After Elon Musk asserted during the 2024 campaign that he could eliminate at least $2 trillion of unnecessary federal spending, the once and future President Donald Trump gave the world’s richest man two things: a partner in billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the green light to make the savings happen.
Thus, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was born.
Musk and Ramaswamy say they will emphasize the elimination of unneeded, outdated, and too-costly federal regulations on the assumption that fewer regulations will require fewer civil servants to administer them.
Sharply reducing regulations will boost economic growth, but cutting back or eliminating wasteful spending will draw intense opposition from Congress and the special interests that benefit from the multiplicity of government programs.
The most recent year in which the federal budget was balanced was 2001, at the end of President Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House. The budget was also balanced in the three prior years. Clinton’s balanced budget successes were greatly aided by Republican majorities that controlled both chambers of Congress throughout, except in 2001 when the Senate was evenly split.
According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the five biggest expenditures in the 2024 federal budget are $1.46 trillion for Social Security, $912 billion for various health care programs, $882 billion for net interest on the $35 trillion national debt, $874 billion for Medicare, and $874 billion for the national defense budget.
All of those figures, with the exception of some aspects of the defense budget, are mandatory expenditures, either because they represent benefit or entitlement programs or they involve payments required to maintain the government’s creditworthiness.
Thus, the bad news is that two-thirds of all federal spending is “mandatory,” and roughly one-third is discretionary. That severely narrows the opportunities for spending reductions sought by the DOGE.
The good news is that the discretionary spending budget represents a genuinely target-rich environment, one that multiple government agencies have been aiming at for decades.
Three agencies, in particular, have lengthy lists of opportunities for federal officials to make government more efficient, eliminate waste and fraud, or eliminate unneeded programs, with hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to be had.
For example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, has for decades continuously sought out and spotlighted duplicative federal programs that, if eliminated, could save billions of dollars annually.
“Congress and agencies have made significant progress in addressing many of the 2,018 matters and recommendations that we identified from 2011 to 2024. These efforts have resulted in approximately $667.5 billion in financial benefits, an increase of approximately $71 billion since our 2023 report,” the GAO said in its 2024 report.
The open recommendations list currently includes 5,376 items, of which GAO considers 495 to be high priorities. Several recommendations related to how federal agencies track spending, if implemented, could save as much as $521 billion annually.
Among the currently outstanding GAO cost-saving recommendations are, for example, 90 for the Department of Defense, 20 for the Department of Transportation, 15 for the Department of Justice (DOJ), 12 for the Environmental Protection Agency, and three for the Food and Drug Administration.
The anti-fraud investigations mounted by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), headed by long-time DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, present another fertile field for DOGE.
“As of August 2024, the PACE has provided investigative support to 48 federal law enforcement and [Office of Inspector General (OIG)] partners on 935 pandemic-related investigations with over 22,000 subjects and an estimated fraud loss of more than $2.25 billion,” Horowitz told the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations and Federal Workforce.
“In fiscal year (FY) 2023, over 14,000 employees at 74 IGs conducted audits, inspections, evaluations, and investigations. Together, their work resulted in significant improvements to the economy and efficiency of programs government-wide, with potential savings totaling approximately $93.1 billion,” according to the CIGIE.
With the total budget for 74 IGs at $3.5 billion, these potential savings represent an approximate $26 return on every dollar invested in OIGs.
In Congress, reaction to the DOGE initiative has been enthusiastic among Republicans but mostly, although not entirely, quiet on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he hopes that Musk and Ramaswamy “fully understand the immovable object they are trying to reform.”
“This isn’t the private sector, and they need to understand the constraints they are under. But I am all for a fresh set of eyes, a new perspective because the government is so ossified, and Congress is so ossified and dysfunctional that you really do need disrupters,” he told The Epoch Times.
“Everywhere you look in Washington, there is waste, fraud, and abuse,” Ernst told The Epoch Times. “Beyond cutting bizarre taxpayer-funded studies to learn how fast shrimp run on a treadmill or how fast a panda can poop, I’m getting to the real meat of the problem by also tackling the bloated bureaucracy at federal agencies.”
Ernst will be joined initially in the new Senate caucus by Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), and James Lankford (R-Okla.).
The House DOGE Caucus is co-chaired by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.).
The first House Democrat, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), joined the House DOGE caucus earlier this week, saying that “streamlining government processes and reducing ineffective government spending should not be a partisan issue.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the oversight and accountability panel, briefly broke the silence with criticism of House GOP plans to create a new DOGE subcommittee to be chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
“Depending on how this is structured and what they do, this could be a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.”
Veteran activists against waste, fraud, and abuse in the nonprofit community also expressed qualified optimism to The Epoch Times.
