Who let the DOGEs out?
What are we to make of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency?
As I was about to hit ‘send’ on this note Wednesday evening, December 18th, my Twitter feed blew up with dozens of stories of how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy had effectively vetoed the bipartisan Continuing Resolution bill negotiated by Republican Speaker of the House Michael Johnson, in the process demonstrating the power of their new DOGE platform, sewing chaos in the Republican Party and neutering not only Speaker Johnson but quite possibly Donald Trump as well. This story is very much ongoing, but rather than update my post, I am publishing it as it was before news of the coup broke.
America is about to embark on a great experiment, not for the first time in our history. This latest experiment will test not whether our Republic can long endure—although it may do that too—but whether the disruptive “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley can be successfully employed to radically reform the US government in ways that fundamentally reshape not only the operation of the federal government but also the relationship between American citizens and their government. At stake, according to Elon Musk, a man not known for the modesty of his ambitions, is not merely “the destiny of America”, but the “destiny of civilization” itself. And perhaps the future of human life on Mars.
One of the first actions taken by President-elect Trump following the November election was to name two high-profile billionaires, the “Great Elon Musk” and the “American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy” as co-heads of a new entity to be called the Department of Government Efficiency, a not-so-subtle play on Musk’s juvenile DOGE meme. In Trump’s DOGE announcement, the President-elect referred to this new initiative as the “Manhattan Project of our time” and said it will “send shockwaves through the system”, a metaphor with perhaps intentionally foreboding implications. According to Trump, the goal of the DOGE is to “drive large scale structural reform and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before”. “Together, these two great Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies”, said Trump.
And this is no doubt what the DOGE intends to do, with the full support of the President-elect, for now at least. But does President-elect Trump in fact have a clear mandate from voters to pursue this sort of reform agenda? If so, what is the scope of that mandate and how might it be implemented? How does deficit and debt reduction fit into this picture? What if any historical parallels might we (and they) look to for lessons to be learned? How likely is the DOGE to be successful, and what happens if it fails?
Let’s explore.
Did Trump win a mandate to pursue radical economic reform? Donald Trump claims to have received from the American people an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to pursue economic reform as a result of his “landslide” victory in the November election. “President Trump won in dominating and historic fashion”, said Trump spokesman Steven Cheung. “We had tremendous success, the most successful in over 100 years,” Mr. Trump told Indonesia’s president in a call that was recorded and played on Fox News. “It’s a great honor and so it gives me a very big mandate to do things properly.”
But is this correct? Did the November election results give Trump a clear mandate from the American people to pursue a radical economic reform agenda? And if so, does it matter that his mandate will be administered by two individuals who no one elected and who will not be subject to Senate confirmation?
The November presidential election was decided by one of the slimmest margins in US electoral history. It is true that Trump did (finally) win a plurality of the popular vote, but he did not win a majority, meaning that once again more people voted against Trump than voted for him (as was also the case in 2017 and 2020, by much larger margins). And his apparently sizable win in the Electoral College (312-226) was in the end decided by just 230,000 votes cast in three key swing states (PA, MI and WI). The Republican party maintained control of the House or Representatives, just barely (220-215), an outcome that was determined by approximately 7,000 votes cast across five districts, a margin of victory which one commentator described as “smaller than the crowd at a Texas high school football game”.
But if even this narrow electoral victory did give Trump some sort of mandate, as winning politicians often claim, one must ask: A mandate to do what exactly? During the campaign, Trump promised voters many things, not all of which were credible or even remotely consistent with one another. He promised not only to cut inflation (the rate of change in prices), but more dramatically to reduce consumer prices (the price of eggs!) back to where they were when he left office, with a 50% (“or more”) reduction in gas and energy prices. He promised to impose sizable across the board tariffs on imported good coming into America, including goods transported within the USMCA free trade zone, and he said that our foreign trading partners (not American consumers) would pay the duties. He promised to slash the federal deficit and reduce the federal debt while extending the legislated expiration of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and eliminating the taxation of income from tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits. He promised to gut federal regulation of business and increase domestic oil and gas production well beyond today’s record high levels (“drill baby drill”). And he promised to end illegal immigration at the southern border once and for all, and to deport 15-20 million undocumented immigrants now living in the United States, in the process saving the government hundreds of billions of dollars with little or no adverse impact on the industries who employ all these immigrants, freeing up a lot of great high-wage jobs for hard-working Americans desperate to swing a hammer, mow lawns and pick fruit.
