Two weeks after President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican party won the 2024 U.S. election, the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is already hard at work recruiting staff and calling for the federal tax code to be dramatically simplified. Given that DOGE currently consists, so far as anybody knows, of two tech bros and an X account, that’s a promising start. In truth, DOGE will have no enforcement authority and looks like a Hail-Mary pass of a reform effort. But maybe — hopefully — it can succeed in tackling the bloated U.S. government where others failed.
“In 1955, there were less than 1.5 million words in the U.S. Tax Code,” DOGE posted Nov. 16 on X. “Today, there are more than 16 million words. Because of this complexity, Americans collectively spend 6.5 billion hours preparing and filing their taxes each year. This must be simplified.”
DOGE launched on Nov. 12, a week after the election, when President-elect Trump announced that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.” DOGE, he added, is tasked “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The challenge is that DOGE has no official government authorization and “will provide advice and guidance from outside of government.” That means it has no arm-twisting power of its own, just the president’s ear and whatever it can persuade him to do. But it also has the flexibility to organize and act as its leadership pleases without swimming through federal red tape.
Even with Inauguration Day over two months away, Musk, Ramaswamy, and the DOGE X account — which may well just be X-owner Musk’s alter ego at this point — are generating buzz. First, of course, is the name which has people wondering if they’re being pranked, given Musk’s connection to meme-driven dogecoin. More substantially, there’s well-founded criticism of the byzantine mess of a tax code. In October, Musk suggested “at least $2 trillion” could be cut from the federal budget.
Ramaswamy, for his part, also promises to go well beyond a few tweaks around the edges.
“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News. “We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.”
It’s enough to make you wonder if the U.S. has been visited by the distilled essence of Javier Milei, the charismatic libertarian president of Argentina, who is busily slashing that country’s wildly bloated and intrusive government. An organization assigned to find ways to shrink the size and cost of government could do a lot of good — if given support and the means to achieve its mission.
Obviously, two tech guys can’t do this all themselves. DOGE is soliciting job applications from “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” That’s a tall order, and whether enough DOGE workers can be found to meet requirements is anybody’s guess. But there’s public appetite for the organization’s mission among the election’s victors.
Trump supporters are “over three times more likely than Harris supporters to favour smaller government,” Pew Research reported of survey results in August. Specifically, 84 per cent of Trump supporters “prefer a smaller government providing fewer services,” compared to 22 per cent of Harris supporters.
That said, majorities of both Harris and Trump supporters oppose any cuts to Social Security, the government scheme that supports people in old-age and those with disabilities. Popular though Social Security is, it was based on bad financial planning from day one and is on-track to run out of money in less than a decade. It also underperforms private savings for all people but those with very low incomes. Of all government programs, Social Security and Medicare require the most streamlining or they’ll consume the entire federal budget, but most people don’t want them touched. Good luck with that.
Beyond those programs, Republicans tend to be far more skeptical of government in general than Democrats, and they’re the constituency for the incoming administration. Majorities of GOP voters look unfavourably on the Centres for Disease Control, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service, according to Pew Research. Barely behind them with higher unfavourable than favourable ratings are the FBI, Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA. Shrinking or abolishing many of them could win wide support from voters who sent Trump to the White House and his allies to Congress.
At least as compelling for the success of DOGE, though, is that reality necessitates a smaller, leaner U.S. government. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office reported: “In fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, the federal budget deficit totalled $1.8 trillion — an increase of $138 billion (or 8 per cent) from the shortfall recorded in the previous year.” That’s a massive mismatch between what the federal government collects and what it spends.
Even more impressive is that revenues were higher than the year before by $479 billion. But expenditures increased by $617 billion, continuing a long practice of federal spending outstripping tax collection, no matter how much money comes in. The federal government hasn’t balanced its budget since 2001, and deficits are increasing, as is the national debt (currently approaching $36 trillion) to which they contribute. The problem is chronic, and it’s approaching critical mass.
Last year, economists Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters of the Penn Wharton Budget Model predicted “the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt.” That’s the “best case” scenario they added; the timeframe shortens if people decide the U.S. government will never tame its irresponsibility. A federal default wouldn’t just cripple the country, it could crash the world economy.
So, DOGE’s mission “to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies” isn’t just about catering to a partisan preference for a smaller, less-obnoxious government. It’s about cutting-to-size a federal establishment that has metastasized beyond not just the patience of many Americans, but also affordability and reason to the point where it threatens to kill its host: the United States of America.
Is DOGE up to trimming the U.S. government? That’s a lot to ask of a non-governmental advisory board with no actual power. But the organization with the joke name may be the only hope we have.
National Post