Government waste is a problem, but, unfortunately, DOGE is not man’s best friend in this case.
Six months after its dramatic rollout, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lost its most famous face. Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul once touted as the figurehead for the Trump administration’s bureaucracy-busting blitz, stepped away from DOGE after his short-term role expired. His exit, coupled with a recent falling out (and perhaps reconciliation) between him and President Donald Trump, has left DOGE without clear leadership and uncertain about its direction.
Since its inception via executive order at the beginning of President Trump’s second term, progressives saw DOGE as the harbinger of a coming techno-fascistic regime, and conservatives saw it as a long-overdue budget-slashing barbecue. Meanwhile, seasoned libertarians with longer memories of Washington’s long history of chewing up cost-cutting task forces with catchy acronyms saw it as nothing more than the latest chapter in a long history of failed government reform efforts.
For all its talk of shrinking government, DOGE has behaved exactly like the agencies it seeks to dismantle: unaccountable and overreaching. DOGE may have been touted as a budget hawk’s dream, but it’s looking more like a Trojan horse for executive overreach that should alarm anyone truly committed to limited government.
Calls to cut federal spending are nothing new. Similar efforts from many past presidents, such as Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission and Bill Clinton’s National Performance Review, didn’t produce lasting reform. While DOGE positioned itself as the engine for a new wave of government downsizing, its failure to drain the swamp, “maximize government efficiency and productivity,” and cut $2 trillion in U.S. government spending should come as a surprise to no one. DOGE, in many ways, was doomed to fail the moment it was created for the simple fact that it came intending to reform a system that, by its very nature, was going to resist reform. Public choice theory points out that institutions, comprised of self-interested individuals, exist primarily to perpetuate themselves. This is precisely why, from day one, DOGE was already facing court battles before it even had the chance to get the ball rolling.
DOGE also cut itself at the knees because both Trump and Elon refused to touch entitlements. If Trump fired every civil servant and cut foreign aid to zero, that would only save $300 billion. For reference, the deficit last year was $1.8 trillion. Even though a majority of Americans believe that our government is wasteful and inefficient, overly intrusive, and run by corrupt officials, many don’t see the contradiction in fiercely defending the very programs that more rules, more money, and more taxes (as long as they can get someone else to pay for them). Social Security and Medicare alone comprise over 50% of all federal spending, but every member of Congress knows that it would be tantamount to political suicide if their constituents got so much of a whiff of them supporting cuts. Cutting $2 trillion, or even $1 trillion, from the budget was never in the cards when 75% of that budget goes to mandatory spending commitments that Trump has either ruled out in cutting or can’t opt out of.
With the biggest drivers of federal spending off limits, DOGE was left to chase savings elsewhere. DOGE has identified several low-hanging absurdities in an incredibly wasteful bureaucracy, things which budget hawks like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) have pointed out for years. However, behind the viral headlines, clickbait, and theatrics, the numbers tell a story riddled with a litany of basic accounting errors, exaggerations, and other embarrassing and consequential mistakes. Even DOGE’s April claim of hitting $150 billion in savings, 85% less than its original objective, might be an overstatement. This, coupled with the fact that DOGE’s cuts will cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year alone due to rehiring fired workers, lost productivity, paid leave costs, and other inefficiencies (not even including all the lawsuits) now raises doubts about whether the agency has made any headway in saving taxpayer dollars at all, let alone reach their savings goal if Congress follows through, and, at this point, that’s a big if.
DOGE’s inefficiency, however, is only half the story. The real danger is not its inability to deliver on its fiscal promises, but the dangerous precedent it sets by transforming an obscure digital office into a partisan wrecking ball that unilaterally decides which departments live or die and is steered by a private citizen operating with virtually no transparency or oversight. All of this, mind you, happened without congressional approval.
For those who genuinely believe in limited government, how we reduce its size matters just as much as the fact that we do so. Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman’s proposal to axe most federal departments from 14 to ~4.5 in his now-famous 1999 interview with Peter Robinson drew applause from Musk himself. However, when Robinson floated the idea of Friedman becoming dictator for a day, Friedman shut it down immediately, saying, “If we can’t persuade the public that it’s desirable to do these things, we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do them.” In a similar vein, the anti-statist stalwart Ludwig von Mises stated that the first thing he’d do as dictator was abdicate. Both thinkers understood something the modern right too often forgets: If you have to centralize power to decentralize it, you’ve already lost the plot.