In the process of making all these wonderful campaign promises, however, Trump expressly disavowed support for one particular thing: the Project 2025 reform agenda. At various points in the campaign Trump said that he had “nothing to do” with Project 2025 and had “no idea” who was involved, despite the many conservative activists who had worked in the first Trump administration and were now heavily involved with Project 2025, including Trump’s OMB head, Russell Vought. Trump described many of the Project 2025 policy goals as “absolutely ridiculous” and he vehemently denied suggestions that he would cut Social Security benefits. Trump’s statements came after polling suggested that many of the reforms proposed by Project 2025 were deeply unpopular with American voters, including Trump voters. And yet it is exactly this Project 2025 reform agenda which is now being actively promoted by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who claim that voters gave Trump (and therefore the DOGE) a mandate to turn the federal government upside down and inside out.
Many readers of this blog will likely have voted for Trump and may well support the DOGE (Project 2025) reform agenda. I myself declined the opportunity to vote for The Donald on three separate occasions, largely on the basis of his manifestly unfit moral character, but I do have some sympathy for elements of what Elon Musk et al are attempting to accomplish, as do many never-Trump Republicans and some of my Democratic friends as well. This doesn’t mean that I believe Trump has anything remotely resembling a ‘decisive mandate’ to pursue radical reform—he certainly didn’t get if from the 75 million of us who voted against him—but with Elon Musk now in charge, the Trump administration may well have enough political capital to implement major reforms if it can move fast enough and avoid making fatal mistakes, which is a big “if” when we are talking anything connected with Donald Trump.
If Elon Musk can succeed in the task he has set out for himself—does anyone really believe the DOGE idea came from Trump?—the second Trump administration may well go down as one of the most consequential administrations in US political history, and this time for positive reasons. But if Musk fails, all hell will likely break loose and we will all know exactly who to blame, with half of the electorate saying “I told you so”.
What will be Musk’s role in the new administration? On paper Elon Musk will be co-head of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, but it is eminently clear that Musk’s position in the new administration will be much more influential than this one advisory appointment suggests. As you may recall, Elon Musk personally endorsed Trump relatively late in the campaign, shortly after the Butler PA assassination attempt on Trump’s life. But once he endorsed Trump, after saying he would not contribute financially to either candidate, Musk reportedly spent over $250 million of his own money (and a lot of his personal capital) to get Trump elected. He flooded Twitter with statements of support for Trump and denigrations of the Democrats; he reposted crazy right-wing conspiracy theories from deep in MAGA land; he made numerous personal campaign appearances with Trump in key states, most notably dancing around with him on stage in PA “like a dipshit” according to Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, a name we will not long remember. This effort on Musk’s part paid off in spades, and so for the cost of a measly $250 million (chump change for him) and a few months of his time (when he should have been working elsewhere), the world’s richest man has now become arguably the single most powerful person in the United States government, without asking for or winning a single vote from American citizens.
What is the DOGE and how will it work? Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency will not be a ‘department’ of government, and its mandate will not be limited to matters of governmental ‘efficiency’ either. There is still a lot we don’t know about the structure and operation of the DOGE, but it appears to have been created in large part for the purpose of providing Elon Musk with a platform to direct the new administration’s economic reform agenda, without the necessity of Senate confirmation or compliance with cumbersome federal transparency and conflict of interest regulations applicable to members of formal Federal Advisory Committees. Putting Musk in charge of the DOGE gives Trump some much-needed private sector credibility and support, particularly with the Silicon Valley crowd and among skeptical members of Congress, and it may also provide Trump with a handy scapegoat if Musk’s plans to radically reform the federal government turn out to be a bust.
Trump made clear in his DOGE announcement that Musk and Ramaswamy will provide advice and counsel only from “outside of government”. Per Trump, any reform proposals developed by the DOGE will be coordinated with the Office of Management and Budget, to be headed by Russell Vought, who held this same position in the first Trump administration and who is one of the key architects of Project 2025. Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy will serve formally in the Trump administration, which will likely amplify rather than diminish their influence, not only with Trump but also with Congress and the public. With Musk and Ramaswamy now firmly in charge of Trump’s economic reform agenda—and free to lob hand grenades into the political process from the peanut gallery—the DOGE will be much more powerful and consequential than any of the other similar government commissions and advisory bodies set up by prior administrations to address the same types of issues now before the DOGE.
