I am not optimistic about real change, although will remain hopeful for now. If I could recommend one specific thing for the new administration to do, it would be to hold public "operating review" meetings with each federal department. Same agenda for each ... why do you exist, what are your top priorities, what were your top accomplishments the last 4 years, how much $ did you spend. If we could just start with that I think a lot of the resistance to change would melt away because we would see the dysfunction and waste.
Reducing government starts with enforcing the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Different, even if leaner, organizational structure isn't what I propose. If central government is bad, more efficient central government is worse. Why not support federalism, which is what the USA is supposed to be according to the Constitution. I'm a classical liberal to the bone, too. I do not want a strong, efficient central government. We began running away from federalism with a vengeance in 1913. Why? I agree with Daniele Vecchi. Is it not entirely clear that we are not one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all? Federalism is the right answer, in my opinion.
The question of what should be decided at which level of jurisdiction is completely distinct from the matters of what should be done, and how to do them best in terms of competency, efficiency, neutrality, and prevention of politicized abuse of power. Some big things are inescapably going to be centralized and uniform, and so one cannot sidestep the problems by some hypothetical decentralization.
I will push back. Give me an example that we can talk about specifically. Name some "big thing" that requires for competency, efficiency, neutrality, and prevention of politicized abuse of power." Let's have that conversation.
I have wondered if it would be possible to impose federalism from the bottom up. If, say, 10% of states pass legislation wanting to take over some federal agency, then all states must take responsibility for it and the feds have to divest it. Same thing for counties/cities and states.
I think that the SCOTUS would have to rule on some state(s) attorney general(s) bringing a case that claims the 10th Amendment is being violated. But I am not a lawyer, so what do I know?
I see two possible problems with thinking this wouldn't have to go through Congress.
1) Congress directs how money is spent, and it's highly likely that specific programs and projects in specific departments have specific budgets, and the President can't just redirect or not spend the money. This also undercuts the 'empty shell' concept. I'm fairly certain this applies to civil service positions, as well.
2) While I see the utility of reducing span of control, I suspect you really aren't going to decrease the number of people that have to be appointed or you're going to leave high-level civil service people in charge. This is a potential issue with Trump's idea of making more high-level civil service positions into appointees. I think there's already over a thousand positions that need appointment and confirmation. Cutting down on that number would require legislation to eliminate or reorganize the postions.
On #1 "the President can't just redirect or not spend the money", actually he can on the latter, the Supreme Court has acknowledged the absolute discretion of the President at directing Executive Branch employee priorities including basically "never" per the concept of finite resources; any unspent money at the end of the fiscal year just reverts to Treasury and US theoretically uses to pay down the debt.
As a former Fed myself the FAR is the only thing that matters when it comes to money and nothing requires me to sign off on ANY expenditure. In practice a failure to execute will negatively reflect on your career as Congress wants their money spent as allocated BUT as long as your boss, Daddy President or the Agency Head, is openly willing via Executive Order or agency policy in writing (to protect you via a future MSPB action) to not actually execute a negative employment action as a result of your failing to execute there is literally nothing Congress can do, they have no FAR execution nor GS supervisory authority.
On #2, likewise you just leave the position unfilled and then the career civil service deputy (or the deputy's deputy but at some point you hit a GS-15), whom doesn't need confirmation and whom you have absolute control over, assumes temporary authority and you can drag "temporary" out for four years, it's happened before and like above there is court precedence.
It would be a faux pas but that is most government norms, when push comes to shove the President has absolute discretion ordering in writing all GS employees.
I'm sure that makes perfect sense to someone in your position but it will be mud to most readers who are not "former Fed". If you want people to understand--and maybe agree!--with your comment, do not use insider acronyms or insider jargon.
If we are talking a technical matter, you use concise technical terms as those specifics are what we are talking.about. Specifics matter when it comes to effectuating policy changes. If you don't understand the specifics, bit hubris to claiming it's broken or how to fix it. If you don't understand how the government actually goes about it's business, you aren't going to be able to change it. If you want to change how funding works, it's the FAR and nothing else. If you want to change how government employees work, it's MSPB and performance plans. Nothing else really matters because end of the day it's a GS-5 making the execution decisions and what matters is their motivation, i.e. punching a clock until tenure and then retirement, not grand proclamations of intent by any of the three branch heads.
Okay, but you are talking to people here who don't know what the significance of FAR or MSPB is, and who probably only have some vague idea that a GS-5 is a low-level government employee. They won't know if they agree or disagree with your comment because they won't know what you are saying. And it won't be their fault.
If your intended audience can't understand it, why bother writing a comment at all?
I'm making an assumption, should be valid TBH, that a person interested in reforming the government knows how the government actually works or else they are just blowing smoke and about as effective hence why politicians don't talk about the FAR lol. There are many Fed, ex-Fed, and Fed adjacent people on here including Arnold himself i believe, he damn well knows what the FAR is.
If the average John Smith , i.e. Elon Musk, doesn't specifically know about, for example, mandatory small business 8A set asides within Federal contract awarding, which is a significant chunk of both government graft and intentionally inefficiency, how is he supposed to address it? And no you can't say "his people will tell them" because they probably don't know either and the career contracting officers couldn't be fk'ed to bother to undermine their own careers and tell him.
If you or anyone who seems to "care" about Federal inefficiency can't be bothered to learn the actual levers of policy and budget EXECUTION then they are doomed to fail because they'll get marginalized by the bureaucracy which has its own agenda independent of whom is elected or in the cabinet (hence why cabinet members are generally irrelevant).
