DOGE is under a lot of fire. Critics claim that the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency woefully misunderstands government programs. That DOGE doesn’t know what constitutes waste, fraud, and abuse. That Congress is the one to decide what gets cut — not an unelected official.
In sum, what Washington & Co. are saying to Musk and DOGE is, “you don’t know our business.” The funny thing is, they are right. But that’s a good thing.
What Elon Musk does know is business efficiency. And what his special force of 20-something-year-old engineers know is analyzing large amounts of data to inform that efficiency-mindedness.
In almost real-time speed, DOGE is throwing out the data that it finds. It started with USAID and has now been at the Department of Education, Department of the Treasury, and Social Security Administration. If you watch the X thread, DOGE is constantly sharing what it has found. It’s raw, unpolished. It does not always lead to accurate conclusions. But it is transparent.
What Musk is doing is radically different from any other effort to bring efficiency to government.
It is not at all radical by business standards.
When new management comes into a company, good management will scrutinize every aspect of the business to figure out what everything is and how it impacts the bottom line. They’ll start with a zero-based budget, zeroing out each budget item and requiring each program, product line, and widget to justify why it deserves its line item back in the budget.
Government does the furthest thing from zero-based budgeting. The various budgets of the federal government know how to do only one thing: grow.
For example, mandatory spending — which makes up more than 60 percent of the federal budget and includes programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — is authorized by law to provide benefits to any person meeting the eligibility requirements. With a growing population, these statutes effectively set the budget to auto-grow.
For discretionary spending — which make up around one-quarter of federal spending — the House and Senate pass appropriations bills. These bills generally use as their budget baseline the existing funding amount, plus inflation, and almost always add more based on the various (special) interests of the Senators, Representatives, and their constituents. The rest of the federal budget is interest on the debt, which, as anyone in credit card debt can tell you, compounds.
All of these are a far cry from zero-based budgeting. And in fact, anything that isn’t an increase is viewed as “cut.”
Yes, you heard that correctly. If a government budget stays the same, year-over-year, according to Washington Math that’s a cut.
Ostensibly this is to make up for the inflation that cuts the budget in real terms. And politicians of all stripes will take to the floor of the House and the Senate to lambast anyone who tries to slow that spending growth. Departments and agencies also face incentives to spend any unused funds before the end of the fiscal year, not only because the money is use-it-or-lose-it, but because it ensures their budgets, plus inflation, will become the new baseline next year.
What the Washington class is really bristling about is DOGE bringing to government what any ordinary business would consider best practices.
It’s important to be clear that, so far, DOGE itself has not actually done any cutting. What it has done is brought much-needed sunlight to what the average American might reasonably view as shady, frivolous, or absurd government spending — with their money. Admittedly, it’s a short distance from there to waste, fraud, and abuse.
Lest my own critics lambast me for saying DOGE hasn’t cut anything with “what about all the grants that were stopped?” I remind them simply that pausing government spending is not the same thing as cutting it. Also, those pauses have been made by the executive branch, to which the Congress has in its infinite wisdom (or dereliction of constitutional duty) chosen to largely delegate allocation decisions.
By all means, yes, Congress needs to do the tough work to trim its appropriations and fix entitlements. Sadly, it has no incentive to stop spending money it does not have. Instead, it leaves it to the executive branch via the Treasury and also the Federal Reserve to figure out.So why not let the guy who built a reusable rocket give it a try? With $36 trillion in federal debt, and interest payments expected to cost nearly $1 trillion this year — more than the government spends on national defense — it’s high time Uncle Sam stop treating itself as Uncle Moneybags. And just maybe that tech-savvy nephew DOGE can help them do that.