Can Elon and Vivek Lead Us to a More Efficient Government? Not with Congress unwilling to give up money and power. By Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann
https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/06/can-elon-and-vivek-lead-us-to-a-more-efficient-government/
Once Donald Trump is inaugurated as our 47th U.S. president, Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter CEO Elon Musk will likely head a Department of Government Efficiency commission (DOGE). Teaming up with tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, this dynamic duo will focus on “drastic reforms” targeting “the entire federal government.”
Already there is talk that Musk and Ramaswamy have identified work-at-home policies for federal workers in an effort to trim $2 billion of bloat from the budget. One area they are targeting is waste at the Veterans Administration.
You might not support the movement to “transition” our country to electric vehicles. But you must be impressed with the sheer determination and sense of urgency Elon Musk applied to his vision of building EVs to scale as he did with Tesla. Similarly, Musk brought the U.S. space program back into existence with similar single-mindedness, having achieved 100 successful year-to-date space missions in 2024 with more to come.
A core aspect of his approach to development and production was found in his recent biography, a five-step process that he refers to as “the algorithm.”
-
Question every requirement. Never accept a requirement that came from a department or committee.
-
Delete any process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back 10 percent of them, you didn’t delete enough.
-
Simplify and optimize. This should come right after Step 2. Do not simplify and optimize a process that should not exist.
-
Accelerate cycle time. Every procedure can be sped up.
-
Automate. This comes last. Do not automate until all requirements have been questioned, processes have been deleted, everything has been simplified, and procedures have been sped up.
Imagine if these five steps were applied to reforming the U.S. government. It would probably look a lot like what Musk achieved with X/Twitter. Less than two years after Musk acquired the company, it operates today with 80 percent fewer employees and is much more productive, accurate, timely, and ideologically balanced.
Even if progressives, for primarily ideological reasons, hate Elon, can anyone argue with the simple fact that anything can be made more efficient if people have the will to do so? It is therefore high time to look at the sheer magnitude of our government and how much money we shell out for its services.
We’re Spending How Much?
Total federal spending for fiscal 2024, which ended in September, was $6.752 trillion, a 52 percent increase from $4.447 trillion in 2019. Meanwhile, the national debt, at the time of this writing, has exploded from $22.7 trillion in 2019 to $36 trillion today, a 59 percent increase in just five years. This increase since 2019 is primarily the cause of Biden’s failed economic policies. Each U.S. citizen is responsible for $107,000 of this debt.
And we are adding $1 trillion to this debt every 100 days. Just servicing the interest on our debt costs us $1 trillion annually.
This is completely unsustainable.
Our government is woefully inefficient, wasteful, and rife with fraud. Utilizing Musk’s experience in running efficient, successful companies, the proposed DOGE has the potential to restructure the federal government, lower costs, improve return on investment, and crack down on fraud and waste. Putting Musk at the head of the commission in partnership with Vivek Ramaswamy is brilliant because they, just like Trump, are already wealthy and can’t be bought off.
The idea of a DOGE and its intentions at putting the government on a power and spending diet seems logical. But Elon and Vivek are dealing with a heavily entrenched bureaucracy that plans to resist whatever needed reforms they propose.
For every duly elected member of Congress, there are 5,476 unelected government bureaucrats. With 434 active federal agencies in existence and 2.93 million workers expanding their authority every day by creating more regulations and limits on American citizens with little or no oversight, the task of reform seems both insurmountable as well as righteous.
Waste and inefficiency in government will be quite easy to find—much of the fraud and reckless spending is visible to anyone paying attention. This is because the activities of the federal government and its profligate spending are not designed to be either efficient or cost-effective. The government is a service bureaucracy whose objectives are political, and efficiency, along with cost-effectiveness, almost always runs counter to those objectives.
Finding areas in the government to reform is the easy part. The hard part is that the bureaucracy has thrown up obstacles to reform that are enormous. Effecting change in this environment will not only be difficult, but it will also be fought with the entire weight and power of the entrenched Deep State, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and every legal resource with ties to government power and money.
On top of that, the bureaucracy has proven over many generations that it is expert at waiting out mandates for reform. They’ll simply refuse to comply, throw up legal roadblocks, and let time take its toll, with the knowledge that a more bureaucracy-friendly administration—typically Democrat—will retake power someday.
Two Massive Barriers: The Budgeting Process and Congress Itself
Can a couple of successful tech executives make superficial improvements to a few areas of the government? Yes, we think they can, but they need to fully understand what they’re dealing with.
At its core, the power of government comes from Congress “bringing home the bacon” of taxpayer dollars to congressional districts and favored constituents. It is a transfer of wealth that is enabled by what we call a “budget,” which is, in reality, a process that funds competing interests and activist groups. It is not a means of identifying financial returns as we would expect in the private sector; it is a managerial tool of the government spoils system that has no incentive for efficiency or cost containment.
And Congress is probably the largest obstacle for DOGE. Few, if any, in Congress would volunteer to be the first to have dollars cut from his or her district in the name of reform. Sustained funding of ongoing priorities keeps these people in office and power. We don’t believe it will be possible to convince anyone in Congress to give up money and power—it helps to explain why 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi pursued a landmark 20th term in Congress. It’s entrenched politicians like Pelosi that are the biggest impediment to the needed reforms needed for DOGE to be successful.
Legacy Media: Government Reform is “Already a Failure”
As expected, much of what’s left of the legacy media is already proclaiming DOGE as a failure even before it is implemented. The most common claim is that massive spending cuts are either politically untouchable (particularly Medicare and Social Security) or legally prohibitive (such as interest on the debt). And other considerations, such as foreign aid, education, agriculture, scientific research, military funding, etc., are “discretionary” and are “what Americans expect the government to do.”
With the reelection of Trump, that outdated mindset is changing. Just look at the overall rightward shift of the electorate in 2024. Even NPR—an overfunded, nonessential government agency—could see it and is known to be on the DOGE chopping block.
What is never examined by these media outlets is whether we are spending too much on these functions or whether we should be spending anything at all. We need a strong military; however, once again the Pentagon cannot account for what its $842 billion budget is spent on (this is the seventh consecutive budget audit failure). Is it really necessary to have a Department of Education at all? Has the Department of Homeland Security made us safer? Is the government conducting scientific research, or are they doing something else with those billions of dollars?
Undeterred, these media outlets once again report hair-on-fire proclamations that cutting government down to size will create “a level of austerity unprecedented since the winding down of World War II.” And why should we be cutting costs at all since discretionary spending has been at “historic lows?”
Besides, those dreaded spending cuts and tax cuts add billions of dollars to our national debt. These folks didn’t seem to care that the unsustainable deficit spending over the past five years resulted in a nearly 60 percent increase in the national debt. But please, go ahead and insist that this time historically proven tax and spending reforms will have the opposite effect that they demonstrated in the past.
So, the battle lines are being drawn, and the rhetoric is rising in temperature. This reform, if it can be pulled off, could be a monumental shift in getting the country turned around from a fiscal disaster. Or the entrenched government “blob” will sit back, fold its arms, and run out the clock.
Right off a cliff.
Comments are closed.