Reform works when you have specific policy changes you want to implement, not "oh I'll change who sits in the big boy chair and his pontifications alone will cause Betty, as GS-10 travel specialist with eighteen years of tenure, to ignore the FTR and piss her boss off whom will still be there doing her performance plan for the next four future administrations by refusing to sign off on his travel to that conference he wants to go to that happens to concide with the same time and location his kid is graduating college (true story btw)" all because the new agency head.of the week wants to "do something irrelevant but popular to makes the Prez and his base happy"
Sorry not going to happen. Musk doesn't even know what the FTR is, much less is it sexy enough to change nor would he have he authority. If you want to change those it's the OMB and OPM directors using the Federal Registry but hey Musk, Arnold, and Indian dude can shriek all they want about solutions that won't happen because they seem to think the problem is in policy or budget formulation (because that's how the media, think tanks, and politicians sell it) when in fact it's in policy and budget execution and, at least Arnold, is fully aware of that via public choice theory which I'm sure I've heard him reference before. As have others on this blog.
If you are assuming that people interested in reforming the government know as much as you do, you are a fool. If you think those are the only people worth writing for, then you probably shouldn't be writing here.
If on the other hand, you want to let the rest of us know how things really are and what might work or not work, you have to meet us where we are. And that means using language we can immediately understand.
Is that really so hard to understand? I realize I've gotten your back up by criticizing you like this and I'm sorry about that but I'm just so sick of, "I don't have to explain things for you hoi polloi. You should already know. Even though my comment is about how you don't know and I have to enlighten you."
I'll second Roger's message, which you seem to be not hearing. Using FAR and MPSB without even expanding the abbreviations are the hallmarks of a died-in-the-wool bureaucrat trying to baffle his audience with brilliance. It doesn't work.
You also have an inflated opinion of your own importance if you think knowing those abbreviations matters even a whit to cutting back the bureaucracy.
No one needs to know any of that to realize that subsidizing student loans is a racket, that an executive order shifting $400B of them to taxpayers is immoral and loses elections, or that paying for DEI and CRT indoctrination in grade school is an abomination.
Their meanings are no more relevant to draining the swamp than worrying about what what leeches and other parasites die as the waters recede.
Now that Trump's been re-elected with a stated focus on reform of the federal administration, there are predictably lots of recent "what to do about the bureaucracy" posts and articles out there and I've tried to read as many as possible to see if any even come close to passing the laugh test constructed on the rubric of my own extensive experiences and observations.
I am some combination of astonished and dismayed that none does. That's quite alarming. Many are written with hubris as regards confidence in assumptions that I know to be false, and with a cavalier attitude about the need to research some of these claims they must have absorbed when their rigorous-scrutiny / healthy-skepticism shields were down, before using these bad coordinates to shoot their canons the wrong way.
The bottom line is that pretty much all of these dogs are not just barking up their own respectively and uniquely wrong trees, but each of these trees aren't even on the same continent as ones that both could be done and would be worth doing.
What is wrong with the USG bureaucracy in any case when it appears to be performing poorly is NOT that is is like a badly-run for-profit company with well-run competitors. I.e., an institution where the telos is sufficiently clear that everyone understands and agrees upon what "better performance" even means, and where the room for improvement in matters of leadership, accountability, incentives, administration, organization, etc. is such that tweaks along these lines would be sufficient to turn things around.
Almost all the reforms proposed would yield wonderful crops if planted and harvested but only AFTER one removes all the land mines from the plot. If you try and do any of that beforehand, you are going to have a bad time. Arguing about whether certain farming practices would yield more crops is beyond premature and misses the main point.
Most of these writers simply find it very hard and foreign to think like the sinister Machiavels they will need to thwart and suppress as the first order of business in order to get anything done. You cannot just assume people will all cooperate in good-faith to correct something you see as an apolitical and obvious design bug when, to them, it's a fully-politicized feature.
It would be good, I think, for people who have not been reading your posts regularly to summarize what false assumptions etc. you are talking about. And as for making people in the bureaucracy cooperate, isn't the new administration planning to reintroduce Schedule F on Day 1? The administration probably assumes (lol) that would help somewhat if it actually came off and not eat a bunch of instant injunctions. Although now that I think of it, threatening to fire people is not the best tool to ensure cooperation and good faith.
You're correct and I've been working on exactly what you suggest.
To be honest I've been sitting on that stuff for a while and put it all on the back burner, but I have felt compelled by recent events to reallocate my attention toward it. I am no insider and I suspect it would be mistake to try to infer what it really being thought and planned at the highest levels of the Trump team from what is available in the public media. But given that limited and low quality info, and the track record of there never being any evidence of "4-dimensional chess" plays, my very preliminary and tentative conclusion is that they are not genuinely pursuing objectives which would have any long-term positive impact on anything that matters. To be fair, if they have concluded that they cannot win or are not willing to fight the necessary wars on those topics and to focus instead on a few more limited aims that can be accomplished by particular uses of executive power that circumvent the Maginot Line of typical judicial vetoes, then that approach is reasonable and justifiable, but also so miniscule in ambition that it cannot be reconciled with grandiloquent rhetoric about "reforming the bureaucracy". Furthermore it relies upon using powers that no anti-progressive wants a progressive President to have, but which use only further legitimates such future moves. Yes, I understand the logic of fighting fire with fire, playing hardball, bringing guns to gun fights, and so forth, and there is something to be said for this. But better to burn down the hardballs while you can, even if that means you don't get to throw one on your turn.
