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 used 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.
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.
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.
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..
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 mail clerk (GS-4) 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 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.
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.
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.
I ran across this beautiful story today: “Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) told Campus Reform in an interview that the House Committee on Education and Labor will work with the new Department of Government Efficiency to peel back wasteful spending in higher education… ...”
and came away even more convinced that DOGE needs to play small ball and not swing for the fence. Musk and Ramaswamy need to cultivate the support of common sense members like Rep. Owens. At the top of their lists of things to do tomorrow really ought be contacting Rep. Owens directly and planning next steps on how DOGE can support him as well as wangling an invite for him to Mar-a-Lago or on the Trump plane to make sure this opportunity does not slip away. I am sure there are many other members sickened by all the waste and willing to do their part in their own way to cut back on it.
Trying to do everything by executive fiat won’t produce lasting change. And if you really want to get a Chief Auditor for the executive branch, you don’t need a DOGE. Draft up a bill – very easy – just use the Chief Financial Officer Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/5687/text ) as a template then send it off to your representative and senators and ask them to introduce. Then you have something to promote other than simply bright ideas that stand little chance of standing out from all the other bright ideas in the world.
If you want it to get traction though, you need to include offsets so that it is paid for at least, and even better, suggest something that will yield savings sufficient to help with something like offset expiring tax provisions. Since the vast sea of government entities already in the oversight racket are doing nothing at all, propose something dramatic like repealing the Inspector General Act of 1978, Pub. L. 95–452, as amended, with the proviso that chapters 35, 71 and sections 5595 severance pay and 5597 separation pay shall not apply nor shall personnel actions taken pursuant to the abolishment of the IG morass be subject to judicial or administrative law review. The provisions listed were designed to make any effort to reduce the size of government too administratively costly to be worth the time and effort. Just give everyone who gets fired a $10,000 parting gift instead to save money and make the effort worthwhile.
Once we know who will head the relevant committees then the draft bill can be sent to them as well. And who knows - I have been saving up to buy a copy of William Godwin's four volume History of the Commonwealth, perhaps I'll put that aside and buy a year of X membership instead so I can pester DOGE with legislative proposals such as this.
Tear em down Coach Kling and build em up . I’m uncertain about all the reorganization , but they need to get better. Smarter , quicker, more efficient and effective and less partisan. There’s no I in team.
There are lots of things to question in your proposal: Is it possibly better to have different groups with different approaches and goals gathering and analyzing intelligence separately?; Why not Homeland under dod?; DOD is a rather large infrastructure owner. Who would control their facilities?; DOD has a major command which is almost all civilians called the Corps of Engineers. Where would that go?; Looking more closely at the Corps, it does military engineering and forward bases in theater (somewhat separately from military engineers), installation infrastructure (in cooperation/competition with base ops), civil works (some of which is ownership of dams very similar to Bureau of Reclamation), and emergency response (mostly or all in support of FEMA). In my 30+ years with the Corps I worked in all four areas and with all the four of the overlapping groups. They also do environmental remediation with even more complicated overlaps. There is much to be gained by having this group of engineers together. Not least is the ability to shift personnel and expertise to different tasks in times of emergency or war. Where would you put them?
One of the issues with beetle sex studies or what have you (now being highlighted by Elon and Vivek's DOGE) is that the wasteful process is designated by statute to ensure an orderly progression from animal to human studies. This scheme was created in the 1970s and is dysfunctional because there many false positives and false negatives involved in animal studies. It would be more economical to adopt a more rational system of human testing to avoid the wasteful and misleading animal studies.
Of course the professional beggars who run these studies want to portray it as "the science," and they perceive society's waste as their critical sustenance, but I think fiscal hawks should sever the roots of waste rather than merely cleaning up the day-to-day squirts from the established waste factories.
I believe the original three departments were Defense, State, and Treasury. I think there was also an Attorney General. An Audit branch makes sense, especially given the dollars at Defense.
I second the 10th Amendment idea below. Texas has the same population as Australia, which has bloated government too, so the states have plenty of scale. See nclalegal.org for the Chevron fighters.
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 used 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.
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.
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.
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..
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 mail clerk (GS-4) 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 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.
