OP-ED: Crippling the federal government
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are waging a war on the government.
No politician runs on a platform of inefficient government, so Trump’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help the government operate more efficiently is theoretically as American as apple pie, though it would be fair to point out that creating a new entity to root out inefficiency instead of using existing channels (U.S. Government Accountability Office, the 17 inspectors general that Trump fired) is itself inefficient (a new layer of unaccountable bureaucracy). But under the anodyne cover of making government efficient, Trump and Musk are actually waging a war on the government.
Republicans have been trying to reduce the size of government ever since the Republicans became the party of big business after the Civil War. Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, captured that sentiment when he said, “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.'”
Storm victims getting assistance from Federal Emergency Management Agency are some of the most visible refutations of that sentiment, but nevertheless, Republicans since Reagan have been demonizing the federal government because they want to reduce taxes (which pay for it) and regulation, which forces people (often businesses) to do things they might not do on their own (spending money to make the workplace safer or to reduce environmental damage, e.g.). Republicans learned that cutting taxes and railing against the deficit were popular attacks on the size of government.
This anti-government campaign gained steam after the Powell Memo (1971), which argued that businesses needed to organize and fight back politically to resist the regulations put in place due to the political activities of the 1960s, particularly Ralph Nader and the rise of consumerism and the environmental movement.
As a result, since then the number of federal government employees has remained relatively stable (under 3 million), while the U.S. population grew from about 200 million in 1970 to 343 million today. Reagan’s popularity forced Democrats to adopt some of his anti-government positions; Clinton famously declared “the era of big government is over” in the 1996 State of the Union Address. But the government continued to provide services, mainly by increasing the use of private contractors (nonprofit and for-profit), in a bipartisan compromise that kept the government from expanding while still providing increased services.
Republicans demonize government workers as lazy and incompetent who do nothing all day but still collect a steady paycheck. Prior to civil service reforms, there might have been some truth to that (especially in the cities run by political machines) as politicians gave out jobs based on political connections, not competence.
After President James A. Garfield’s assassination by a disgruntled job-seeker in 1881, civil service reforms substituted merit for political connections in hiring. This made the government much more efficient, as employees did not switch with new administrations, retaining expertise and institutional knowledge (what Trump calls the Deep State). Of course, Trump even wants to change that, making more of the government jobs schedule F jobs, which allows the administration to fire them without cause (making them political jobs).
Evaluating the efficiency of an organization requires someone with knowledge of what that organization does, going over the processes it uses and the results it gets. But that’s not what DOGE does.
The DOGE wiz kids (mostly tech-savvy kids in their 20s) look at an organization’s spending and pick out things they think are wasteful and cut them. They also fire a percentage of the workforce, sometimes based on seniority (probationary employees are often fired because they have fewer job protections). Musk is proud that they are cutting things with a metaphorical chainsaw, but he shouldn’t be, because they’re making a mess of it.
One of the first, dramatic moves that DOGE did was to pressure most federal workers to quit (with salary continuing until September), under threat of being fired by then if they didn’t. How is it “efficient” to encourage almost all federal government workers to quit?
Making government efficient would mean evaluating the workers and getting the weak ones to quit while retaining the best. The recklessness of DOGE has resulted in the need to hire back employees DOGE evidently did not realize were vital; hundreds of employees who oversee nuclear weapons, people working on the Avian Flu outbreak and National Park and Forest Service employees. Any competent evaluator would know what people did before firing them.
DOGE is firing 7,000 IRS employees just as tax season gets into high gear. That might save money in the short term at the expense of forcing taxpayers to wait longer to interact with the IRS. It also epitomizes DOGE operations; saving money on the payroll is all DOGE considers, because IRS employees actually bring in much more in revenue than they cost: They force wealthy tax cheats to pay their taxes. Firing them only makes sense if you care more about reducing tax audits of the very wealthy than government efficiency.
DOGE has claimed to find $55 billion in waste, fraud and abuse, but only $16 billion in savings was documented, and that was inflated by claiming $8 billion in savings by canceling an $8 million program. And even the programs listed were not fraudulent, but simply doing things Musk didn’t think were worth doing.
DOGE is also cutting parts of the government that oversee Musk’s contracts with the federal government. The fact that the owner of Space X is overseeing spending at NASA could not be a clearer conflict of interest; other conflicts of interest include the Labor Department looking into Tesla, the Department of Agriculture investigating Neuralink, and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s role in overseeing the new payment system Musk wants to create for X.
Trump and Musk are not interested in efficient government. They want a weak government that lets their businesses do what they want without oversight. Government services are being sacrificed so Trump’s wealthy supporters can become even wealthier.
Kent James is a member of East Washington Borough Council.