DOGE: Dreaming of a Better Government
By Steve Huntley
December 1, 2024
It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
The dreams, that is, of conservatives and libertarians yearning for a return to small government.
And maybe also the dreams of millions of Americans fed up with government censorship of social media. Fed up with government lawfare against everyone from Donald Trump to parents protesting woke policies at school board meetings. Fed up with the so-called government experts whose imperious dictates mangled our society in the name of the Covid pandemic.
Trump says he’s ready to tackle the leviathan in Washington and has tasked two of America’s most prominent and successful entrepreneurs to bring the wisdom and common sense of the private marketplace to government. To cut Washington’s colossal administrative state down to size. To make it more efficient. To streamline it. But also to restrain it. To get its too-interfering fingers out of our lives. To return to Congress the responsibility for specifying the laws that hit close to home with us.
“Drain the swamp” is how Trump describes the job he’s given to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a lawyer/investment guru and one-time presidential candidate. They will head the Department of Government Efficiency, called DOGE.
Their declared goal — save the country half a trillion dollars through cuts in government programs, through staff reductions in the vast Washington bureaucracy and through slashing government regulations.
How big is their challenge?
Immense.
The full-time government work force numbers around 2.3 million, who pull down $271 billion in salaries. The total employment count reaches three million when part-time workers and contractors are included.
By comparison, America’s biggest private employer, Walmart, has 1.6 million people on its payroll.
The Federal Register, the record of government regulations and rules, runs more than 90,000 pages. (It’s been higher — nearly 95,900 pages when Barack Obama was president, according to Forbes magazine.)
The Federal Register is fed rules, regulations, and decrees by some 400 departments and agencies. Some of them are big and well known, others are small, and there likely are a number of them most of us have probably never heard of. But all work at infiltrating the decisions of faceless bureaucrats into myriad avenues of American life.
Think of the Labor Department writing rules and regulations affecting 165 million workers. Think of the federal government’s mandate (soon to be overturned by Trump) to demand electric cars constitute an ever-growing share of the vehicles manufactured by automakers. Or consider gender dictates leading to men stealing athletic trophies from women.
And, again, will any of us ever forget the Covid mandates closing schools? Or shutting down churches while celebrating big Black Lives Matter gatherings? Or kicking soldiers out of the army and nurses out of hospitals for not getting vaccines?
All that built up a flood of feelings among everyday Americans that things are out of control, that government is just too big and too intrusive.
Taming the giant administrative state won’t be easy.
Musk and Ramaswamy will be running an advisory commission. They’ll have no authority of their own to do anything.
They will make recommendations to Trump, to his cabinet and to Congress. It will be up to them to implement whatever the DOGE comes up with.
Given his natural inclinations, Trump will be on board. But many other things — the latest international crisis, for example — will be demanding his attention.
His cabinet heads should be on board too. But history offers tales of political appointees being captured by the bureaucracy they are tasked to reform. Scores of high-ranking pencil-pushers will be eager to whisper in a cabinet secretary’s ears how important this or that function of their agency is.
The challenge of reigning in the Washington colossus will be tougher in Congress. From the start, Democrats will battle against it. They like big government. Most of them are all in on “experts” issuing orders for the rest of us to bow down to.
But even Republicans will find the job at times a bridge too far. As President Ronald Reagan once put it, “Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
The simple truth is that every federal program and every bureaucratic organization has a constituency, Americans who indeed see value in them.
The big government unions will swarm Capitol Hill peddling arguments about why, for example, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is absolutely vital to environmental protection of the seas.
Or the Washington aristocracy will assert the Commission on Fine Arts has a vital mission “to advise the federal government on matters pertaining to the arts and national symbols, and to guide the architectural development” of D.C.
And sometimes maybe they’ll be right.
Some of the targets of small-government advocates could turn out to be just too big to bring down.
The Education Department is a prime target for anyone out to cut Washington down to size. That agency has spent a fortune to achieve little if anything to advance the education of America’s children.