Schedule F is a whole other ball of wax. It is one of those things that could, theoretically, be legally done without having the survival chances of a sole commando toppling the North Korean regime by running naked through the DMZ. I believe it would be totally futile even as a deterrent to the kind of conduct the Trump team wishes to suppress, especially as people have been thinking strategically about how to deal with a possible Schedule F since the moment the idea was floated. Forestalling the kind of likely and intended-impact-neutralizing moves that would immediately result would require augmentation by implementing an entirely different level of policy reforms, akin to giving otherwise doomed and pinned-down ground forces the close air support they need not just to survive but also to go on to accomplish their mission.
I would run DOGE exactly the opposite and instead of attempting a reorganization or introducing even more oversight would start targeting the little things and build up from there. Big numbers come from smaller numbers being added together. And clearing out the undergrowth gives a better view of the law of the land. First rattle out of the box should be the traditional inaugural hiring freeze, a freeze on conference funding and travel, and a freeze on furniture purchases. Before requiring the employees to return to the office, the transition teams ought to be physically inspecting the federal office building and coming up with some estimates on the amount of rental space contracts that could be cancelled and money saved that way. The employees that actually process license applications and the like are likely already in the office. The employees doing advanced planning for the FY27 Pacific Islander GLBT+ Recognition Week festivities and the like are probably not.
To drain the swamp someone has to get down into the weeds and pull them out one by one.
Nobody in the federal civil service, including the OMB staff, is willingly going to not obstruct whoever the new director of the Office of Management and Budget turns out to be, so the Deputy Director for Management for management ought be assigned responsibility for assigning and following up on OMB staff analysis of DOGE suggestions on an expedited basis. Put all the communications up on the internet.
To that end, if I were running DOGE I would first put up some explanations on basics for all the people eager to assist. I realized yesterday when Tyler Cowen posted as a “fact of the day” the completely and utterly wrong statement that “The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year” and then publishes his own “how to run DOGE” piece which gives the spectacularly horrendous advice of focusing on only a few things.
There are going to be thousands of DOGE contributors and I would harness their collective energy by asking them to work in different teams each focusing on particular phase of governance like authorizations, appropriations, agency budgets, regulations, executive orders, and management issues.
The authorization team could split into groups to identify authorization law that needs to be repealed. My request for their assistance would be something like:
“DOGE authorization review team members, please pick a title of the United States Code (https://uscode.house.gov/ )and identify statutory language that common sense suggests could be repealed without harm to the nation. Please submit a statement identifying the statutory authorization language in question, identify if possible any possible appropriated funding associated with the provision, and any regulations. For example:
“Common sense suggests that the following program is unnecessary to national defense, of low priority, and its repeal would help address the financial crisis facing the nation:
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (https://www.hjf.org/ )
The stated statutory purpose of the Foundation is “(1) to carry out medical research and education projects under cooperative arrangements with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, (2) to serve as a focus for the interchange between military and civilian medical personnel, and (3) to encourage the participation of the medical, dental, nursing, veterinary, and other biomedical sciences in the work of the Foundation for the mutual benefit of military and civilian medicine.”
As a medical research grant issuing body it duplicates the mission of the National Institutes for Health. The authorizing statute states that the Council of Directors should report to the President however no such reports appear to be publicly available.
I had never heard of the Foundation before this morning but since I have always thought that Title 10 of the United States Code is the most embarrassing pile of legal slop in the universe, I just opened it up at random and it was the first thing I came across, striking me as shady, likely active in noncompetitive grants, and a typical publicly funded sinecure for retired military. A little sunlight disinfectant would likely not be a waste. And there are thousands of such programs squirreled away in the dark recesses of the code.
Because timing is everything and teams need goals, I would make a rescission bill a first priority. If the lame duck congress pushes through an omnibus, the first thing I would do is ask the volunteers to review it to identify possible rescissions. The first Trump administration submitted a rescission bill that passed the House but got shot down by a few votes in the Senate. In the mean time, one team of volunteers can be reviewing agency budget documents on the agency websites and another team can be going through appropriations bills as they are enacted.
The big picture stuff, major reforms etc, are going to take complicated legislation and if we ever find out who the members of the next Senate and House are going to be (ballots are still being counted in the second week after the election in this beloved second-rate banana republic of ours), Trump needs to get Vance on that case. Vance needs to work his former colleagues to let them take credit for the big stuff. And the more sympathetic members he can get to work with industry groups to come up with common sense major reform packages to cover all of government, the more likely something will be to stick. Trump relied upon a lot of swamp creatures his first time around, trusting they would work in good faith to advance his agenda. He should not make the same mistake this second time around..
There is an inherent contradiction. A President at best plans for 4 years so his ability to see tangible results in reorganizing the government operations are always limited and there is no certainty the new President will continue along those lines. The US would have the solid advantage of being a federal state where bureaucracy can be brought much closer to the customers: e.g. Switzerland where the powers given to municipalities and cantons are much more decentralized than in the US. Economies of scale do not justify the additional red taping they create in a world getting progressively digital. So 1. Reduce the State size to a bare minimal 2. Decentralize as much as possible.
The main constraint with this idea is that bureaucracies tend to forget the customer and focus on either the processes of the organization or the need for greater staff to accomplish the ‘mission creep’ that always arises. Presto , you’re back to being on hold for 2 hours to get answers to questions, and the offices start staffing up on enforcement. See the EU and UK. No thanks!