How does the DOGE plan to reform the federal government? It would be reasonable to expect that the primary goal of an entity called the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ would in fact be to promote ‘government efficiency’. And this is perhaps what Trump would like us to believe the DOGE is up to: cutting wasteful spending from a bloated federal budget. Cutting waste and improving the efficiency of government operations is of course a part of what the DOGE hopes to achieve, but Musk et al have much bigger ambitions than just making the federal government run like a well-oiled machine. (Good luck with that!). They not only want to make the federal government more ‘efficient’, they also want to cut federal spending to the bone, shift governance responsibility back to state and local authorities, and dramatically recast the role of the federal government in American life, taking us back to the 1950s, for better or for worse.
Per Elon Musk, the financial goal of the DOGE is to cut federal spending by $2 trillion annually within the next several years. At current spending levels, this would represent a 40% or so reduction in the total federal budget (ex-interest expense on the federal debt), an amount which on its face seems patently absurd, but which may not be as crazy as it sounds if Musk and Ramaswamy can figure out how to do it and can convince Congress and the American people to go along, which I expect they can.
None of this bodes well for the state of democracy in our constitutional republic, but it may well lay the groundwork for a long-overdue restructuring of the federal budget and potentially a reduction of the federal debt.
But what exactly does the DOGE have in mind? Once again, there is still a lot we don’t know, but here is what I have been able to piece together over the past few weeks from press reports and the barrage of tweets from Musk and Ramaswamy, starting with some of the least controversial items on their ‘to do’ list.
Modernizing government operations. There is little doubt that some federal government operations could be better managed than they are today, and this would seem to be a potentially fruitful area for exploration by the DOGE, well within its stated purview. As an example, Musk himself has posted on Twitter claims that the federal government could save upwards of $100 billion annually simply through ‘modernizing’ its legacy IT systems. I have no idea if this is reasonably achievable, or at what up-front cost, but I do know from experience that IT conversions can be notoriously difficult to implement and are rarely completed on time or on budget even in the private sector. And while Musk and his colleagues have some real expertise in this area, we should be somewhat cautious about proposals to “outsource” government operations to the private sector (and specifically to Silicon Valley) which is hardly a new idea and which has some very real potential conflicts of interest.
Reforming government procurement. Musk and Ramaswamy have pledged to reform federal procurement practices, but as of yet have not provided much guidance on how they plan to go about doing so. Procurement reform would seem to be particularly promising at the Department of Defense, the government agency with the largest discretionary budget. And Musk himself has already identified a few suspect DoD programs, including the F-35 fighter jets. (Who needs manned aircraft when we have drones?) This is again an area where Elon Musk has some experience, but also some large vested interests. And so I suspect we will see the DOGE lobbying for the sort of procurement reform which will benefit new age ‘challenger’ companies like SpaceX to the detriment of legacy incumbents like Boeing, no doubt with strong resistance from congressmen in districts with large amounts of defense industry investment and employment.
Privatizing the Post Office is another idea which seems to have great appeal to Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump, but which on further examination may not be as promising as it may seem on first glance. Conventional wisdom generally understands the US Postal Service is to be massively overstaffed and inefficiently managed with generally poor service, although I am not sure how true this is. But the USPS does employ something 600,000 people or 20% of the total federal work force, which may put it near the center of the DOGE’s target. It is often said on the right (and most recently by Trump) that the USPS should be privatized because “it is not profitable”, a statement which suggests a poor understanding not only of how privatization works but also of how government works. The USPS no doubt loses a boat load of money each year, even after four years of restructuring under the management of Trump-appointee Louis DeJoy, but this is in large part due to the fact that UPS, FedEx and others have over the past several decades cherry-picked most or all of the profitable delivery business from out of the Postal Service. This leaves the Post Office with the unenviable task of delivering generally low priority mail to every city, town and village in America and doing so at low prices to the consumer. But efficient or not, the USPS continues to deliver 24 million packages daily and to process 3700 pieces of mail every second of every day, and most of this is of no interest whatsoever to the private sector.
Slashing federal employment is also high on the DOGE hit list, perhaps in part because of the proclivity of federal employees to vote blue. But we are not talking about taking out a few thousand employees here or there, we are taking about millions of jobs. Elon Musk has threatened to reduce the federal workforce by as much as 80%, comparable to what he did at Twitter (albeit without the constraint of those irksome laws governing the civil service). On its face, this seems absurd, as with Musk’s $2 trillion budget cuts, but keep in mind here that 20% of the federal workforce is employed by the Post Office, which alone accounts for potentially 600,000 jobs.