The very idea of eliminating an entire federal department would have heads exploding in every corner of Washington.
Another idea is to move some departments out of D.C.
For example, an Agriculture Department headquartered in, say, Iowa would be closer to the people it serves. Again, that’s a big idea that would be a heavy lift.
Such a transfer would no doubt bring a lot of resignations by bureaucrats who couldn’t imagine leaving the friendly, sophisticated environs of Washington to live among the rubes in the hinterland.
Legions of bureaucrats are still working from home, an artifact of the Covid shutdowns. Just ordering them to show up at the office might spark mass resignations. We can only hope.
Any DOGE proposals for staff reductions will run into the wall of Civil Service Act protections and loud opposition from government unions. That makes reform hard, but not impossible.
In considering all the obstacles Musk and Ramaswamy face, we shouldn’t forget that this has been tried before.
In President Reagan’s time, the Grace Commission, like DOGE strictly an advisory body, sifted through the maze of the federal universe and came up with a passel of recommendations. Most of them went nowhere.
Some of us are old enough to remember another election that delivered a new bunch of Republicans to Congress committed to smaller government. It prompted then-President Bill Clinton to declare, “The era of big government is over.”
Guess what? It wasn’t.
Trump has even tried this before. In his first term, one of his first executive orders demanded that for every new regulation, two old ones had to be junked.
The initial results were encouraging. The number of pages in the Federal Register in 2017 fell to 61,300, according to Forbes magazine.
However, by the time he left office, that total was back up to more than 86,000 in 2020 — still 9,500 fewer pages than Obama’s record high.
Maybe this time will be different. Maybe America isn’t only ready for reform, it’s eager to see it happen.
This last election threw up a lot of rhetoric about threats to democracy.
The great mass of us are waking up to the realization that this threat comes not from Trump or Kamala Harris or some other political candidate.
It comes from our elected officials abdicating responsibility to a mass of unelected, unaccountable, imperious so-called experts who think they know better than us, who see us as a bunch of yokels who don’t know what’s good for ourselves.
As Musk and Ramaswamy put it recently: “Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats — tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants ….”
There’s nothing democratic about that picture.
The administrative state has grown so big and powerful that this may be our last chance to bring it to heel, to make the words “public servant” actually mean something, to end the nightmare of an ever-more intrusive unelected, unaccountable administrative state.
It’s a chance we don’t want to miss.
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Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews.com from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain.
For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages.
Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.
Comments 22
Brilliant, Mr. Huntley! I must go along with Brendan Behan’s most famous witticism, ” I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.”
I recently binge-watched the old 80s British series “Yes, Minister”. It’s a timeless, classic story of a newly appointed minister and his struggles against the civil service bureaucracy. I’ve watched a few congressional committee hearings that resemble the hilarious [in the show] machinations and duplicitous actions of career civil service officials whose main goals are accruing the increased staff and budgets that represent success for them. It’s a good guide to what’s in store for the next four or more years. Given time, political leaders can prevail – but it takes real time, more than one term. Requiring actual attendance and moving offices out of DC are ideas on the right track, I think, but will present their own issues. I’m hoping for the best, but it’s a 12 year job.
Agreed. It does take more than one term. So when folks say the solution to all our ills are term limits for our representatives, that in effect is just turning over 100% of our government (rather than the 80% now) to the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state.
Another gem of a commentary. The unelected functionaries of the USG who make some of these inane and overly complex rules do need to go on a diet. We can only hope Elon and Vivek can cut thru the red tape (I read somewhere that government rules and regs were once wrapped in red tape- thus the well worn phrase).
EV mandates – did you hear the one a day or so ago about all the EV’s stranded in Chicago because of the extreme cold? Add that to monies spent putting EV chargers in lower income areas. EV’s in selected situations can be useful (commuters with a 20 mile run or errands) but as your main vehicle? 🚗 A toy for the well off. I drive a hybrid. Not an issue to go 500 in one day. Also Title 9 back in full force. Boys out of girls spaces and sports. Etc etc.
