When Donald Trump proposes something, we often roll our eyes. A lot of the time, it’s for good reason. He’s the guy who once allegedly proposed bombing a hurricane, and who just nominated a Fox News host to be the Secretary of Defense. A think tank won’t be hiring him to be a policy guru anytime soon. But what if Trump’s newly-proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is actually a good idea?
If you want a project delayed, just get the Washington, D.C. bureaucracy involved. Comedian Larry David described the current government bureaucracy perfectly in a 2011 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Citing his longtime friend Richard Lewis, who required confirmation for a plan to go out for lunch, David said, “You’re like some kind of government bureaucracy. You got the plan, you got the confirmation, you got the subcommittee, I got to go through all these levels.”
Google the terms “federal government” and “backlog,” and it will take you on a wild goose chase. The Department of Homeland Security is behind on 1.4 million applications for migrant work visas. The Internal Revenue Service has yet to get to one million Employee Retention Credit requests. We have 650 immigration judges who are assigned to hear an outstanding two million immigration requests. A $3 billion onshore wind plant that President Barack Obama labeled a “priority” in 2011 was approved just last year. The federal government is currently sitting on approving projects that would provide 2,000 gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery storage. How did Congress respond to this concern? By initiating a two-year study of the problem. Great job all around, guys!
At the same time, we have numerous regulations from executive agencies that do nothing but make life harder for the average American. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had a rule requiring licenses for domestic rabbits used in exhibits like magic shows. At the same time, a license isn’t needed if the rabbit was to be used for food (thanks, big agriculture!) or if it was another species, such as an iguana. If that is not confusing enough, all homes that were going to host a rabbit performer were required to have disaster-preparedness plans and home inspections beforehand. We’re talking about rabbits at kid’s birthday parties, but the USDA was treating them like one of the last northern white rhinos. Plenty of other pointless regulations exist at the federal and state levels: the sort of tilt that a ladder has to have on a family apple orchard, bans on hair braiding without a license, and prohibitions on mobile car washes committing the serious crime of being in the same location every day.
As you read this, you probably think it sounds like a post in the comment section of the libertarian website Reason.com from a user with a profile picture of Ayn Rand. But in all seriousness, overregulation is an actual problem. The point of law is to improve people’s lives. Yet, in many cases, it is doing the exact opposite. That is where the DOGE comes in.
“Do we really need, whatever it is, 428 federal agencies?,” Musk said last month. “There are so many that people have never even heard of and have overlapping areas of responsibility.”
Musk is right. Streamlining the bureaucracy makes sense. Often, the government’s response to a problem is to create another federal agency or just throw more money at a problem rather than reducing red tape. The DOGE could be a crucial component in refreshing the government to be results-oriented.
Every year, Congress adds two million words to the U.S. Code, and an additional 60,000 to 70,000 new pages per year are added to the Federal Register, which contains new agency policies. Vivek and Elon could use their background as entrepreneurs to find creative solutions, including through artificial intelligence, to parse through these regulations and find areas to consolidate or modernize. Or the DOGE could expand the Biden administration’s efforts to streamline the federal cybersecurity regulation process to other sectors such as energy or agriculture. It could facilitate collaboration between executive agencies and state governments so that the government works at an efficiency rate closer to that of the private sector. I would consider the DOGE a win, as long as they can figure out how the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) can approve Environmental Impact Statements in less than an average of 8.6 years.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government loses hundreds of billions of dollars per year. GAO annually discovers more and more government waste, including billions of dollars spent on overlapping programs. In many cases, the federal government is just wasting money. In 2022, the Department of Defense spent $28 million on forest camouflage uniforms, only to realize that they were not appropriate for the desert of Afghanistan. Would it really be much of a stretch to say that Bernie Madoff may have been a better manager of money than the current federal government?
Some Democrats have embraced the possibility that the DOGE could bring much needed reform to the federal government.
“[The DOGE] could save tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars,” Chris Coons, a Democratic Senator from Delaware, said. “Depending on how it’s structured and what they do, this could be a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.”
Could the DOGE end up being a farce? That is possible; it’s named after a meme cryptocurrency, after all. The DOGE could propose eliminating needed regulations on the environment or occupational safety. It could eliminate jobs actually needed in the bureaucracy. We don’t want to deregulate too much. You want to know if your Boar’s Head meat is actually a petri dish for listeria.
Rest assured, Elon and Vivek won’t be able to take a sharpie to the US Code or federal regulations, as the DOGE is simply an advisory committee. Congress and the Office of Management and Budget can approve the good ideas and ignore the bad ones.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are some of the most accomplished individuals in the world, though perhaps someone should take away Musk’s phone for the indefinite future. Regardless, the two of them know quite a bit about modern innovation. At the same time, our government is clearly behind the times. Remember when one US Senator asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook could make money, since they did not charge users? Modernizing and streamlining the government is something we need. If Elon can land a flying skyscraper, perhaps he can fix American bureaucracy.
Blake Fox is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at bfox@wesleyan.edu.