John Hart, the recently installed CEO of Open the Books, a nonprofit that maintains the world’s biggest continually updated public database of spending at the federal, state, and municipal levels, applauds the decision to pursue excessive regulations.
“If DOGE begins with eliminating regulations and downsizing agencies that administer those regulations, it can provide an immediate or near-term economic boost that will produce political capital that can be re-invested in pursuing further cuts,” Hart told The Epoch Times.
According to Taxpayers Protection Alliance President David Williams, thanks to the DOGE, there may be room for some creative thinking about mandatory spending.
“There is not a lot of visibility about each other among the agency providers of money to people who need it,” he told The Epoch Times. “So one thing that would be sweeping and big is if you provide any such benefit to people, you must as a government agency report that to a central office, and then the United States has to decide what the cap is for the amount that we would give to people in a year.”
Williams suggested a requirement for all recipients to provide a fingerprint to prevent benefits from being fraudulently transferred to one person using more than one name.
No one doubts that the DOGE initiative can shine a new spotlight on hundreds of billions of dollars in potential savings. But getting Congress to approve reforms and then convince federal workers to implement those reforms faithfully is a daunting challenge.
Among the many obstacles to achieving such savings include the immensity of the career bureaucracy and its lack of individual performance accountability.
Tom Schatz has led Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) since 1992; the nonprofit research group has exposed hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget.
The CAGW was founded in 1984 as the successor to the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also known as the Grace Commission, established by President Ronald Reagan’s executive order in 1982.
The commission was co-founded by businessman Peter Grace and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to recommend ways to control government spending.
Asked if the federal government had become unmanageable, Schatz responded: “It’s interesting that you use the word ’management' because to us, that’s the whole issue. It’s the least exciting thing that you can say needs to be done, but they need to manage the peoples’ money more effectively.”
He said CAGW investigators have asked government officials repeatedly how much providing a certain service or product costs.
“They can’t answer that. Their answer usually is, ‘Well, we just keep spending money until that person gets what they are supposed to get. So to me, DOGE needs to not only identify the waste, they also need to establish both the methodology and the justification for what they are doing,” Schatz said.
Musk and Ramaswamy should expose waste, he said. After that, “[they] need to communicate ‘here’s our recommendations, here’s why we are making these changes, here’s how it’s going to make your life better and save people money,’ yet get them what they need,” Schatz said.
Not framing their recommendations in that manner will enable critics to blast the DOGE as merely targeting government programs that Musk, Ramaswamy, and others in the Trump administration may oppose for ideological or self-interested reasons.
The CAGW chief noted that Reagan included Grace Commission recommendations in his budget, aggressively encouraged their adoption by Congress, and tracked their progress. He said he thinks that Trump will be similarly engaged in pushing DOGE recommendations.
“I think this is really the best opportunity since the Grace Commission to create recommendations that will not only impact now but will have an ongoing positive effect on how the government operates,” Schatz said.
Concerning another obstacle that the DOGE faces, expert Donald Devine said: “One cannot really fix the non-defense bureaucracy. It is simply too big.”
Devine is a former director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which managed the federal workforce under Reagan from 1981 to 1985. He has since written three books about managing bureaucracies and is a senior scholar at The Fund for American Studies.
“The total number of federal ‘employees’ is not 2 million because there are also 10 [million] to 20 million contractors and grantees; no one knows the exact numbers,” Devine told The Epoch Times.
Those figures also do not include state and local government workers whose jobs are federally funded. Devine said the best hope for effectively managing such a sprawling workforce is eliminating unneeded agencies and streamlining programs to eliminate duplication.
He said restoring the management principles of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 is equally important. That law was written and became law under President Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress.
“It is important to remember that the original Pendleton Act [that ended the old ’spoils system' of hiring] required that civil service personnel be selected based on the knowledge, skills, and abilities criteria still set in law today,” Devine said.
Those criteria have not been consistently or faithfully applied in government hiring for many decades.
“The solution is to go back to the (Democratic) Carter Civil Service Reform Act 1978 and the initial Reagan implementing regulations of 1981 to manage, based upon its principles of political control and career performance,” he said.
Open the Books’ Hart pointed to a crucial factor that the DOGE has in its favor—previous cost-cutting efforts such as the Grace Commission and the Simpson–Bowles Commission in the tea party era.
“One trend that is important to think about that’s different today from the Simpson–Bowles time or during the Reagan years is that there has been a political realignment, and the Republican Party is now the working class party,” he said.
In prior years, Hart said: “Democrats could appeal to their working class base by being demagogues on Republican proposals to reduce government. Whereas today, the party advocating reducing the administrative state has also won the hearts and minds of the working class.”
That shift of working-class voters to Trump and Republicans will make a huge difference in how successful the DOGE effort can be, Hart said.
