such body exists for him to populate.
Just creating a new think tank might feel like a letdown after all the pomp and excitement surrounding the DOGE. But a letdown has always been inevitable given the absurd heights of hype that have enveloped this idea from the start. The legal and administrative options, and the revealed preferences of everyone involved, all point toward structuring the DOGE as an outside body of advisers. Such a private group could draw on any expertise it wanted and publish its ideas for the benefit of both the public and government officials. It could do a lot of good.
Thinking Like Policymakers
And yet, even as an outside advisory group, if the DOGE wants to be useful it would have to approach its task with a recognition of the distinct perspective of the public official. Its advice would need to promote the disposition of an insider more than an outsider, because its goal is to shape how government works.
This has always been a challenge for President-elect Trump and those around him. Rising as populists in a populist era, they have tended to understand themselves as outsiders critiquing the state even when they have been in charge of administering it. Their approach to the institutions of the federal government has been fundamentally oppositional: They have sought to deconstruct and dismantle the mechanisms of regulatory and administrative action and to appoint critics of institutional excess to run the institutions they criticize. There is real value in such hostility to counterproductive bureaucracy, of course, but by itself it is not a recipe for durable change or functional administration.
The chief champions of the DOGE have so far exhibited this attitude, too. Describing their ambitions in the Wall Street Journal in November, for instance, Musk and Ramaswamy argued that two recent Supreme Court decisions that limited the power of administrative agencies — West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v. Raimondo — will help their efforts to rein in regulation. That is how outsiders think, but it is not the reality insiders face.
In fact, any effort to transform the character of the administrative state will require assertive administrative action. Reversing bad regulations requires deploying the same procedures and powers (and even most of the same people) that produced them. The federal courts will not excuse failures to abide by legally required procedures because they are aimed at unmaking rules rather than making them. As the Supreme Court famously put it in 1983, “The direction in which an agency chooses to move does not alter the standard of judicial review established by law.”
Court decisions that weaken administrative agencies will therefore weaken the people the DOGE seeks to advise, because those people run administrative agencies. So the Court’s recent moves to diminish administrative power, which were justified, will make the DOGE’s work harder, not easier, and will mean that Congress should be its audience as much as the executive branch.
Seeing things this way may take some work for those leading the DOGE. The logic of change agents in a cutting-edge industry is unavoidably different from the logic of change agents in the government of a democratic republic. There are no alternatives to the core institutions of our government, so they must be reformed rather than replaced. The question reformers must ask can’t be, “What will arise if we blow up this system?” It must be more like, “How could we run this system differently and better?” Asking that question requires acknowledging that running things, not just breaking things, is the challenge you face.
This imperative ties together the key decisions the DOGE will need to make about its work. Sloganeering about cutting waste and firing bureaucrats seems natural to outsiders, but ultimately gets policymakers nowhere. Only structural change, and ideally structural change advanced through legislation enacted by Congress, will really endure and improve American government over time. And thinking like the people in charge of advancing such change requires taking seriously the means you use to advise them and the means they must deploy to do their work.
If the DOGE is to deserve the time and work of serious, successful outsiders who want to have an impact on our country, its goal should be to help them enable the insiders elected to run the federal government to leave behind institutions better geared to facilitating American dynamism rather than retarding it.
That won’t be easy. But it’s possible, if the people running the DOGE decide to get serious about its purpose, its structure, and its disposition. They will need to decide soon.