Thanks to contributions from folks like you JK news will continue to thrive.
Mr. Huntley:
You’re asking America to dream of saving itself. Will we withstand the siren song of corporate media? Or will we begin to deny ourselves perks and programs? Alexis de Tocqueville understood us.
Thanks for a brilliant column.
It is an honor to work with you.
JK
Working from home is supported by private business. Saves money on rent and allows worker to be available for conference and one on one business calls at all times. Of course the worker has to exempt from punching a clock. So that work work for a fed union worker, but not all fed employees are in a union.
You do not understand the difference between the private vs the federal work force. So let me explain it to you. If a private sector worker works from home and does not perform up to standards he loses his job. If enough do so as well, then the business they work for goes out of business. If a federal worker does the same, the worst that happens to him is that he is put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). He is virtually unfirable. And no matter how many incompetent workers there are, the federal government NEVER goes out of business. So my point is, lessons from the private sector are not necessarily translateable to the public sector, as presently structured. You have never worked in the federal system. Right?
100% that the issue boils down to “It comes from our elected officials abdicating responsibility…”
The legislators don’t really accomplish much (any?) meaningful legislation as they seem overly focused on creating sound bites to promote their always ongoing re-election efforts. They abdicate their law making responsibility to bureaucrats, executive orders, the Supreme Court, etc. Grandstanders, the lot of them if not all.
Great point. I bet one of the loudest protestors against dismantling the federal leviathan will be our very own elected representatives. In the absence of the beast they’d actually have to do some real work.
Thank you,Steve.
Thank you Steve for highlighting the need for and challenges around dismantling the bureaucracy or swamp. I have worked in the food industry for 39 years and can tell you there is much amiss in the USDA, FDA and EPA from personal experience. There also are still some true “public servants” within those organizations. You are correct, this might be the last chance we gave as a country to pull ourselves out from beneath the colossus of unaccountable regulators. It is crucial not just to reduce the size, but put in place accountability to the citizens and the ability to remove from their roles people who have abused the public trust. Congress will be a major obstacle. Whether completely dismantling departments like Education or decentralizing by geographic moves various departments, it is a long overdue exercise in curtailing what has become an excessive burden on taxpayers citizens.
Wonderful as always, Mr. Huntley! When you left the Sun Times, so did we. And when Mr. Kass left the Trib, so did we.
As far as “unelected bureaucrats making laws,” as a firearms instructor, I heard a lot of hysteria when SCOTUS overturned the ATF bumpstock ban on the basis that bureaus/agencies do not get to make laws. Many personss asked how SCOTUS was allowed to so cause danger to so many people.
My standard reply was that all SCOTUS did was to tell bureaucrats that, if they really wanted to make laws, they had to run for and be elected to Congress first. That caused a lot of spluttering, but ended the question.
At this point in our civic lives, the easiest way to become a tyrant is not to be elected to office, but rather to be a middle management or higher figure in a governmental bureau/agency. They’re equivalent to the flappers in Gulliver’s Travels, and the ones actually in control.
If DOGE gets any footing, I will expect mass hysteria from CNN, MSNBC, Democrats, and the Deranged Liberal Progressives (DLP) that thrive on a bloated bureaucracy; and the bureaucracy thrives off of mass media and the DLP for the spin. So for the next four years we will have the classic reactions of spoilt children. Screaming, crying, sabotage, refusals, shutdowns and the like. We’ll just have to push through that; because, just like a spoilt child, it will change behavior only when it realizes that the old way doesn’t work. We really need to change the bureaucracy otherwise the “public servants” will be us the taxpayers.
Just a note. Still take the Trib for sports, and the comics. Yes, the comics. Anyway, had the displeasure of skimming over articles that meet every Leftist nonsense known to man. What a shame.
