As the year 1980 came to a close, Americans had just experienced the worst annual inflation in decades.
It was the culmination of weak, incompetent leadership combined with massive government spending throughout the stagflation of the 1970s— an entire decade of high unemployment, little growth, and a rising cost of goods and services.
But 1981 was famously “morning in America”. Ronald Reagan took over with a mandate to get the economy moving again and get inflation under control.
Reagan was a small government libertarian at heart, and he knew that excess government spending was a major reason for so much turmoil. Reagan actually coined the term “drain the swamp”, and he turned to his friend, businessman J. Peter Grace, to form a group that would study government waste.
The so-called Grace Commission made over 2,400 recommendations to Reagan. But in the end, the swamp fought back with a vengeance. And won. Very few proposals ever saw the light of day, and ultimately the commission was a failure.
Today there’s plenty of shrieking online and in the media from critics who cite the failed Grace Commission as the reason why Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ will fail too.
Their rationale is simple: the concept failed once before, therefore it will fail again.
And that logic makes perfect sense to people who have never accomplished anything in their entire lives.
If our species never tried to improve upon past failures, we’d all still be living in caves.
Just imagine if the Wright Brothers had said, “well, Leonardo da Vinci tried a flying machine a few hundred years ago and failed, so we shouldn’t even try.”
Practically every modern convenience we enjoy is thanks to someone who examined other people’s past failures and said, “I can do it better.”
DOGE may very well be able to do it better. There’s certainly enough opportunity to improve.
One obvious area is the out-of-control rulemaking authority that the federal bureaucracy currently abuses. And here’s a great example:
Congress passed an obscure law in 1976 that gave some limited powers to the Federal Trade Commission. The law was short— the entire text was a mere six pages.
Nearly five decades later, FTC head Lina “Genghis” Khan claims that this six-page law gives her the authority to issue over 460 pages of regulations governing mergers and acquisitions of private businesses.
Sorry, but how can six pages of legislation turn into 460 pages of regulations? Only if you’re a power-hungry bureaucrat who deliberately abuses authority.
Putting a stop to that should be relatively straightforward.
The much harder (though achievable) task will be changing the culture in government, i.e. ensuring that officials remember their job is to support the taxpayer, not the other way around. And to go back to the Executive Branch’s core mission of administering essential services as efficiently as possible.
Perhaps one of my favorite examples is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a small agency under the Department of Labor whose annual budget is close to a billion dollars.
To put that in perspective, there are about 35 million registered businesses in the United States. Fewer than 7,000 (i.e. less than 0.02%) generate annual revenues of $1 billion or more (and hence would be able to SPEND $1 billion per year).
Generating a billion dollars in revenue is extremely hard. Companies have to innovate, compete, and provide extraordinary value in order to make that much money.
Given its annual budget, the BLS is essentially in the same rarefied air as the top 0.02% of all businesses in America.
What does the BLS do to earn its handsome budget? They crank out a few reports (i.e. the CPI and employment report) which are of dubious value and politically charged.
That’s it. Honestly, most people reading this could probably crank out the same reports with a $10 million annual budget, at most. There’s plenty of AI that can do the job as well.
Particularly egregious is that the BLS spends about $250 million annually just on its unemployment report.
Meanwhile, a private company by the name of ADP, which processes payroll for a significant portion of US businesses, already puts out its own employment report.
ADP actually has the data. And they publish it for FREE every month without costing the taxpayers a dime.
Yet Uncle Sam still sees fit to spend $250 million of taxpayer money on a function that the private sector already provides for free.
This is just one out of literally thousands of other examples. And it’s pretty clear that people who criticize this government efficiency project obviously have an agenda. They’re part of a system that is primed for destruction… although, bizarrely, they’ll end up benefiting in the long run.
Now, clearly this is not a lock. There are always things that can go wrong.
So while I think it’s great to have a sense of optimism, it also makes sense to maintain a Plan B.