How many people actually work for the federal government, and where are they all employed? Let’s look at some data. The federal workforce currently consists of around 2.9 million full-time civilian employees, of whom 700,000 (25%) work for the defense department and 600,000 (20%) work for the US postal service. The other top agency employers are Veterans Affairs (400k), Homeland Security (200k), and Justice and Treasury (100k each). But these numbers grossly understate the true size of the federal workforce, which in 2015 was estimated to have another 5.5 million or so contract and grant employees. Add in 1.3 million active-duty military personnel and the total federal government employee base comes close to 10 million, accounting for roughly 6% of the total US workforce. In terms of geographical distribution, the bulk of federal employees work in Washington DC, Virginia, Texas, California and Florida.
It is not entirely clear to me how exactly the Trump administration might go about reducing the size of the federal workforce. I would assume that most of this will come with the elimination or downsizing of particular administrative agencies (discussed below), but Musk et al have also been pushing some other creative ways to shrink the payrolls more directly and more quickly, for example by having Trump order all remote-working federal employees “back to the office now”, something which Musk has also done with his own companies. Many people believe this makes sense, although I for one am not convinced. But whatever one thinks of the merits in this particular context, one has to acknowledge the irony or audacity of this proposal coming from someone like Musk, who has himself been working remotely for quite some time now and presumably has no plans to stop.
Decimating the administrative state. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have made eminently clear that a primary focus of the DOGE will be on dismantling large portions of the administrative state, and in the process reducing dramatically not only the size of the federal government but also reducing the scope for federal regulation of business. This is all consistent with Trump’s own comments in his initial DOGE announcement, but Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy appear to be taking it to an entirely new level, with some support from Congress. House Speaker Johnson says that 75% of all federal agencies are potentially on the chopping block, a target which may be more aspirational than realistic but which suggests just how out-of-control some people think the federal government really is, or how little respect these people have for what our federal government actually does.
But just how many agencies are we talking about and how large are they? This depends on how one defines “agency”, but by one count there are over 400 federal agencies and sub-agencies which receive funding in the federal budget, most of which are actually quite small in budgetary terms at least. At the larger end, the Department of Health and Human Services (which administers Medicare and Medicaid) has an annual budget of close to $2 trillion and employs 83,000 people, and the Defense Department has a budget of close to $1 trillion and employs 3.4 million civilian and military personnel. In contrast, the Department of Education, the smallest of the cabinet level agencies, has a budget of $280 billion and just 4,000 employees, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a sub-cabinet agency, has a budget of $750 million (not billion) and 1,700 employees.
I am not sure which of these many federal agencies the Trump administration is really gunning for, but some federal agencies seem to particularly vulnerable, for reasons that may have less to do with government efficiency than with conservative ideology and tactical positioning in the culture wars. Let’s look at two of them.
Eliminating the Department of Education. I myself do not understand much about what the DoE actually does, and I would bet dollars to donuts that neither does Donald Trump. But what Donald Trump (and possibly the DOGE) may not yet understand is that the vast majority of the Department of Education’s $280 billion budget is not spent promulgating DEI regulations or mandating transgender access to restrooms in public schools, but rather administering and distributing large block grants and other forms of transfer payments to reimburse state and local governments for the cost of providing public education, funds which the state and local governments are happy for the federal government to provide. In addition to its general revenue sharing with state and local governments, the Department of Education also funds Pell grants (scholarships) to college students from poor families and administers the federal loan program for post-secondary students. And while the federal student loan program is both controversial and large, with total outstanding loans of $1.75 trillion made to over 46 million Americans, the budgetary impact from any reduction in this program going forward will likely be much smaller than one might think given the way it is funded (off the federal budget, through loan securitizations) and accounted for (a complicated topic for another time).
And while there may well be sound and principled economic efficiency reasons in many cases to oppose federal revenue sharing, which may incentivize an over-production of governmental programming at the state and local level, this is not what appears to be driving the interest of the DOGE. Rather, Musk et al seem mostly concerned with specific programs that are being funded by the DoE, particularly those which it believes promote DEI activities or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy in our schools.