There are some easy ones in regulation that need not be uniform nationwide such as most environmental regulation, occupational health and safety, minimum wage, health and safety, much infrastructure with state level benefits.
The argument progressives often make is the problem of " the race to the bottom", by which they mean, "Local power is an illusion if limited by external competion." Local cost of living will of course determine local market wages. If you want to impose price controls to place a floor in the local market rate, it's hard to do so unless everyone else is forced to.
Reduce budgets and reductions in staff will follow. Conduct serious desk audits to see what, if anything, staff are doing and whether it’s useful. Assess whether technology (AI) could replace personnel. Evaluate regulations to determine if they are consistent with recent Supreme Court decisions. Drop regulations that are unsupported by rigorous analysis, especially if they are being challenged in the courts. Privatize certain federal activities — e.g., air traffic control — whenever possible. Many more reforms are possible, indeed necessary. Such reforms have been advocated at least since the Carter administration. Without congressional buy-in — or a president who is willing to act boldly and hope he will be upheld after endless appeals — DOGE will only achieve modest cost savings.
The problem with desk audit's is you are forgetting a lot of government jobs are just make work programs as a way to give people whom otherwise would be on public assistance a sense of meaning while figuring (the USG) 1% productivity is better than the 0% if they just sat home instead, the cost is the same either way to the taxpayer.
We had a guy recently retire in my previous office who was our dedicated mail clerk (GS-4) for his entire fifty year career, never mind we got maybe two parcels of mail a week, but he was proud he was contributing to our nation and it gave him his life's meaning. As a young man, he was outed in the Air Force and beaten to an inch of his life suffering permanent and significant brain damage in the process and spent five months in a non medically induced coma. He could have sat home on the taxpayers dole (SSDI, etc) probably drinking himself to death by 40 but instead via a make work Federally hiring program for people like him in the 1970s he stayed off that dole, lived a happy productive life, and brought us our mail full of positivity each day (even if it was to stop by each person and tell them no mail today) while saving all of us highly paid GS-14 type engineers from having to waste our time going to the mailroom daily on the off chance we got mail.
The USG and taxpayers won on that guy and hundreds of thousands of other useless eaters on the payroll just like him. It's inefficient by design hence why special hiring and contract awarding preferences exist. People oddly think the USG is inefficient because of bureaucracy, laziness, etc and sure that contributes but the vast majority of it is by willful design to promote a public policy goal. We intentionally award contracts to companies that we know won't perform and cost more than their competitors simply as a way to give them money. We hire inferior people whom we know won't be productive and give them jobs like "Lactation Manager" (yes that is a real job in NOAA, their entire duty is to once a year send out an email reminding NOAA employees that they can breastfeed at work; no I'm not joking). She probably shouldn't be a GS-13 but she is because just like our mail clerk, we need a way to give overeducated unemployable women a job otherwise they might have to get married, turn to prostitution, or more likely end up on the public dole as useless women are wont to do. This way she feels important and hey, we don't have to waste anyone else's time writing that email once a year.
2 more suggestions: (1) For units/departments with overtly-obstructionist-leftist managers who can't be fired (the deep state), restructure their departments and slot them into a non-functioning position with no staff to manage. And (2), create an ombudsman unit charged with reviewing all studies and surveys which government units rely upon as to their structural validity and their unbiased and statistically valid conclusions, such as for CDC, NIH, FDA, EPA, so there are no more horrors like the unscientific mask mandates and school closures we had to endure.
"A President could simply give one person the authority to be the single point of communication between himself and every agency."---this is the czar model, which can work and can fail. Its success depends very heavily on said czar being respected by agency heads, which flows from the czar's proximity the the president. And when a president is as mercurial as Mr. Trump---well, good luck.
Yes, and shall we speak of the information assymentries problem? The czar inevitably relies heavily on the various department heads to know what is going on. Which means they can play him.
All new hires sign on for a maximum of 8 years. Congress passing a law to get rid of lifelong govt bureaucrats, called euphemistically public servants, would be a huge improvement. As govt officials leave, then try to get real jobs, they will remember the problems and be more willing to discuss them honestly.
Using AI for most taxpayer/ voter comments and info requests, including FOIA requests, could also help.
In the already weaponized DoJ, Dem & Rep partisanship should be explicitly recognized with specific checks & balances. Two new offices should be created: a 75% Rep office to investigate Democrats and govt bureaucrats, and a 75% Dem office to investigate Republicans and govt bureaucrats. HR Clinton's illegal email server should have been investigated by Reps in the DoJ, with limited Dem involvement. The Russia Hoax should have been investigated by Dems, with limited Rep involvement -- the Mueller witch hunt of over 40 investigators had no recent Reps, tho Mueller was registered as Rep in 2001. It should have been 30 Dems & 10 Reps, all hired in the 7 years before.
I am not optimistic about real change, although will remain hopeful for now. If I could recommend one specific thing for the new administration to do, it would be to hold public "operating review" meetings with each federal department. Same agenda for each ... why do you exist, what are your top priorities, what were your top accomplishments the last 4 years, how much $ did you spend. If we could just start with that I think a lot of the resistance to change would melt away because we would see the dysfunction and waste.
Reducing government starts with enforcing the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Different, even if leaner, organizational structure isn't what I propose. If central government is bad, more efficient central government is worse. Why not support federalism, which is what the USA is supposed to be according to the Constitution. I'm a classical liberal to the bone, too. I do not want a strong, efficient central government. We began running away from federalism with a vengeance in 1913. Why? I agree with Daniele Vecchi. Is it not entirely clear that we are not one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all? Federalism is the right answer, in my opinion.