It’s even a relief to know that things won’t get worse during the next four years. Making things better, finally.
It will be a marginal success if DOGE is able to restore the concept of “public servant”. The bureaucrats have inverted it in their minds: we, the public are their servants.
DOGE must convince the royals in the swamp that we are not serfs. That job starts January 20th.
Great analysis Mr. Huntley.
Mr Huntley,
Your words, as always are true and meaningful. You very accurately painted a clear picture while incorporating and discussing Reagan and Clinton. Lest we forget that John Kennedy tried to incorporate Keynesian economics as his way to way to indirectly “shrink” the government’s role by boosting economic growth through lower taxes. As far back as 1963 people had an inkling that government was “too” big. Will DOGE work? Will Congress bite? Will things change? Will Iowa become an outpost for the Department of Agriculture? Stay tuned. New episodes beginning January 20, 2025.
PFB
Excellent column, Steve, as always.
One can only hope some of the dreams come true…and some treasonous pay the price for their misdeeds.
We follow bureaucratic rules and regulations as if they are laws. If we actually enforce these rules and regulations, every citizen breaks the “law” multiple times a day, making us all criminals, making it anarchy, making our country basically lawless. Is it time to lash a railroad tie on the bumper and weld up plates on the family truckster windows?
The job of bureaucrats is to take the money that they are budgeted, spend every last dime of it to justify the bureaucrat’s job.
If you ever wanted a job where you could go to work everyday, never to be noticed and screw up the lives of citizens everywhere, a federal job is it.
Think of all of the federal buildings that are at 30% occupancy, while paying 100% for utilities and we wonder why we keep printing money?
You want to talk foreign ownership of US assets? Did you know we pay Pakistan MILLION$ because they own a hotel in NY that are housing illegals? How many thousands of acres of farmland China bought in the last 20 years? The answer should be ZERO.
There was a time in this country when we could rely on the FBI to ferret the communists out of our government. But now? Well, let’s just say that they have joined the party of Lenin.
DOGE has a monumental task. There will be resistance. There will be sabotage. Much of what DOGE will do will have to be done in the dead of night. Bolsheviks have to sleep sometime.
America will never change as long as conservatives believe that liberals are logical/rational people.
They are not.
You don’t feed a crocodile hoping that you will be eaten last (Churchill).
In lean times a business will require every department to slash 10% or more out of its budget or workforce. With some guide rails and immediacy, it is effective.
Departments know where they can afford to cut. Start there. Require revised budgets. Then let DOGE scrutinize deeper.
I spent half my medical career in the federal work force. The DOGE initiative is an enormous undertaking:
First off the number of federal contract employees is far higher than stated by Mr. Huntley. It is approx. 4 million (excluding DOD and Post Office). Although NO one is quite sure of the exact number. This is a “shadow” government” likely ignored by DOGE.
Second, during my career I have personally reviewed federal contracts related to health care, and I can tell you that many charge the government i.e. the US taxpayer, 1.5 to 2x the going private sector rate. They treat the government – and hence the US taxpayer – as “money trees.” So here is the irony: many in the private sector will be first in line loudly protesting the attempted destruction of the federal golden goose.
Third, the average citizen is against the huge federal leviathan. But woe to anybody or any initiative that in fact reduces federal “services”. Then all hell will break loose.
Forth, since 1996 there was a way to nullify the rules and regs of the administrative state. Namely the Congressional Review Act (CRA) allowed the Congress to nullify most rules and regs but had to do so in the same manner as if passing legislation. So in the 28 years since its passage, literally tens of thousands of rules and regs have been promulgated by federal agencies but only twenty have been nullified. Now with a Republican President and Congress – at least for the next two years – maybe the CRA can be meaningfully applied.
Finally, this has all been tried before as Mr. Huntley points out. Reagan authorized the Grace Committee with issued a vast and detailed report on how to tame the “beast.” It was promptly ignored.