Canning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB was created by Congress in the wake of the global financial crisis and it has never been popular with Republicans, going back to the days when it was just a fever dream of Senator Elizabeth Warren. Nor is it popular with the financial services industry, including Musk’s buddies in Silicon Valley, many of whom seem to have recently jumped onto the Trump/Musk bandwagon. Having said this, much of the political opposition to the CFPB seems to have as much or more to do with the nature of its mandate—protecting consumers against predatory activity by the financial services industry—as with how efficiently or effectively the CFPB executes this mandate. And according to Vivek Ramaswamy the Trump administration may find that is is much easier to eliminate the CFPB than other agencies because of a quirk in the way it is funded, via the Fed, rather than by direct appropriation from Congress. Which would certainly be ironic for those who sponsored the CFPB in the first place.
The war on woke. Musk and Ramaswamy seem to have gone out of their way to confirm widespread suspicions that the DOGE’s focus on government ‘efficiency’ is really just code for cutting federal spending on activities that they consider to be “progressive” (their word, not mine). Musk and Ramaswamy have stated publicly that they intent to “defund” organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the Public Broadcasting Corporation and the ACLU, the latter of which does not in fact receive any federal funding. And they are now proposing to slash or even “eliminate” all foreign aid, as called for recently by former Kentucky congressman Ron Paul, who seems to be particularly upset by the $9 billion or so the US spends each year on “humanitarian” aid, which he views as particularly “immoral” (his words). This should perhaps come as no surprise, as the PBS, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are all suspect organizations in MAGA land, and US foreign aid never polls well with American voters, particularly on the right. But the budgetary impact of eliminating foreign aid will likely be small, as it represents ca 1% of the federal budget, not the 25% which many voters seem to believe.
Entitlement Reform. When it comes to the federal budget, entitlement reform is really The Big Kahuna. Federal government spending on just the top three programs—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—now accounts for almost 60% of the total federal budget (ex-interest expense). But entitlement reform is also a very sensitive topic and any effort to reform these programs will be fraught with political danger, even with Musk in charge. I intend to write more on this subject in the future, but for now let’s just clarify a few terms and look at a few numbers to help set the stage for that more detailed discussion, and to put into context the scale of the challenges facing the DOGE.
The word ‘entitlement’ is an ambiguous and often emotionally laden term, which in popular usage encompasses two very different types of government-funded programs: ‘social insurance' and ‘welfare’. Social insurance programs are those which have a broad or universal base of public participation, like Social Security and Medicare, from which virtually all Americans over the age of 65 receive benefits and to which virtually all younger workers make contributions. Welfare programs on the other hand tend to be targeted to narrower groups of people who are deemed to be in need of special assistance for one reason or another, for example Medicaid or Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Over the past seventy years or so, entitlement spending has become a core part of the American way of life. Each month, the US federal government transfers hundreds of billions of dollars from one group of people to another, in many cases with little or no regard for individual need. Over half of all US households now receive cash or in-kind assistance from at least one federal entitlement program, and this proportion is over 40% even in households headed by a person under the age of 65 (when Social Security and Medicare benefits typically kick in). Eighty percent of people living in households headed by a single mother receive entitlement payments and nearly six out of every ten children in America grow up in a family receiving entitlements. (This data is from John F. Cogan’s excellent history of US entitlement programs, The High Cost of Good Intentions (Stanford University Press, 2017), which I highly recommend.)
Annual spending on Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and Medicare ($1 trillion) accounts for almost 40% of total non-interest federal spending and these two programs benefit something like 70 million Americans, many of whom participate in both programs. Medicaid costs the federal government another $900 billion a year—the states pick up a smaller share—which benefits over 88 million people including 40 million children. ACA ("Obamacare”) health insurance subsidies account for a much smaller share of the federal budget—around $80 billion a year—but 20 million people benefit directly from these subsidized policies and another 20 million have ACA-compliant but non-subsidized health insurance policies, including many people who were previously uninsured.
Social Security reform is widely known to be the “third rail” of American politics: Step on it and you die. And the same is almost certainly true of Medicare. This lesson has presumably not been lost on Donald Trump, who during the campaign committed not to cut either Social Security or Medicare, but it does not appear that Musk or Ramaswamy feel in the least bit constrained by Trump’s campaign promises. To my knowledge, Musk has not said much publicly on Social Security but he did recently repost with the cryptic comment “interesting” an extensive Twitter thread from Utah Senator Mike Lee, who has a long history of disparaging Social Security as a ‘Ponzi scheme’ which should be “pulled up by the roots”.
