How many election seasons have come and gone with multiple promises of bringing hope, change, efficiency, accountability, prosperity, and freedom? Regardless of whom we elected in the past, it doesn’t seem like anything changes, not really.
For this reason, many observers of the current moment are not yet believers and that is totally understandable.
We look back at a long series of promises and have come to dismiss them as just more rhetoric for purposes of public consumption that does not amount to anything in reality.
Can this time be different?
My current mood is: I suspect so. Yes, this represents the triumph of hope over experience. So be it. Things could indeed be different this time.
First, a major factor here is that the bureaucracies themselves came after the U.S. president starting in 2016 after Trump was elected in a shock outcome that Washington, D.C. did not expect. That immediately kicked off an internal war: the permanent state versus the elected state. That problem grew worse and worse to the point that in the second half of 2020, it’s not entirely clear if and to what extent the elected government had any power at all.
Well, Team Trump is back in town and absolutely determined to govern. That will require taking on the permanent ruling class. That is a hugely complicated problem but with enough energy and expertise, it can be done.
Second, the reformers/revolutionaries have a much easier time of it now than any of the failed budget/bureaucracy cutters of the past. The American people will cheer at radical proposals and results, as never before, and the wailing of the media will fall on deaf ears. This is because the credibility of the bureaucracy and the media have taken huge hits over four years, exactly as many of us predicted.
Third, we now have Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk leading an outside commission, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), absolutely determined to bring modern standards of efficiency and accountability to a government hugely in need of a glorious spring cleaning. These two are experienced businesspeople who know you can get more done with less. Musk cut 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce before rechristening the platform as X, and then it became the number one news app in the world.
It seems to me that the time has come for the reform efforts to be real.
1. DOGE people will be placed at every agency and then use artificial intelligence to identify thousands of regulations to eliminate, based on new legal standards as set by the U.S. Supreme Court.
2. These employees will then report to Trump and have him approve the cuts. They can take place through executive order or legislation or both. This could zero out some 40 years of regulatory thickets and affect the whole of American life, freeing enterprise to do what it is supposed to do.
3. Given the minimized standards of what government is supposed to do, DOGE will then turn to identifying, by start-up standards, the minimum number of personnel necessary to achieve the task. This could be a fraction of the number currently employed.
4. Eliminate the jobs but not with cruelty. There would be incentives for early retirement plus generous severance packages that are better than anything anyone would usually get in the private sector, e.g., one year or more. This is the British model for how slavery was ended in that country, not with war but with money.
5. Cut programs in which Congress’s spending authorization has lapsed, a category that could include VA health care (with half a million employees!), NASA (18,000 employees), and thousands of redistribution programs.
6. Have Trump approve through the Office of Management and Budget a temporary suspension of payments and introduce immediate large-scale audits with posting of the results in public.
7. Have Trump claim authority to stop the spending, while taking on the 1974 budget law on impoundments with full expectation of court challenges.
8. Deal with the fallout in litigation, knowing full well that the public will be completely behind the reformers. After all, the people being phased out from government are the very ones who issued the edicts for mail-in ballots, rent moratoriums, mask mandates, and forced shots for everyone including children.
Presumably, most of this can happen without Congress.
Crucial to this task is the legal precedent of two critical Supreme Court rulings. Remember that it is not the job of the court to implement reforms but merely rule on the merits of the case in light of the law. The job of making the court’s judgments be realized in American life is that of the representatives elected by the people.
When they say a plethora, we are really talking about 40 years of regulatory overreach. The Court knew exactly what it was doing in issuing these recent rulings. They are meant to have an effect and they will. This can happen by expensive, bit-by-bit, litigation over a decade or more, or we can save time and money and act on the law of the land now. That will require decisive action.
There are several main advantages to far-reaching reforms. It will increase the popularity of the Trump administration and guarantee its place in history. It will improve the economic environment by ending endless debt expansion. It will also gut the forces that thwarted the Trump administration from 2017–2021, bringing back transparency and accountability.
And yet the question keeps coming back. How do we know this is for real and not just another commission put together in D.C. to create the illusion of reform without the reality?
I asked some people who were present at the 1981 wave of government cutters if the mood today compares. They all had the same answer: No. In the first Reagan term, there was not much public appetite for balancing the budget or cutting bureaucracy beyond mild rhetoric. There is no comparison to the public mood today, which has become extremely intolerant toward all undemocratic forms of imposition and waste.
That’s good to hear. Expectations are very high. It’s going to be up to DOGE to make sure that the Trump administration can lead the revolution or become a transitional government in the form of the Kerensky government in Russia in 1917 or the First French Republic after 1789. It’s always been the great challenge when the public has its appetite for change whetted to this extent.
If anyone can do it, it is the fabulous five: Trump plus Vivek plus Musk, and including Tulsi Gabbard over intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over health and medicine. This is the dream team. If it cannot happen with these people, it’s hard to imagine conditions under which it could ever happen. This could be a turning point. If it is not, and the Trump administration ends up as merely transitional, I don’t like to think what comes next.
