(Nov. 13) 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….
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 full column is at this link.]
