DOGE and pony show
Can DOGE spur meaningful reform?
I spent the first half of my career working in Congress in Washington, DC; today, I work with startups and technology companies, most of which are based in and around Silicon Valley. The 2024 election saw a continued convergence of my two professional lives, of Silicon Valley and DC. There is perhaps no greater example than Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a meme-named advisory department that will, according to the statement from President Trump, “provide advice and guidance from outside of the Government, and will partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget to drive large scale structural reform.”
I am no Elon Musk fanboy.
I am in awe of what Elon Musk has done with Tesla, bringing electric vehicles in the U.S. to the mainstream and decarbonizing personal transportation, a sector responsible for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions1. SpaceX, in terms of technological innovation and driving down the cost of satellite and rocket launches, is nothing short of a modern marvel.
I’d love to see government spending, and, in general, the bevy of regulations that make navigating the U.S. Code exceedingly complex for individuals and businesses, reigned in and refocused on what matters so the government can better work for the American people.
Can DOGE do it? That depends on its mission.
Starting with the wrong problem
I have the distinct pleasure of working with people much, much smarter than me every day. It’s one of the best things about being a freelance comms pro.
One technology and product development leader I spoke with recently told me that “it’s important to be accountable to the problem, not to the person owning the problem.”
It’s a simple statement that rewired my brain.
So over the holidays, when someone said “I’m Elon will find trillions of dollars to cut” — because what would a gathering of friends and family be without deranged hot takes about politics — I asked myself: Can DOGE be accountable to the problem?
And we definitely do have a debt problem. The Department of Defense, one of the single largest spenders of taxpayer money, couldn’t pass an audit to save its life.2 Interest payments on the current U.S. debt translates to over 15% of federal spending.3 $38 million in COVID relief payments went to dead people.4
Unfortunately, Elon Musk has made it clear that to address U.S. debt, federal government employees are target 1 for DOGE.
Cutting headcount at your typical SaaS startup to get to fiscal soundness works because headcount is their biggest expense. It is almost laughable how not true that is for the government. Let’s dig into the numbers:
For the sake of conversation, let’s assume that every one of the 2,105,8645 employees across all of the Cabinet-level federal agencies — from the 486,000-ish employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the 220,000-ish employees at the Department of the Army all the way to the 14,000-ish at the State Department and 4,000-ish at the Department of Education — make the maximum allowable salary under the General Schedule (GS)6 classification and pay system: $191,900.7
They obviously don’t, but bear with me.
If you fired 50% of federal employees, all of whom are hypothetically making as much as possible, you’d save about $200 billion. That’s a big chunk of change, right?
Wrong.
In FY22, the government spent $6.3 trillion. $200 billion is a hair over 3% of total federal spending.
Three. Percent.
It’s like scooping a gallon of water out of the fucking ocean. As I am writing this, I am reminded of some brilliant dialogue from Rian Johnson’s film, Glass Onion:
“It’s so dumb.”
“It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!”
“No! It’s just dumb!”
Accountability to the problem
Reasonable observers can agree that DOGE’s idea to reform government spending by laying off a bunch of federal employees is a solution fundamentally unaccountable to the problem because the action does not meaningfully, you know, reduce government spending.
On the flip side, here’s a rough breakdown of how the federal government spends our money (using FY22 numbers for consistency):
The first category are mandatory programs, whose expenditures do not require annual appropriations from Congress in the budget and are instead set by pre-existing laws: Social Security ($1.2 trillion) and Medicare/Medicaid ($1.4 trillion).
The second category is what’s called discretionary spending — meaning, each year, Congress decides how much to spend on it. Discretionary spending is broadly broken down into two categories: Defense spending ($750 billion) and everything else ($910 billion).
For about every dollar spent on mandatory programs, we spend about 64 cents on discretionary programs. The largest category of spending, mandatory programs, is on autopilot — elected officials in Congress do not touch it when budgeting.
If that seems bad to you, that’s because it is.
Reforming mandatory spending is very clearly the most impactful way to reduce government spending.
Congress has no desire to do that.
DOGE, meet Congress
Here are a few facts to noodle on:
Voters over the age of 45 outnumber voters under the age of 45 two to one.8
In the 117th Congress, the average age of Members of the House was 58; Senators were 64.9
Individuals must be 62 years old to collect Social Security benefits (notwithstanding some disability exceptions).
Individuals must be 65 to be eligible for Medicare (notwithstanding some disability exceptions).
We have an older voter base that votes for older members of Congress, who are in turn the only people who can vote for changes to existing laws that allocate money to the federal government’s largest expenditures, which are programs for older people.
The idea that Congress would vote to cut or reform Social Security and Medicare, programs that most voters care about keeping because it benefits them, is a farce. Members of Congress care about one thing above all else: Keeping their job. Amending Social Security and Medicare in any way is as surefire a way to lose an election as exists.
I wish I believed elected officials had the mettle to make hard choices. I don’t.
The fiscal state of the nation will still be dire because no one will touch mandatory programs because it’s easier and more effective to spike a political football than it is to enact true, meaningful change through Congressional policy. The people who, today, say they care about the budget will stick their heads in the sand, burying people my age and younger in debt up to our eyeballs.
DOGE, meet Congress: Part II
DOGE is ostensibly also focused on a different set of problems: Waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies within federal government agencies, all of which, without a doubt, exist and are bad and should definitely be fixed.
You wanna know whose fault that is? To paraphrase THE pop queen Britney Spears, oops, Congress did it again.
Here’s how it works: Congress (the Legislative Branch) writes laws; the Executive Branch (regulatory agencies) enact laws.
But Congress writes laws that are not prescriptive. They’ll say to the Department of Transportation (DoT) “We want cars to be safer! How? We don’t know. You guys figure it out.” Then DoT writes a bunch of regs.
We should not be surprised that regulations are exploding when Congress cedes its authority to the regulatory agencies by way of unspecific legislative language. And exploding they are: Up to 4,500 new regs are written every year.10 The annually-published Federal Register, which includes all proposed and enacted regs, is tens of millions of words. Some of those include what can only be described as strokes of genius, like:
Washing a fish at a faucet in a national forest that's not specifically designated for fish-washing is illegal.11
Restaurants can’t sell onion rings made from diced onions unless they’re called “Onion rings not made from actual onion rings but instead diced onions” or something stupid.12
You can’t use a falconer’s falcon in a movie unless the movie is about falconry.13
Let’s assume DOGE finds a bunch of dumb regs and works with Congress to get them off the books. Let’s assume, for a time, regulatory agencies will be operating more effectively and efficiently on behalf of the American people because regulations have been streamlined. Elon Musk et al will (rightly) spike the political football and declare victory.
And a victory it will be, albeit one that is short-lived.
DOGE will have treated symptoms, but not the disease. Unless Congress changes how it writes laws and commits to a level of specificity that reduces or eliminates the possibility for regulatory agencies to take a heavy hand when implementing laws passed by Congress, we’ll be in the same place we are today a decade from now: Swimming in unwieldy regulations with a bloated federal government spending more money than it has, unable to adequate meet the needs of the American people.
Can Elon Musk change Congress?
Nah.
But I’d love to be proven wrong.
Additional reading
Statecraft by Santi Ruiz, a delightful newsletter that serves as “a roadmap for readers trying to get big hairy things done in the public sector, and illuminates the inner workings of government for the policy-curious,” also published an interview about federal bureaucracy today. I strongly recommend giving it a read and subscribing — it’s one of the best policy newsletters out there.
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