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.
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.
I ran across this beautiful story today: “Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) told Campus Reform in an interview that the House Committee on Education and Labor will work with the new Department of Government Efficiency to peel back wasteful spending in higher education… ...”
(https://www.campusreform.org/article/education-cmte-will-work-dept-government-efficiency-cut-back-waste-higher-ed-rep-burgess-owens/26805 )
and came away even more convinced that DOGE needs to play small ball and not swing for the fence. Musk and Ramaswamy need to cultivate the support of common sense members like Rep. Owens. At the top of their lists of things to do tomorrow really ought be contacting Rep. Owens directly and planning next steps on how DOGE can support him as well as wangling an invite for him to Mar-a-Lago or on the Trump plane to make sure this opportunity does not slip away. I am sure there are many other members sickened by all the waste and willing to do their part in their own way to cut back on it.
Trying to do everything by executive fiat won’t produce lasting change. And if you really want to get a Chief Auditor for the executive branch, you don’t need a DOGE. Draft up a bill – very easy – just use the Chief Financial Officer Act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/5687/text ) as a template then send it off to your representative and senators and ask them to introduce. Then you have something to promote other than simply bright ideas that stand little chance of standing out from all the other bright ideas in the world.
If you want it to get traction though, you need to include offsets so that it is paid for at least, and even better, suggest something that will yield savings sufficient to help with something like offset expiring tax provisions. Since the vast sea of government entities already in the oversight racket are doing nothing at all, propose something dramatic like repealing the Inspector General Act of 1978, Pub. L. 95–452, as amended, with the proviso that chapters 35, 71 and sections 5595 severance pay and 5597 separation pay shall not apply nor shall personnel actions taken pursuant to the abolishment of the IG morass be subject to judicial or administrative law review. The provisions listed were designed to make any effort to reduce the size of government too administratively costly to be worth the time and effort. Just give everyone who gets fired a $10,000 parting gift instead to save money and make the effort worthwhile.
Once we know who will head the relevant committees then the draft bill can be sent to them as well. And who knows - I have been saving up to buy a copy of William Godwin's four volume History of the Commonwealth, perhaps I'll put that aside and buy a year of X membership instead so I can pester DOGE with legislative proposals such as this.
Tear em down Coach Kling and build em up . I’m uncertain about all the reorganization , but they need to get better. Smarter , quicker, more efficient and effective and less partisan. There’s no I in team.
There are lots of things to question in your proposal: Is it possibly better to have different groups with different approaches and goals gathering and analyzing intelligence separately?; Why not Homeland under dod?; DOD is a rather large infrastructure owner. Who would control their facilities?; DOD has a major command which is almost all civilians called the Corps of Engineers. Where would that go?; Looking more closely at the Corps, it does military engineering and forward bases in theater (somewhat separately from military engineers), installation infrastructure (in cooperation/competition with base ops), civil works (some of which is ownership of dams very similar to Bureau of Reclamation), and emergency response (mostly or all in support of FEMA). In my 30+ years with the Corps I worked in all four areas and with all the four of the overlapping groups. They also do environmental remediation with even more complicated overlaps. There is much to be gained by having this group of engineers together. Not least is the ability to shift personnel and expertise to different tasks in times of emergency or war. Where would you put them?
One of the issues with beetle sex studies or what have you (now being highlighted by Elon and Vivek's DOGE) is that the wasteful process is designated by statute to ensure an orderly progression from animal to human studies. This scheme was created in the 1970s and is dysfunctional because there many false positives and false negatives involved in animal studies. It would be more economical to adopt a more rational system of human testing to avoid the wasteful and misleading animal studies.
Of course the professional beggars who run these studies want to portray it as "the science," and they perceive society's waste as their critical sustenance, but I think fiscal hawks should sever the roots of waste rather than merely cleaning up the day-to-day squirts from the established waste factories.
How about privatization?
I believe the original three departments were Defense, State, and Treasury. I think there was also an Attorney General. An Audit branch makes sense, especially given the dollars at Defense.
I second the 10th Amendment idea below. Texas has the same population as Australia, which has bloated government too, so the states have plenty of scale. See nclalegal.org for the Chevron fighters.