If I Ran the DOGE

I have thought about it for years

Early in 2012, I wrote The Case for Executive Reorganization. Ten years later, I wrote Designing a Better Regulatory State. If I were offering advice to (“ran”)¹ the Department of Government Efficiency, I would bring ideas from those two articles.

Reorganization can work at multiple levels. Under the President, a reorganization could improve the reporting structure. Below that, within each agency, reorgs could get rid of unnecessary sections and bad managers.

By reorganization I do not mean go to Congress with a bill to restructure the government. That would be a waste of political capital. Instead, I mean “change who is really in charge,” which is something that Presidents do all the time, shuffling in White House staff or naming “czars.”

COO/CA

In the more recent article, I proposed what I call the COO/CA model. There would be a Chief Operating Officer, who oversees the executive branch. My guess is that the ideal person would be the #2 executive at a big company. Not the visionary or the public face. Instead, the person who manages the organization on the inside. Who is the guy at Tesla who keeps the wheels from falling off, so to speak? You want that guy.

A COO is not the same as a Chief of Staff. A Chief of Staff manages up, especially the President’s schedule and to-do list. A COO would manage down, overseeing the Cabinet departments and other agencies.

The other major player would be the Chief Auditor. As a libertarian, I want to see checks and balances operating. Congress does not have the resources or the skill set to properly oversee the agencies. I have in mind an adversarial department with more clout than the Government Accountability Office. Vivek for Chief Auditor.

I do not believe that it would require an act of Congress to implement the COO/CA model. A President could simply give one person the authority to be the single point of communication between himself and every agency. He could designate a single person to chair a committee of Inspectors General and other watchdogs. Give this committee chairman the clout that a Chief Auditor needs.

From 150 direct reports to 8

A dozen years ago, I pointed out,

Today, there are 15 cabinet agencies, which is already too many. However, in addition to the cabinet departments, there are another 69 independent agencies and government corporations, 69 boards, commissions, and committees, and 4 quasi-official agencies.

I proposed that the number of agencies reporting to the President should be reduced from 157 to 8. If the President went with a COO, then all eight of these would report through the COO.

One goal of a re-organization would be to group units with overlapping responsibilities together, rather than keeping them in separate departments. This would reduce the extent to which one sub-unit of government has functions that duplicate or impede the functions of another sub-unit.

Another goal would be to identify and dismantle units that are running on autopilot but not serving any useful purpose. By undertaking a wholesale re-org, you can change the default status of a unit from “keep doing what you did last year” to “justify your continued existence.”

To implement a major reorganization, an act of Congress would be a nice-to-have, but not a must-have. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that if the President really wants to shift responsibilities around, he can do it. My theory is that if you do not like, say, the Department of Education, you can leave it in place as an almost-empty shell, but put the key personnel and actual authority elsewhere.

The proposed 8 departments

In the re-org I sketched out in 2012, the basic scope of the Department of Defense and the Department of State would be unchanged. Within those departments, there are probably some tangential functions that could be cut or moved elsewhere, but the functions of military organization and international relations make sense as is. I did envision moving intelligence agencies under the Defense Department.

The other six agencies in this scheme were:

Financial Operations, Infrastructure, Economic Opportunity, Science and Statistics, Consumer Safety, and Homeland Security

I wrote that Financial Operations

Includes Treasury, Office of Management and Budget, the Social Security Administration, and Medicare operations. This department would be responsible for government financial transactions as well as monetary policy.

This department would also administer all programs that involve contingent obligations of the government, including guaranteed loans (FHA, student loans, small business loans, green energy loans, and so on) and entities such as the FDIC and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. I think that contingent obligations (commitments, such as government guarantees of private debt, that may give rise to spending) are particularly dangerous. I wish that as many as possible could be eliminated. Other mechanisms, such as on-budget subsidies, would be better substitutes. Meanwhile, they ought to receive close attention.

Suppose that you made the Treasury Secretary the head of Financial Operations. Then you would transfer functions currently housed elsewhere, such as FHA and the FDIC, to Treasury. Again, you could leave the FHA and FDIC officials as figureheads, but the key personnel and real authority would be under Treasury. Moving monetary policy away from the Fed certainly would require an act of Congress, so I would not count on that happening.

Infrastructure would be headed by an infrastructure “czar.” This could be the Secretary of Transportation, but it is much more than just roads and bridges. It includes ports, air traffic control, nuclear power, the electric grid, telecommunications, payment processing, air quality, water quality, and emergency management. The task is to set and enforce standards for reliability in these areas. Officials at other agencies involved in the environment, telecom, etc., would report up through the infrastructure “czar.”

Economic Opportunity would be headed by another “czar.” Although Financial Operations would disburse funds for Food Stamps, Medicaid, and so on, Economic Opportunity would set strategy and rules. I would hope that the overlaps and inconsistencies among all of the various welfare programs would be surfaced, and this department would press Congress to make changes to rationalize them, reducing the high implicit tax rates that poor people face. Economic Opportunity would take over functions of the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well those of agencies dedicated to veterans, Native Americans, etc.

Regarding Science and Statistics, I wrote

Support for research in basic science, medicine, energy, and so on. Obtain and publish important data on demographics and economics. There would be no Department of Energy. Any space program would fall under this department, but privatization of space exploration would be encouraged.

This would make someone like the head of the NSF or NIH a cabinet-level position in practice, if not in name. So the President (or COO) should pay close attention to the person chosen.

Consumer Safety would take over the functions of the FDA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and so on. Also elevates this function, so that the choice of leader would be important.

Regarding Homeland Security, I wrote,

I think this should look more like the old FBI than the current DHS. I would move the Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency to Infrastructure. I think that this department should be subject to a very powerful auditing team, both to curb tendencies toward intrusion on privacy and to question the effectiveness of policies and practices. Such an auditing team would have the authority to challenge the value of the “security theater” that takes place at airports.

I was already thinking about the issues that would lead me to propose the Chief Auditor function in 2022.

I would never claim that consolidating the executive branch to these exact eight functions is optimal. I wrote,

No re-organization can eliminate all overlaps. Departments will need joint committees to track some issues. For example, the departments of Economic Opportunity and Financial Operations will need a committee to ensure that payments to Social Security and Medicare recipients follow policy. Homeland Security and Infrastructure will need a committee to focus on protecting the electric grid.

Regardless of the exact organization structure, I suggested the following exercise:

Have the head of each of the eight departments choose existing organizational entities (sub-units of the current 157 cabinet departments, boards, and so on) the way team captains on a playground choose their teams. The department heads would make their choices based on the functions that they are supposed to perform. My guess is that under this approach many existing entities would not be picked at all. If so, then this would suggest that those entities can be phased out altogether.

Such a process would yield the sort of cuts in waste and inefficiency that the DOGE is supposed to achieve.

1. The title is a play on If I Ran the Zoo, a classic Dr. Seuss book that the nannies would cancel.