Don’t DOGE, REGO

Reform is needed to reduce government and increase efficiency

Don’t DOGE when you can REGO.

Government acronyms are enough to make anyone cringe. DOGE, the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency, has it all. It is misleading. It won’t be a real government agency and whether it promotes efficiency is very much an open question. DOGE will be headed by two people whose experience with government mostly involves finding ways to secure taxpayer dollars while avoiding scrutiny.

With that background, it’s small wonder that the gurus of DOGE, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, seem to focus their first cost cutting efforts on government personnel. Bureaucrats always are an easy target and in many businesses when costs have to be cut, heads roll. Just look at the disaster that befell workers at what was then known as Twitter after Musk became the chief tweet.

In the federal government, unlike many businesses, labor is not the major expense, however. Eliminating ALL federal civilian personnel would save less than $300 billion annually in wages and benefits. That is less than one-third of the annual interest payments on the national debt.

Reducing civilian employees also brings its own set of practical and political challenges. It was well documented in the recent debate over increasing the number of IRS agents that job-cutting at the tax collection agency costs more money in lost revenue than it saves in personnel costs. Yet, for congressional Republicans, eliminating IRS agents is one of the few personnel cuts they have been willing to make. Only people with the apparent political naïveté of Musk and Ramaswamy would believe that the GOP will eliminate border patrols, staff administering programs for veterans, farmers and other important constituencies, air traffic controllers or even a single job in a member’s home district.

Here’s a prediction: When it’s all said and done, the TOTAL amount of federal spending saved by DOGE (and let’s focus on real savings, not the typical “fuzzy math” of some pols) will be less than what Musk’s companies receive in federal contracts.

The federal debt should be reduced, but not DOGE-style. A good place to start would be to look to history and President Bill Clinton’s REGO (Reinventing Government) program. REGO - itself based on a Reagan-era initiative - was successful because its emphasis was on reinventing government, conducting an agency-by-agency review of the federal government looking for redundancies, unnecessary personnel and offices and wasteful and inefficient programs.

The REGO result: the federal workforce was reduced by more than 350,000 positions without a loss of service to taxpayers, new customer service standards and performance measures were implemented, 16,000 pages of regulations were cut, procurement processes were strengthened and savings of $136 billion were achieved - and that was 30 years ago.

The focus of DOGE should be squarely on reducing the federal debt by making government work smarter not just cheaper. Achieving meaningful success requires hard decisions on both the revenue and spending sides and a commitment to reform not just cuts. Some suggestions:

• DOGE could start by targeting unnecessary tax incentives to eliminate. For example, the U.S. today is producing MORE energy (including oil) than any country ever in the history of the world. Why do fossil fuel companies need the tax breaks that favor them, much less the additional incentives Trump is proposing? Calling out these kind of tax breaks would give DOGE credibility with many taxpayers and achieve meaningful debt reduction.

• Change the definition of “welfare” to include the massive subsidies that go to higher income taxpayers, not just those that serve people who are most vulnerable. For example, the mortgage interest deduction for homeowners and the exclusion of most capital gains on a principal residence combined are by far the largest federal housing subsidy programs. The benefits overwhelmingly go to higher income taxpayers. They could be further capped without imposing undue hardship on anyone.

• Increase the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax. Next year, only income up to $176,100 will be taxed for Social Security. That would increase the revenue flow to the retirement program while reducing the federal deficit. Strengthening Social Security not only delivers on the program’s multi-generational promise, it is far more fair than the benefit cuts that will be needed if nothing is done.

• Reduce defense spending. In 2016, the Pentagon told Congress that 22% of its bases would not be needed by 2019. To his credit, President Donald Trump’s budget reflected a small step forward to close some bases. The Republicans, who controlled Congress at the time, had a predictable response: “The last thing the military needs right now is a BRAC (base reduction and closing),” said South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, reinforcing the political adage that acronyms are useful when tough decisions may be unpopular. South Carolina still has at least seven significant military bases. Think Sen. Graham’s opinion on “BRAC” has changed? Republicans might well roll over when it comes to confirming inexperienced people to Cabinet positions, but try to take away their pork? Not a chance.

• As REGO and other initiatives have shown, there is plenty of room to eliminate unnecessary regulations, to impose tighter controls on federal contracts and procurement and to make agencies more accountable. Those efforts should be done to make government more efficient not more ideological. Some environmental standards can and should be revisited, but undermining air and water standards by ignoring the very real impacts of climate change on communities and the cost of disaster recovery is short-sighted, dangerous and, in the long-run, expensive.

Reducing the federal debt won’t be achieved through gimmicks. President-elect Trump has suggested that he can use “impoundment” to ignore congressional appropriations and simply not spend funds Congress has approved. Other presidents have tried; the courts consistently have ruled that the power of the purse is with Congress. President Trump has the veto pen, and he can use that to reduce spending. But both he and the GOP Congress have been unwilling to make hard choices. Recall that in Trump’s first THREE years in the White House (pre-pandemic and with Republicans controlling Congress in two of the years), the cumulative federal deficit was more than in the last FOUR years of the Obama Administration.

The choices are difficult. Government programs exist because they met someone’s need and had a constituency. Even when needs diminish, constituencies often remain politically strong.

One root of the DOGE title is an Internet meme - Do Good Everyday. Musk and Ramaswamy have set an ambitious goal to cut federal spending by $2 trillion (the federal budget is about $6.8 trillion and the federal debt is about $36 trillion). It is a good thing to make reducing the federal debt a priority. But Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy will need more than a commitment to doing good everyday. Budget cutting will require them to be fair, transparent and tolerant. That’s a tall order for men not typically associated with those qualities.