The question of what should be decided at which level of jurisdiction is completely distinct from the matters of what should be done, and how to do them best in terms of competency, efficiency, neutrality, and prevention of politicized abuse of power. Some big things are inescapably going to be centralized and uniform, and so one cannot sidestep the problems by some hypothetical decentralization.
I will push back. Give me an example that we can talk about specifically. Name some "big thing" that requires for competency, efficiency, neutrality, and prevention of politicized abuse of power." Let's have that conversation.
I have wondered if it would be possible to impose federalism from the bottom up. If, say, 10% of states pass legislation wanting to take over some federal agency, then all states must take responsibility for it and the feds have to divest it. Same thing for counties/cities and states.
I think that the SCOTUS would have to rule on some state(s) attorney general(s) bringing a case that claims the 10th Amendment is being violated. But I am not a lawyer, so what do I know?
I'd never thought about the actual mechanisms, just the general concept. Before your comment, I'd have guessed it would need an amendment.
I see two possible problems with thinking this wouldn't have to go through Congress.
1) Congress directs how money is spent, and it's highly likely that specific programs and projects in specific departments have specific budgets, and the President can't just redirect or not spend the money. This also undercuts the 'empty shell' concept. I'm fairly certain this applies to civil service positions, as well.
2) While I see the utility of reducing span of control, I suspect you really aren't going to decrease the number of people that have to be appointed or you're going to leave high-level civil service people in charge. This is a potential issue with Trump's idea of making more high-level civil service positions into appointees. I think there's already over a thousand positions that need appointment and confirmation. Cutting down on that number would require legislation to eliminate or reorganize the postions.
On #1 "the President can't just redirect or not spend the money", actually he can on the latter, the Supreme Court has acknowledged the absolute discretion of the President at directing Executive Branch employee priorities including basically "never" per the concept of finite resources; any unspent money at the end of the fiscal year just reverts to Treasury and US theoretically uses to pay down the debt.
As a former Fed myself the FAR is the only thing that matters when it comes to money and nothing requires me to sign off on ANY expenditure. In practice a failure to execute will negatively reflect on your career as Congress wants their money spent as allocated BUT as long as your boss, Daddy President or the Agency Head, is openly willing via Executive Order or agency policy in writing (to protect you via a future MSPB action) to not actually execute a negative employment action as a result of your failing to execute there is literally nothing Congress can do, they have no FAR execution nor GS supervisory authority.
On #2, likewise you just leave the position unfilled and then the career civil service deputy (or the deputy's deputy but at some point you hit a GS-15), whom doesn't need confirmation and whom you have absolute control over, assumes temporary authority and you can drag "temporary" out for four years, it's happened before and like above there is court precedence.
It would be a faux pas but that is most government norms, when push comes to shove the President has absolute discretion ordering in writing all GS employees.
"they have no FAR execution nor GS supervisory"
I'm sure that makes perfect sense to someone in your position but it will be mud to most readers who are not "former Fed". If you want people to understand--and maybe agree!--with your comment, do not use insider acronyms or insider jargon.
If we are talking a technical matter, you use concise technical terms as those specifics are what we are talking.about. Specifics matter when it comes to effectuating policy changes. If you don't understand the specifics, bit hubris to claiming it's broken or how to fix it. If you don't understand how the government actually goes about it's business, you aren't going to be able to change it. If you want to change how funding works, it's the FAR and nothing else. If you want to change how government employees work, it's MSPB and performance plans. Nothing else really matters because end of the day it's a GS-5 making the execution decisions and what matters is their motivation, i.e. punching a clock until tenure and then retirement, not grand proclamations of intent by any of the three branch heads.
Okay, but you are talking to people here who don't know what the significance of FAR or MSPB is, and who probably only have some vague idea that a GS-5 is a low-level government employee. They won't know if they agree or disagree with your comment because they won't know what you are saying. And it won't be their fault.
If your intended audience can't understand it, why bother writing a comment at all?
I'm making an assumption, should be valid TBH, that a person interested in reforming the government knows how the government actually works or else they are just blowing smoke and about as effective hence why politicians don't talk about the FAR lol. There are many Fed, ex-Fed, and Fed adjacent people on here including Arnold himself i believe, he damn well knows what the FAR is.
If the average John Smith , i.e. Elon Musk, doesn't specifically know about, for example, mandatory small business 8A set asides within Federal contract awarding, which is a significant chunk of both government graft and intentionally inefficiency, how is he supposed to address it? And no you can't say "his people will tell them" because they probably don't know either and the career contracting officers couldn't be fk'ed to bother to undermine their own careers and tell him.
If you or anyone who seems to "care" about Federal inefficiency can't be bothered to learn the actual levers of policy and budget EXECUTION then they are doomed to fail because they'll get marginalized by the bureaucracy which has its own agenda independent of whom is elected or in the cabinet (hence why cabinet members are generally irrelevant).
