Entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will find it’s not so easy to radically downsize government. Their task, though, will be a worthy one if they take the right advice.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced that the two financial titans will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency … to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. … [They will] drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.”
The announcement, well intentioned though it may be, immediately raises several alarms, even apart from the almost comical self-parody of creating a new bureaucracy to eliminate bureaucracy. For example, what does Trump mean by a “Department?” A new government department or agency can be created only through legislation, not by mere executive action. Even if Trump is just doing the Trumpian thing of using exaggerated and imprecise language, he still can’t create a new office even within the White House unless he fits it in within whatever budget Congress legislates for him.
If the model here is, as it should be, the late President Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission on government cost control, which was (almost entirely) privately funded, Trump should make this clear. Either way, the number of committee members and staff should be expressly limited, as should the length of time it will operate. In other words, the Ramaswamy-Musk group should not be a permanent “department” of government but a one-time task-oriented reformist body.
That said, the need for massive reform is obvious. The federal leviathan has grown outlandishly large; Its tentacles, its burdensome interferences, reach into far too many areas of what should be private, everyday life; and the costs of feeding it are immensely too high. On the other hand, Ramaswamy’s frequent campaign promises to eliminate 75% of the federal workforce are ignorant and ludicrous, both legally and practically. Existing government-union contracts, not to mention civil service laws that probably would provide continuing legal protections to current federal workers even if changed going forward, make such large down-scaling impossible.
And even if it were legal, federal services, funding, and regulations are so intertwined with so many areas of American life that a 75% workforce reduction, even if phased in during several years, would be cataclysmically disruptive. Moreover, while most regulatory burdens are too intrusive, federal bureaucracies do perform important work in safeguarding clean air and water and workplace protections and, of course, in maintaining a social safety net. They shouldn’t be gutted.
If Musk and Ramaswamy don’t let ambitions completely outrun reality, though, they can do a lot of good. To do so, they will need to understand that almost nothing can be done via executive fiat. Most of the reforms will need painstaking detail work that Congress will need to approve through legislative action.
Two key laws, or sets of laws, must be completely rewritten. The first is the Administrative Procedure Act, passed in 1946, that dictates how the federal government may issue rules and regulations. The second is the set of existing civil service laws, with some provisions dating all the way back to the Pendleton Act of 1883.
To the extent that executive action alone can streamline the federal government, the model again comes from the Reagan administration. Musk and Ramaswamy should consult with Don Devine, who as Reagan’s civil service director was credited with helping eliminate some 100,000 positions from the federal bureaucracy. Devine, still sharp as a tack, knows how it’s done.
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They also should give a prominent spot on their team to the lawyer and longtime government-reform advocate Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and numerous other books outlining a new vision for how government agencies should operate. Nobody has thought longer and harder about how to instill a culture of responsiveness and responsibility to government and civil society.
If Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy just want to make a lot of noise about revamping government, their task will be easy. If they want to actually accomplish much, their jobs will be much harder. If they do that harder work, though, the benefits to the public, notwithstanding Ramaswamy’s wild hyperbole, could be immense.