Is DOGE Making the Government More Efficient?

Of course not. Next question.

Photo by Alex Gruber on Unsplash

I began the first draft of this post in a professorial mode.

Efficiency is a relationship between input (usually money, time, or effort) and outgo (some desired result). Increasing efficiency can mean cutting costs without lessening results, or keeping costs constant while increasing results. Sometimes both are done.

Then I argued that DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency” has nothing to do with efficiency. It was an easy case to make.

DOGE, by reducing the federal payroll, is cutting costs. And that’s all it’s doing. With rare exceptions, DOGE ignores outgo: It never claims that the targeted agencies are accomplishing just as much as before. Partly because they’re not.

The agencies, after the sudden firings, can’t do as much as they did before. Hardly a surprise. Every day the news reports the latest losses. A quick sampling: The Forest Service maintains trails less well and is less able to help hikers in distress. NOAA’s data will be less accurate, endangering fishing craft at sea. The Great Lakes are at greater danger from sea lampreys. CDC data about bird flu is under threat. VA research on a certain form of cancer has been stopped mid-study. And on and on; just read the headlines.

Realizing this story was already so well known, I wondered whether to bother posting it. I stopped collecting stories about DOGE’s casualties.

As my mind settled, more questions, deeper ones, emerged. Why does anyone believe that DOGE seeks efficiency, when it so obviously doesn’t? I was reminded of the dark years of Vietnam, when generals regularly published body counts (the number of enemy soldiers killed). Report the killings, they decided; it will encourage people to believe that we’re winning the war. The strategy worked, for a while.

Musk flaunts his own body count, the number of people DOGE has fired. His supporters love it, and ask no questions. They don’t even ask how much the slashing will reduce costs. In fact, it will make very little difference; payroll is about 5% of the federal budget. Most of our money goes to human services like Medicare and Medicaid, and to the military.

As I was musing about that, the landscape shifted a bit. Pushback from the Cabinet members persuaded Trump to rein in Musk, but only slightly; he remained the ultimate authority on firing. Maybe the Cabinet members cared about the effectiveness of their departments; maybe they just resented limits on their own authority. Despite the turmoil, Republicans still love DOGE. Again, why?

One obvious answer is party loyalty. Last fall many on the left blinded ourselves to Biden’s frailty. Now many on the right cannot see DOGE’s duplicity.

There are other, less obvious and more interesting, reasons for the right’s fierce attachment to DOGE. One is the allure of “shock therapy.” Before tackling that, though, a note: Everyone agrees that there’s waste in government. We disagree about how to lessen it.

The allure of “shock therapy”

DOGE supporters who believe that the program is really about efficiency may assume that sudden, brutal, downsizing will force agencies to do more with less. Occasionally sharp jolts like that are productive, but much more often they’re simply destructive.

In the late 20^th century economic shock therapy – overnight privatization of state-owned industry, removal of regulations -- was in vogue. It was adopted by, or forced upon, several countries that were in crisis: Russia, for instance, floundered after the fall of the Soviet Union; Bolivia and Chile faced hyperinflation. Typically shock therapy produced years of destitution and misery, greatly increased economic inequality, and often weakened democracy. Think of the Russian oligarchs, whose wealth also gave them enormous political power..

Sometimes shock therapy, done gradually as in Poland, led to a stronger and more stable economy. Poland today has an economy almost as strong as what the United States already has. We have it without shock therapy, without its suffering and its dangers. We are not in crisis, except for the one Trump has created. Shock therapy for us, now, promises nothing but suffering and destruction.

By way of contrast, look back at Bill Clinton’s “reinventing government” project, which cut almost half a million jobs and a massive number of regulations. LINK 6a. His project took seven years, worked through standard channels, studied the ground with care. Not a headline grabber. Rather, effective governance. (I think of Clinton as the best Republican president we ever had.)

Another assumption, deeply held in the United States, is that the private sector always does things more efficiently. The idea is that competitive pressure (the “discipline of the market”) forces businesses to think more shrewdly and creatively. Again, this can be true. But the analysis misses a fundamental point: Businesses seek to make a profit.

Clinton learned that the hard way. He reduced the federal workforce, but not the responsibilities of the agencies. Sometimes they hired back the same employees through private contractors, paying more, because of course the contractors took a cut.

This brings us to the heart of the issue. DOGE’s real aim is not efficiency; it does not aim at government doing what it does now, at less cost. DOGE is the Department of Government Elimination. Its real aim is to have the government do less. A lot less.

Any problems with that? Stay tuned.

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