Reform works when you have specific policy changes you want to implement, not "oh I'll change who sits in the big boy chair and his pontifications alone will cause Betty, as GS-10 travel specialist with eighteen years of tenure, to ignore the FTR and piss her boss off whom will still be there doing her performance plan for the next four future administrations by refusing to sign off on his travel to that conference he wants to go to that happens to concide with the same time and location his kid is graduating college (true story btw)" all because the new agency head.of the week wants to "do something irrelevant but popular to makes the Prez and his base happy"
Sorry not going to happen. Musk doesn't even know what the FTR is, much less is it sexy enough to change nor would he have he authority. If you want to change those it's the OMB and OPM directors using the Federal Registry but hey Musk, Arnold, and Indian dude can shriek all they want about solutions that won't happen because they seem to think the problem is in policy or budget formulation (because that's how the media, think tanks, and politicians sell it) when in fact it's in policy and budget execution and, at least Arnold, is fully aware of that via public choice theory which I'm sure I've heard him reference before. As have others on this blog.
If you are assuming that people interested in reforming the government know as much as you do, you are a fool. If you think those are the only people worth writing for, then you probably shouldn't be writing here.
If on the other hand, you want to let the rest of us know how things really are and what might work or not work, you have to meet us where we are. And that means using language we can immediately understand.
Is that really so hard to understand? I realize I've gotten your back up by criticizing you like this and I'm sorry about that but I'm just so sick of, "I don't have to explain things for you hoi polloi. You should already know. Even though my comment is about how you don't know and I have to enlighten you."
P.S., you aren't writing to Elon Musk here.
I'm probably going to regret this tomorrow.
I'll second Roger's message, which you seem to be not hearing. Using FAR and MPSB without even expanding the abbreviations are the hallmarks of a died-in-the-wool bureaucrat trying to baffle his audience with brilliance. It doesn't work.
You also have an inflated opinion of your own importance if you think knowing those abbreviations matters even a whit to cutting back the bureaucracy.
No one needs to know any of that to realize that subsidizing student loans is a racket, that an executive order shifting $400B of them to taxpayers is immoral and loses elections, or that paying for DEI and CRT indoctrination in grade school is an abomination.
Their meanings are no more relevant to draining the swamp than worrying about what what leeches and other parasites die as the waters recede.
Now that Trump's been re-elected with a stated focus on reform of the federal administration, there are predictably lots of recent "what to do about the bureaucracy" posts and articles out there and I've tried to read as many as possible to see if any even come close to passing the laugh test constructed on the rubric of my own extensive experiences and observations.
I am some combination of astonished and dismayed that none does. That's quite alarming. Many are written with hubris as regards confidence in assumptions that I know to be false, and with a cavalier attitude about the need to research some of these claims they must have absorbed when their rigorous-scrutiny / healthy-skepticism shields were down, before using these bad coordinates to shoot their canons the wrong way.
The bottom line is that pretty much all of these dogs are not just barking up their own respectively and uniquely wrong trees, but each of these trees aren't even on the same continent as ones that both could be done and would be worth doing.
What is wrong with the USG bureaucracy in any case when it appears to be performing poorly is NOT that is is like a badly-run for-profit company with well-run competitors. I.e., an institution where the telos is sufficiently clear that everyone understands and agrees upon what "better performance" even means, and where the room for improvement in matters of leadership, accountability, incentives, administration, organization, etc. is such that tweaks along these lines would be sufficient to turn things around.
Almost all the reforms proposed would yield wonderful crops if planted and harvested but only AFTER one removes all the land mines from the plot. If you try and do any of that beforehand, you are going to have a bad time. Arguing about whether certain farming practices would yield more crops is beyond premature and misses the main point.
Most of these writers simply find it very hard and foreign to think like the sinister Machiavels they will need to thwart and suppress as the first order of business in order to get anything done. You cannot just assume people will all cooperate in good-faith to correct something you see as an apolitical and obvious design bug when, to them, it's a fully-politicized feature.
It would be good, I think, for people who have not been reading your posts regularly to summarize what false assumptions etc. you are talking about. And as for making people in the bureaucracy cooperate, isn't the new administration planning to reintroduce Schedule F on Day 1? The administration probably assumes (lol) that would help somewhat if it actually came off and not eat a bunch of instant injunctions. Although now that I think of it, threatening to fire people is not the best tool to ensure cooperation and good faith.
You're correct and I've been working on exactly what you suggest.
To be honest I've been sitting on that stuff for a while and put it all on the back burner, but I have felt compelled by recent events to reallocate my attention toward it. I am no insider and I suspect it would be mistake to try to infer what it really being thought and planned at the highest levels of the Trump team from what is available in the public media. But given that limited and low quality info, and the track record of there never being any evidence of "4-dimensional chess" plays, my very preliminary and tentative conclusion is that they are not genuinely pursuing objectives which would have any long-term positive impact on anything that matters. To be fair, if they have concluded that they cannot win or are not willing to fight the necessary wars on those topics and to focus instead on a few more limited aims that can be accomplished by particular uses of executive power that circumvent the Maginot Line of typical judicial vetoes, then that approach is reasonable and justifiable, but also so miniscule in ambition that it cannot be reconciled with grandiloquent rhetoric about "reforming the bureaucracy". Furthermore it relies upon using powers that no anti-progressive wants a progressive President to have, but which use only further legitimates such future moves. Yes, I understand the logic of fighting fire with fire, playing hardball, bringing guns to gun fights, and so forth, and there is something to be said for this. But better to burn down the hardballs while you can, even if that means you don't get to throw one on your turn.
Schedule F is a whole other ball of wax. It is one of those things that could, theoretically, be legally done without having the survival chances of a sole commando toppling the North Korean regime by running naked through the DMZ. I believe it would be totally futile even as a deterrent to the kind of conduct the Trump team wishes to suppress, especially as people have been thinking strategically about how to deal with a possible Schedule F since the moment the idea was floated. Forestalling the kind of likely and intended-impact-neutralizing moves that would immediately result would require augmentation by implementing an entirely different level of policy reforms, akin to giving otherwise doomed and pinned-down ground forces the close air support they need not just to survive but also to go on to accomplish their mission.