From the outset, DOGE should not even exist as an independent entity. The Supreme Court and the Constitution recognize the power to establish executive departments as one of the prerogatives of Congress. To circumvent this, Trump foisted DOGE into existence by rebranding USDS, an inconspicuous agency created by President Barack Obama in 2014 to “upgrade the government’s technology infrastructure,” as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before naming Elon Musk as its de facto head. Musk, however, was never even an official DOGE employee, let alone its leader. Instead, he was listed as a special government advisor limited to a 130-day term with no formal authority to make government decisions. This hasn’t stopped DOGE from invoking his name to threaten federal workers, violate federal transparency rules by giving him access to classified information (including Social Security Numbers), or allow him to appear next to Donald Trump in Oval Office interviews and hover over meetings with cabinet leaders of actual departments. Technically, Amy Gleason is the ‘acting head’ of DOGE (something that is not reflected on DOGE’s website and took the White House over a month to disclose).
Even if DOGE was a congressionally authorized department, it still wouldn’t have the statutory authority to arrogate Congress’s spending authority, let alone dismantle federal agencies at will. Any attempt by the president, committee, task force, or advisor to assume the power of the purse is unconstitutional, which is the same logic the Supreme Court applied when it struck down a similar instance of executive overreach, that being Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Trump’s own executive order stated that DOGE’s establishment cannot be “construed to impair or otherwise affect the authority granted by law to an executive department, agency, or the head thereof,” meaning that DOGE was never meant to usurp the legal authority of existing federal agencies. Its actions in the past six months have displayed the exact opposite.
To be clear, DOGE is not entirely wrong in identifying bloated or underperforming agencies.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has come under fire for its lack of accountability and sweeping regulatory powers over businesses. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been used to provide humanitarian aid to many countries in need, but has been criticized for inefficiencies and misaligned political initiatives that, in many cases, have propped up institutions inimical to substantive economic growth. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) has continuously supported the counterproductive Housing First model and has failed to produce significant progress as homelessness continues to climb to its highest level on record. Finally, besides the fact that there is nowhere in the Constitution that gives the federal government any authority to govern education, the failure of the American public education system under the watch of the Department of Education (DOE), which has been whiffing key metrics for more than forty years, has made it abundantly clear that the status quo is not working.
Certainly, substantive arguments could be made against most of the federal government’s expansion in recent decades. While presidents enjoy some discretion when managing their departments and may propose reorganizations, President Trump, DOGE, and certainly Elon Musk do not have the authority to unilaterally shutter federal departments at will. This marks a clear breach of the separation of powers. Since CFPB, USAID, USICH, and DOE are all independent agencies established by Congress, similarly, these agencies can only be abolished by Congress. Congress is to blame for the size, scope, and spending of the federal government, and Congress must oversee its reduction. If DOGE hopes to see any of its major proposals endure, it must be willing to persuade Congress and an electorate whose trust in government is near historic lows.
As much as Trump pundits might hate to hear it, the federal leviathan cannot be dismantled by executive action alone. Executive orders might make headlines, but they don’t shrink budgets, and no chainsaw in the world will cut through 100,000 pages of the Federal Register. Real change needs more than political theater. It requires courage, clarity, and, more importantly, a Congress willing to join the demolition crew.
To its credit, DOGE has served as an important catalyst for bringing the long-forgotten conversation on slashing government spending back into the political arena in a period when both major parties have largely abandoned fiscal responsibility to engage in bipartisan spending sprees. $180 billion in savings amounts to over $1,000 per taxpayer, but assuming these projections are overstated, if DOGE saved even $1 in taxpayer money, that would still be more than if it didn’t exist. However, while DOGE might have promised to drain the swamp, without legislative backing, it’s more likely to either learn to swim in it or, even worse, deepen it by concentrating power where it’s least accountable. If DOGE is what reform looks like, then maybe the real waste is the time we spend hoping.
