Department of Government Efficiency

An Efficiency Problem

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.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are partnering to create a new U.S. government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk underwrote the Trump campaign with $200 million in donations (AP estimate) and his own brand of buying votes.

Supposedly, the acronym comes from Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, the Doge. Whatever. When Heather Cox Richardson says the name of the pending Musk/Ramaswamy agency, she pronounces it doggy. She’s authoritative enough for me.

So yes, Musk paid for his new appointment, which represent a colossal conflict of interest, as that agency reportedly, avowedly, will shut down many regulations that currently govern aspects of Musk’s enormous U.S. government contracts. Getting his new powers involved corruption — a person really isn’t supposed to pay to acquire powers in the U.S. federal government. Can there be a shred of doubt that corruption won’t feature in nullifying EPA regulations on SpaceX, Tesla, and other Musk holdings?

But that is just toxic foreplay. Musk and Ramaswamy tell Forbes they will cut some $2 trillion in U.S. federal spending (sparing all the contracts with Musk-owned corporations, no doubt). What do they intend to defund?

They will get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which tells us, “We protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices and take action against companies that break the law.” Thanks, Elon, for planning to deep-six this one.

Goodbye, Department of Education. Populist demagogues like Trump have railed against such an unwanted department for decades, clearly tired of spending funds on schools that serve marginalized communities

DOGE will get really vicious with organizations like Planned Parenthood, which averages approximately $50 million a year in federal funding. Reproductive help for women is almost certainly taking that hit.

Musk will make headlines when he and Ramaswamy end the $535 million federal support for public radio and TV. They actually called that “unauthorized spending,” even though Congress authorized it. You may not get public TV — so long, Sesame Street — but you will get a full display of gaslighting.

The Veterans Administration healthcare funding is targeted by Musk — interesting, a white South African deciding the U.S. military veterans should stop getting healthcare.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed “austerity” measures on some poor countries that were not managing to repay loans and the impacts were severe, with poverty increased and government services decreased, even eliminated. The targeted countries — such as Greece, Kenya, and many more — reacted with cries of extreme pain and many of those harmful punishing policies were curtailed.

Musk says his DOGE will inflict hardship. Many Americans will lose their jobs, both inside the government and outside. The government contracts with many companies and when DOGE decides those contracts are not going to be honored, the losses will be severe in some quarters. Add to that the rising consumer prices that are widely predicted from Trump’s tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China (and possibly everyone else), and the American lifestyle may be in for the biggest shock since 1929.

When Trump was desperately seeking votes from retirees and those who love them, he promised not to cut Social Security, and even added that he would stop the practice of the IRS taxing Social Security. We will see if Musk lets him keep that promise.

It is astonishing that, in a roaring Biden-Harris economy that is benefiting literally every class of Americans, Trump garnered more votes than Harris and will throw wrenches into many of the gears of that economy, if Musk succeeds.

Dr. Tom H. Hastings is coordinator of conflict resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.