I would run DOGE exactly the opposite and instead of attempting a reorganization or introducing even more oversight would start targeting the little things and build up from there. Big numbers come from smaller numbers being added together. And clearing out the undergrowth gives a better view of the law of the land. First rattle out of the box should be the traditional inaugural hiring freeze, a freeze on conference funding and travel, and a freeze on furniture purchases. Before requiring the employees to return to the office, the transition teams ought to be physically inspecting the federal office building and coming up with some estimates on the amount of rental space contracts that could be cancelled and money saved that way. The employees that actually process license applications and the like are likely already in the office. The employees doing advanced planning for the FY27 Pacific Islander GLBT+ Recognition Week festivities and the like are probably not.
To drain the swamp someone has to get down into the weeds and pull them out one by one.
Nobody in the federal civil service, including the OMB staff, is willingly going to not obstruct whoever the new director of the Office of Management and Budget turns out to be, so the Deputy Director for Management for management ought be assigned responsibility for assigning and following up on OMB staff analysis of DOGE suggestions on an expedited basis. Put all the communications up on the internet.
To that end, if I were running DOGE I would first put up some explanations on basics for all the people eager to assist. I realized yesterday when Tyler Cowen posted as a “fact of the day” the completely and utterly wrong statement that “The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year” and then publishes his own “how to run DOGE” piece which gives the spectacularly horrendous advice of focusing on only a few things.
There are going to be thousands of DOGE contributors and I would harness their collective energy by asking them to work in different teams each focusing on particular phase of governance like authorizations, appropriations, agency budgets, regulations, executive orders, and management issues.
The authorization team could split into groups to identify authorization law that needs to be repealed. My request for their assistance would be something like:
“DOGE authorization review team members, please pick a title of the United States Code (https://uscode.house.gov/ )and identify statutory language that common sense suggests could be repealed without harm to the nation. Please submit a statement identifying the statutory authorization language in question, identify if possible any possible appropriated funding associated with the provision, and any regulations. For example:
“Common sense suggests that the following program is unnecessary to national defense, of low priority, and its repeal would help address the financial crisis facing the nation:
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (https://www.hjf.org/ )
The stated statutory purpose of the Foundation is “(1) to carry out medical research and education projects under cooperative arrangements with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, (2) to serve as a focus for the interchange between military and civilian medical personnel, and (3) to encourage the participation of the medical, dental, nursing, veterinary, and other biomedical sciences in the work of the Foundation for the mutual benefit of military and civilian medicine.”
As a medical research grant issuing body it duplicates the mission of the National Institutes for Health. The authorizing statute states that the Council of Directors should report to the President however no such reports appear to be publicly available.
Authorizing language: 10 USC 178:
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title10-section178&num=0&edition=prelim enacted in Pub. L. 98–36, §2(a) (and amendments)
Funding sources for the foundation are unknown. Military medical research is funded through the Defense Health Program account. Its budget request is at: https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2025/budget_justification/pdfs/09_Defense_Health_Program/00-DHP_Vols_I_and_II_PB25.pdf “
I had never heard of the Foundation before this morning but since I have always thought that Title 10 of the United States Code is the most embarrassing pile of legal slop in the universe, I just opened it up at random and it was the first thing I came across, striking me as shady, likely active in noncompetitive grants, and a typical publicly funded sinecure for retired military. A little sunlight disinfectant would likely not be a waste. And there are thousands of such programs squirreled away in the dark recesses of the code.
Because timing is everything and teams need goals, I would make a rescission bill a first priority. If the lame duck congress pushes through an omnibus, the first thing I would do is ask the volunteers to review it to identify possible rescissions. The first Trump administration submitted a rescission bill that passed the House but got shot down by a few votes in the Senate. In the mean time, one team of volunteers can be reviewing agency budget documents on the agency websites and another team can be going through appropriations bills as they are enacted.
The big picture stuff, major reforms etc, are going to take complicated legislation and if we ever find out who the members of the next Senate and House are going to be (ballots are still being counted in the second week after the election in this beloved second-rate banana republic of ours), Trump needs to get Vance on that case. Vance needs to work his former colleagues to let them take credit for the big stuff. And the more sympathetic members he can get to work with industry groups to come up with common sense major reform packages to cover all of government, the more likely something will be to stick. Trump relied upon a lot of swamp creatures his first time around, trusting they would work in good faith to advance his agenda. He should not make the same mistake this second time around..
There is an inherent contradiction. A President at best plans for 4 years so his ability to see tangible results in reorganizing the government operations are always limited and there is no certainty the new President will continue along those lines. The US would have the solid advantage of being a federal state where bureaucracy can be brought much closer to the customers: e.g. Switzerland where the powers given to municipalities and cantons are much more decentralized than in the US. Economies of scale do not justify the additional red taping they create in a world getting progressively digital. So 1. Reduce the State size to a bare minimal 2. Decentralize as much as possible.
The main constraint with this idea is that bureaucracies tend to forget the customer and focus on either the processes of the organization or the need for greater staff to accomplish the ‘mission creep’ that always arises. Presto , you’re back to being on hold for 2 hours to get answers to questions, and the offices start staffing up on enforcement. See the EU and UK. No thanks!
