Trump is coming for the executive branch. Does he know what he’s doing?
"The president-elect has signaled he will be destructive, but he seems motivated by retribution rather than saving money.
President-elect Donald Trump is coming for the executive branch. Eight years ago, he thought he could shake up federal agencies and left after four years with little to show for it. This time, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the charge, he is talking about even more radical changes. Will he do any better the second time around?
Trump isn’t the first president to try to shrink or reorganize the executive branch, or the first to claim to be leading an assault on waste, fraud and abuse that would deliver significant cost savings and more efficient government. Richard M. Nixon had his Ash Commission. Ronald Reagan had the Grace Commission. Bill Clinton had his National Performance Review, known as “reinventing government,” or “REGO,” led by then-Vice President Al Gore.
Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy have huge ambitions and no humility about what they are undertaking. What they have talked about amounts to a wholesale attack on federal agencies designed to eliminate thousands of regulations, reduce the federal workforce by an order of magnitude that could cripple the delivery of vital services, and effect cost savings that would amount to nearly one-third of the federal budget, or the entire discretionary part of the budget and then some.
All government bureaucracies need occasional overhaul and rejuvenation. Trump’s motivation is more about punishment and retribution. His Cabinet choices point to that. At the Justice Department, as The Washington Post reported, he is prepared to fire the team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith on two indictments of the president-elect. More broadly, he looks to dismantle what he regards as an unresponsive and oppositional administrative state.
Previous attempts to make the government smaller or more efficient have fallen far short of what was promised. Of those earlier efforts, Gore’s reinventing government initiative might have been the most successful. The Grace Commission, named for businessman J. Peter Grace, by contrast, came up with recommendations that promised $424 billion in savings over three years. Closer scrutiny by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office (now renamed the Government Accountability Office) pegged the savings at about $98 billion. Most of what the Grace Commission recommended went nowhere.
Could that be the outcome for Trump in his second term in the White House, roughshod attacks with little to show for it? Experts say what Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about — both in terms of money saved and workforce reductions — is unrealistic and that they will soon bump into political and economic realities that will leave them far short of what they claim. That doesn’t mean, however, that at the outset the president-elect should not be taken seriously about how disruptive he will try to be in his efforts. Musk has claimed he can cut the budget by roughly $2 trillion, but analysts say that would require drastic (and unpopular) cuts in entitlements programs, defense or other vital services.
Trump has created what he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, which is not an official agency of government but simply a unit designed to empower Musk, the world’s richest person, and Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, to begin their work. The two wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that outlined their plan. It is worth a read for anyone wondering about their intentions.
Rhetorically, it is a call to arms “to cut the federal government down to size” and attack “the entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy [that] represents an existential threat to our republic.” The plan is premised, in part, on recent Supreme Court rulings that limit the power of the agencies to write and impose regulations and that Musk and Ramaswamy say give the president considerable latitude to make big changes.
Musk and Ramaswamy said they will serve as outside volunteers. They will oversee the hiring of “a lean team of small-government crusaders” who will work with “legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these [Supreme Court] rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.” They expect that work to identify vast numbers of regulations that can be eliminated — and that with that will come a reduction in the federal workforce.
The DOGE duo dispute what they say is conventional wisdom that says presidents can’t fire federal workers, that those protections are there to protect workers only “from political retaliation,” but not from broader reductions that don’t target individuals. Further, they say, the president has the power to make other administrative changes, such as the relocation of agencies outside of Washington, which likely would result in many workers choosing to leave government service rather than uprooting. Congress might want a word on anything like that.
The Wall Street Journal opinion piece does not mention cost savings of nearly $2 trillion. Instead, the piece mentions taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in spending “unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended.”
Musk and Ramaswamy also said that their initiative would identify “pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.” Whether this is a scaling back of ambitions or an oversight in failing to cite the full scope of the cuts previously described isn’t clear.
Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, who oversaw Gore’s reinventing government initiative, offered counsel to the incoming administration in a piece on the Brookings website entitled, “Cut the government with a scalpel, not an axe.” That was the approach taken during the Clinton administration, which resulted in the elimination of 640,000 pages of internal agency rules and a reduction in the federal workforce of 426,000 employees.
In an interview on Friday, Kamarck applauded the Trump team’s determination to review federal regulations. “A regulatory review is a very sensible and good thing to do and ought to be done periodically anyway,” she said. But she had reservations about some of the other things Musk and Ramaswamy have talked about.
As a candidate for the Republican nomination this year, Ramaswamy claimed the federal workforce could be cut by three-quarters over eight years, with a 50 percent reduction achievable in the first year or two, along with a 40 percent reduction in the number of agencies and units in the executive branch. “I’m probably the candidate in the last 30 years who has the deepest understanding of how to actually shut down the administrative state,” he told Washington Post editors and reporters in June 2023.
Musk has a reputation for cutting budgets or workers at companies he owns, including Tesla, X and Space X. A recent New York Times article said he was often willing “to cut too much rather than too little” and also described him as having spent six hours going line by line through Twitter’s budget with the company’s executives, ordering cuts along the way and brooking no resistance.
Kamarck, however, questioned whether the federal bureaucracy is truly bloated, as Ramaswamy and the Trump team claim. There are, she noted about 19,000 Border Patrol agents. How many of those would Trump cut while still making good on his promise to secure the border and deport millions?
There are about 1,800 air traffic controllers, she said. Would Trump’s team cut that workforce significantly, causing potential flight cancellations and disruption? “It will take about a week and Congress will say, ‘Hey, you can’t do this,’” she said.
And how deeply would he try to cut the workforce at the Social Security Administration, at the risk of checks not being sent out promptly or other breakdowns in a program that he has otherwise vowed not to touch?
Kamarck offered other examples of where the Trump team could produce only symbolic victories. Trump has targeted the Department of Education for elimination. Kamarck said the department could be eliminated but two key programs likely would remain — the student loan program and Title 1, which adds to state and local governments for low-achieving students in areas of higher poverty.
The student loan program could be shifted to the Treasury Department and Title 1 to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said, which means a portion of its budget would be shifted rather than cut. Its workforce is the smallest of any Cabinet agency. Kamarck’s point is that after programs are shifted, the money saved might not be significant and the number of workers eliminated would be tiny.
Kamarck also cautioned the Trump team about its notion that the best approach is to rely primarily on people outside of government to lead the effort, if that is their plan. The Grace Commission did that, using people in the private sector to bring a business sensibility to the federal government. Gore’s operation worked closely with people in the agencies, which Kamarck argued produced better results. “The fat in the government is like the fat in good piece of steak,” she said. “It’s marbled through it.”
Musk and Ramaswamy claimed that with his electoral college majority and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump is poised for “a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.” In the face of expected opposition, they said, “We expect to prevail.”
Those words no doubt reflect the aggressive approach the president-elect and his advisers hope to take once he is sworn in. Meanwhile, executive branch employees are bracing for what could be coming and opponents are preparing to resist through legal and other channels. Whether Trump’s shock troops, led by Musk and Ramaswamy, are truly ready will be known soon."
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