Immigration Reform. Immigration reform may not seem like a topic which should central to the DOGE’s “efficiency” mandate, but I have no doubt that Musk and Ramaswamy will be all over this one too. Elon Musk has a long history of commenting (often sensibly) on immigration reform, most notably with respect to high-talent immigrants like himself, who have found the US immigration system slow and cumbersome, or in his words “a laborious Kafkaesque nightmare”. During the campaign, however, Musk seems unfortunately to have jumped enthusiastically into the deep end of the MAGA cesspool, promoting half-baked immigrant conspiracy theories and tweeting about “sanctuary cities protecting child rapists”, with little apparent sense of context, fact checking or in some cases basic human decency. More recently, Musk and Ramaswamy have used their DOGE platform to express outrage at the amount of government spending on undocumented immigrants, “The scale of spending on illegal immigration boggles the mind” said Musk, unfortunately citing as his sole source of data a study conducted by FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration organization which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as a “hate group with ties to white supremacist groups”. But illegal immigration is by all accounts a huge problem in urgent need of attention and something which Musk and Ramaswamy should rightly be focused on. And if they play their cards right, perhaps they can temper some of Trump’s worst tendencies on this matter and save us all a lot of heartache and grief.
Deficits and the national debt. The US federal public debt now stands at an astounding $36 trillion, representing 120% of annual GDP, the result of deficit spending over the past twenty-five years in both Republican and Democratic administrations, as Musk and Ramaswamy have been highlighting in their posts. Bill Clinton was the last US president to preside over a balanced budget, accomplished in large part by virtue of a booming economy and the ‘peace dividend’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A portion of the subsequent growth in the federal debt is attributable to exceptional defense spending in certain periods, most notably in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Another portion is due to the large tax cuts passed under Bush and Trump. And the biggest amount is attributable to unanticipated federal spending during and after the global financial crisis and the covid pandemic, under Obama, Trump and Biden. But the silent killer which has been embedded within our federal budget for over seventy years now is entitlement spending, with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid being the primary culprits. And until we get control of this, there will be only so much that the DOGE or anyone else can do to get the federal budget under control.
The parallels with Reagan. Perhaps this is due to my age, but the whole DOGE/Project 2025 thing seems eerily reminiscent of what our country went through in the early 1980s during the first term of the Reagan administration. To his credit, Ronald Reagan was at the time and until today has been the only president in modern US history to have made a serious effort to get the federal budget under control. And while the Reagan administration did succeed in slowing the rate of growth of federal spending, the federal debt exploded out of control due to a nasty recession, Reagan’s large tax cuts and increased defense spending. Suffice it to say that things did not go entirely as planned, as I wrote about in a prior post, Reflections on Reaganomics. And as a result, Reagan’s promised “morning in America” proved in the end to be little more than a catchy campaign slogan. Or as the Brits might say, a bit of a damp squib.
Will the DOGE succeed? And what happens if it fails? Only time will tell whether this time is different than it was under Reagan. With Elon Musk in charge, and reporting (at least on paper) to Donald Trump, the odds of implementing radical economic reform are higher now than they have been in much of the past forty years.. But the odds of political chaos and dysfunction are also probably higher now than they have been ever since, well since the first Trump administration. “Move fast and break things” may be quite effective in Silicon Valley, where most new ventures fail and yet the capital keeps flowing in search of the ‘next big thing’. But this isn’t how republican government is meant to work. And revolution does not always lead to better times ahead, as history has repeatedly demonstrated.
But whatever one thinks of Donald Trump and Elon Musk—and I for one have been thinking way too much of them over the past few weeks—we are all in this boat together and we had better hope that it doesn’t sink. As for me, I am now well into my retirement years, and having considered the current state of play in Washington I have decided that I will now begin drawing my Social Security benefits, with or without Trump’s promised tax relief, before Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can get their hands on them.
Links
Trump’s DOGE Announcement, Truth Social, 12 November 2024
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government, WSJ, 20 November 2024
DOGE Details: The Knowns and Unknowns, Gibson Dunn, 6 December 2024
Musk Wants $2 Trillion of Funding Cuts. Here’s Why That’s Hard, WSJ, 26 November 2024
DOGE’s Big Ideas, WSJ, 5 December 2024
Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s Disrupter in Chief, The Economist, 21 November 2024
The Education of David Stockman, The Atlantic, December 1981