There are some easy ones in regulation that need not be uniform nationwide such as most environmental regulation, occupational health and safety, minimum wage, health and safety, much infrastructure with state level benefits.
Why would you want a national minimum wage when the cost of living differs so much, even county to county?
The argument progressives often make is the problem of " the race to the bottom", by which they mean, "Local power is an illusion if limited by external competion." Local cost of living will of course determine local market wages. If you want to impose price controls to place a floor in the local market rate, it's hard to do so unless everyone else is forced to.
Take Medicare off balance sheet and fund it through a resource based domestic resource trust fund as Norway presently does.
Have you considered applying here?
https://x.com/DOGE/status/1857076831104434289
Reduce budgets and reductions in staff will follow. Conduct serious desk audits to see what, if anything, staff are doing and whether it’s useful. Assess whether technology (AI) could replace personnel. Evaluate regulations to determine if they are consistent with recent Supreme Court decisions. Drop regulations that are unsupported by rigorous analysis, especially if they are being challenged in the courts. Privatize certain federal activities — e.g., air traffic control — whenever possible. Many more reforms are possible, indeed necessary. Such reforms have been advocated at least since the Carter administration. Without congressional buy-in — or a president who is willing to act boldly and hope he will be upheld after endless appeals — DOGE will only achieve modest cost savings.
The problem with desk audit's is you are forgetting a lot of government jobs are just make work programs as a way to give people whom otherwise would be on public assistance a sense of meaning while figuring (the USG) 1% productivity is better than the 0% if they just sat home instead, the cost is the same either way to the taxpayer.
We had a guy recently retire in my previous office who was our dedicated mail clerk (GS-4) for his entire fifty year career, never mind we got maybe two parcels of mail a week, but he was proud he was contributing to our nation and it gave him his life's meaning. As a young man, he was outed in the Air Force and beaten to an inch of his life suffering permanent and significant brain damage in the process and spent five months in a non medically induced coma. He could have sat home on the taxpayers dole (SSDI, etc) probably drinking himself to death by 40 but instead via a make work Federally hiring program for people like him in the 1970s he stayed off that dole, lived a happy productive life, and brought us our mail full of positivity each day (even if it was to stop by each person and tell them no mail today) while saving all of us highly paid GS-14 type engineers from having to waste our time going to the mailroom daily on the off chance we got mail.
The USG and taxpayers won on that guy and hundreds of thousands of other useless eaters on the payroll just like him. It's inefficient by design hence why special hiring and contract awarding preferences exist. People oddly think the USG is inefficient because of bureaucracy, laziness, etc and sure that contributes but the vast majority of it is by willful design to promote a public policy goal. We intentionally award contracts to companies that we know won't perform and cost more than their competitors simply as a way to give them money. We hire inferior people whom we know won't be productive and give them jobs like "Lactation Manager" (yes that is a real job in NOAA, their entire duty is to once a year send out an email reminding NOAA employees that they can breastfeed at work; no I'm not joking). She probably shouldn't be a GS-13 but she is because just like our mail clerk, we need a way to give overeducated unemployable women a job otherwise they might have to get married, turn to prostitution, or more likely end up on the public dole as useless women are wont to do. This way she feels important and hey, we don't have to waste anyone else's time writing that email once a year.
Not what the Founders had in mind.
DOGE is a labor of Sisyphus.
Technology shock from advanced AI, and consequent massive economic dislocation, might induce more upheaval in governance at some point than any DOGE.
2 more suggestions: (1) For units/departments with overtly-obstructionist-leftist managers who can't be fired (the deep state), restructure their departments and slot them into a non-functioning position with no staff to manage. And (2), create an ombudsman unit charged with reviewing all studies and surveys which government units rely upon as to their structural validity and their unbiased and statistically valid conclusions, such as for CDC, NIH, FDA, EPA, so there are no more horrors like the unscientific mask mandates and school closures we had to endure.
"A President could simply give one person the authority to be the single point of communication between himself and every agency."---this is the czar model, which can work and can fail. Its success depends very heavily on said czar being respected by agency heads, which flows from the czar's proximity the the president. And when a president is as mercurial as Mr. Trump---well, good luck.
And, of course, one person has only 24 hours in a day. He will miss at least 90% of what's important.
Yes, and shall we speak of the information assymentries problem? The czar inevitably relies heavily on the various department heads to know what is going on. Which means they can play him.
Does this make sense? Yes.
How incompatible is it with Trump? 100%
All new hires sign on for a maximum of 8 years. Congress passing a law to get rid of lifelong govt bureaucrats, called euphemistically public servants, would be a huge improvement. As govt officials leave, then try to get real jobs, they will remember the problems and be more willing to discuss them honestly.
Using AI for most taxpayer/ voter comments and info requests, including FOIA requests, could also help.
In the already weaponized DoJ, Dem & Rep partisanship should be explicitly recognized with specific checks & balances. Two new offices should be created: a 75% Rep office to investigate Democrats and govt bureaucrats, and a 75% Dem office to investigate Republicans and govt bureaucrats. HR Clinton's illegal email server should have been investigated by Reps in the DoJ, with limited Dem involvement. The Russia Hoax should have been investigated by Dems, with limited Rep involvement -- the Mueller witch hunt of over 40 investigators had no recent Reps, tho Mueller was registered as Rep in 2001. It should have been 30 Dems & 10 Reps, all hired in the 7 years before.
Maybe we could start by asking if Tesla is actually an efficient company
https://drucker.institute/rankings-2023/