On January 20th, President Trump reorganized the United States Digital Service into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and ordered it to begin “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.” The task list soon became much larger to include, in the president’s words, “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal agencies.”
DOGE has quickly gone to work, holding up millions of dollars of federal contracts and firing tens of thousands of government employees. Elon Musk, who is somehow involved in the department but not its head, claims the goal is to save up to $2 trillion by radically slashing the federal budget.
Efficiency is a tricky value. It’s hard to be against it. Why wouldn’t you want something to be efficient — meaning, fast, cheap, and accessible? But it’s not always obvious that efficiency is not the only, or the best, standard to have in all important matters. Fast food is efficiently delivered and relatively inexpensive, but no one pretends that it’s nutritious or even really that tasty. I doubt many people would choose a McDonald’s meal for Thanksgiving over a carefully cooked home meal, prepared with love and attention.
Efficiency is about means-to-end thinking — what’s the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to get from here to goal X. Yet it appears that with DOGE efficiency has become an end in itself now. Efficiency for efficiency’s sake. What goals are we achieving by making government “more efficient”? Musk has floated the idea that the DOGE slashing might result in a savings dividend of $5,000 to eligible households. This sounds exciting to many, but at what expense? What services might no longer be accessible? What kind of government and society do we really want? An efficient one — but to accomplish what kinds of values?
It’s not clear that government efficiency was that high of a concern for the Founding Fathers. They were more concerned that government protect the liberty of its citizens. For that reason, James Madison, the fourth U.S. president, argued that our federal government ought to be organized in a way so as to work in a slow and complicated manner.
The Founders were worried about groups of people seizing government offices to push their own agendas. So they built a federal republic — a government with multiple independent branches that check each other, splitting the legislative body in two to give public opinion different weight in consideration. All of this was to make government business gradual and deliberative, not necessarily efficient, in order to make sure that individual life, liberty, and property were not unduly infringed upon by the government.
There are some worrying signs about the operations of DOGE. Who exactly is directing it? President Trump has said it is not Musk; he is a “special senior advisor” directly to the president and therefore does not have to be vetted by other branches. The members of DOGE are “special government employees,” meaning they are not subject to ethical rules and conflict of interest regulations like other federal employees. DOGE records are also now classified as presidential records, meaning the public cannot have access to them until after 2034.
If anything is clear, it seems that any possible “government efficiency” is being balanced against transparency and public oversight. Is getting a one-time check (that may or may not raise inflation, which is rising by itself already) worth a government that blocks insight into how it makes its major decisions about public welfare?
This kind of power is even more worrisome when there is increasing evidence that these savings are not going to materialize in any significant way. All these developments seem like something that would have raised Madison’s suspicions.
As he wrote in Federalist Letter 51: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Jose-Antonio Orosco, Ph.D., is the author of several books and a professor at Oregon State University.
