Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are probably very aware that President Donald Trump has established what is colloquially called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an effort led by Elon Musk, a businessman and currently the world’s richest person.
DOGE aims to, as the executive order laid out, “modernize Federal technology and software and to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” These days, or at least my Facebook feed would lead me to believe, it seems that you are asked to be either all in for federal government spending (“protect the federal worker,” “get rid of tax cuts,” “the government actually needs more money to operate,” etc.) or all in for DOGE, the cut first, brag now, measure later approach to federal government spending reform.
Perhaps this is the problem: social media can’t handle the complexities of such a challenge. Government bloating, inefficiency and in places, ineffectiveness, is hard to wrangle, much less accurately capture with limited characters. However, much of the communication by Trump and Musk around these efforts has been through the medium of social media, in posts and reposts, sometimes with text but often in memes, with props like a chain saw, or through a rather bizarre news conference with one of Musk’s children wandering around the Oval Office. More attention seems to be given to quick wins and dunking on bureaucracy, and the likes and shares that follow, than accuracy in the details, as evidenced in the DOGE-published “wall of receipts,” with errors like the $8 billion savings from a canceled Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract that was later revised to reflect its $8 million value, 1/1000th of the originally posted savings.
While I struggle with skepticism seeing this cavalier showman’s approach to federal government reform, I do worry about our ever-increasing federal deficit. I agree that there is a lot of foolishness and waste in federal government spending, some of which has been highlighted by DOGE in the last few weeks. I also understand that given the bulk of federal spending is on entitlements, addressing these challenges will likely take hard decisions. But as I see the near constant updates about the efforts toward efficiency, I can’t help but think of a favorite line from the movie “The Princess Bride.” With all respect, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
One of the limits with framing support of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts as being merely for or against efficiency, is that cutting is only one side of an important equation. Any reasonable definition of efficiency includes some consideration of effectiveness or the ability to get the results you want. To be efficient means getting those results with the minimal amount of waste, expense and effort, which is different from expedient ineffectiveness. Creating a more efficient government will surely require cuts, but the wrong cuts in the wrong way can themselves be wasteful. In addition, the wrong cuts could also be out of line with our goals as a country, such as security or safety, and potentially devastating, like unintentionally firing U.S. Department of Agriculture employees working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. To articulate and accomplish your values, in the smallest amount of time with the least amount of resources is a much harder and more complicated task altogether. It is a task that will not only take time and intentionality to, as Georgia’s Rep. Austin Scott challenged the effort, “measure twice and cut once,” it will also take the ambition of all three branches of government.
In laying out the philosophy behind our Constitution, James Madison famously argued for divided government:
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Bureaucrats are not angels, but neither are Trump, Musk or anyone at DOGE. There is a fundamental assumption about human nature that is built into our Constitution, namely that men and women are fallible, including the men and women that govern. While we are invited to vote for the party most aligned with our interests and values, the power this person yields, be they a president or member of Congress, will inevitably be checked. These checks are not flaws in the system, but a system that is designed with the belief that we are all flawed.
We are overdue for some serious rethinking of our federal government and this will be work that will take time. It will take a clear articulation of and alignment to the values that drive these cost-cutting decisions, values that I would argue cannot be merely to punish enemies or destroy bureaucracy, but must cast a vision for freeing up resources and reducing constraints to build our country into a place where all people can thrive. It will take Congress stepping up to these difficult tasks and hearing out and wrestling through the laws that drive the federal deficit and those that may unduly hamstring the executive branch, and it will likely take some back and forth with the judicial branch to understand exactly where the boundaries of executive authority lie. Madison understood that in our divided government, ambition in one branch of government would be made to counteract ambition in the others. Congress and the courts, this is a time for such ambition. None of us are angels.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Hannah Heck, a lawyer, founded a public policy, advocacy and consulting practice. She lives in Atlanta and spends most of her time in board service, supporting her four children and writing about life raising a son with Down syndrome.
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