DOGE: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Government are Not the Problem — Bureaucratic Power is

Many are dancing an Irish jig – even non-Irishmen whom one would not expect to know such dances – over the prospect of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy heading up a new “Grace Commission 2.0” of sorts, cheerfully nicknamed a Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

They intend an 18-month project, hopefully to conclude by our nation’s 250th anniversary, in which they will apply standard American manufacturing cost-cutting techniques such as LEAN and Six Sigma tools, to find out how much fat is in every federal department, bureau and agency, and cut it out as fast as possible.

Such fat might be identified in surplus personnel, surplus office costs, unnecessary perks, redundant systems, and more.  It is assumed they can cut ten percent of the federal workforce without it even being noticed; with such diligent chiefs as these at the helm, there’s no telling how much more money they will be able to save the taxpayer.

In preparation for this project, Mr. Musk has been reminding the public of our massive national debt, and of the fact that interest on the debt alone already exceeds our military spending.  To say this situation is unsustainable is putting it mildly. All Americans should wish the DOGE team well.

There is no need, incidentally, to feel sorry for the people to be cut in this process.  The DOGE team knows the law, and fully understands the rules about terminating civil servants.  These people will likely get an enviable mix of cash buyouts and federal pensions that reward them more handsomely than they deserve for their years of bureaucratic pencil pushing.

We can expect the DOGE team to save an enormous amount of money for the American taxpayer, which will provide a noticeable bump to the economy.

However, if all the government does is continue to do what it does today with just 80%, or 70%, or even 50% of the employees, that will still not be a victory.

Why not?  Because the usual targets of such a project – “waste, fraud and abuse” – are not America’s main problem with our federal government.

Our problem isn’t that the government is too big or too costly. 

Our problem is that it has gone rogue.

Even if we cut the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, from its current 14,500 employees to just one single overworked guy, we won’t have helped the country at all, if that one guy continues to issue the regulations that the EPA currently issues every year.

In the end, the salaries, benefits, perks and office supplies that we spend on our federal agencies aren’t America’s cancer.  Our cancer is the Federal Register, that monstrous stack of regulations to which federal bureaucrats contribute every day.

The federal bureaucracy had no right to ban the American-made incandescent lightbulbs that we’ve used happily for over a century; but they used an ill-advised law requiring greater bulb efficiency as grounds for an outright ban, and now our homes are full of expensive Chinese LEDs — and those old American bulb factories are shuttered and empty.

The federal bureaucracy had no right to issue a ban on single-stage natural gas furnaces, requiring Americans (starting next year) to make and buy the dual-stage models that cost twice as much. But the bureaucracy issued the ban anyway, massively increasing the cost of American housing at a single stroke of the pen.

The federal bureaucracy had no right to mandate special low-flow shower heads, but they did, forcing plumbing fixture manufacturers to change the way they design bathroom shower fixtures, forcing them to unload their old perfectly-good products at discount and start selling new compliant products at greater cost, often now made abroad.

Shall we go on?  All over the federal government, we find outrageous, unconstitutional, destructive regulations.

Legally, every federal agency is limited in two ways: the agency can only exercise the powers granted to it by Congress, and Congress itself had to have the Constitutional authority to grant it such power in the first place.

But the government stopped honoring these two restrictions over a century ago. 

Once Congress sets up an agency, it loses interest in what that agency does, so its oversight is usually limited to a brief moment of funding discussion when the annual budget fight comes along.  Because of this lack of real oversight, far too many of the nation’s bureaucrats soon discover that their power to overregulate is limited only by their own Napoleonic imagination.

It doesn’t take 15,500 employees and a $10 billion budget for the EPA to regulate American businesses out of existence, to regulate factories out of the country, and to regulate American citizens into poverty.  The EPA could do all that with 10,000 employees and a seven billion dollar budget.  Heck, considering the feverish dedication of some of the climate extremists in that movement, they could probably do just as much damage with a quarter the people and a fifth the budget.

So cutting direct management and personnel costs should not be our primary goal if we seek true government reform.

The DOGE needs to look first at every department in the context of the Constitution of the United States, alongside the legislation that authorized the existence of the agency. 

The real question isn’t “How many bureaucrats can we cut?” – it’s “How thoroughly and quickly can we restore this agency’s obedience to the rule of law?”

And in the case of the many rogue agencies – probably too numerous for the casual reader to believe – that simply cannot be reformed, how closely can the DOGE team and the Congress work together to sunset those agencies for good, and thereby free the American people from their tyranny?

It’s a natural assumption, especially from a businessman, that waste, fraud and abuse must be our biggest problems, but they aren’t.  Illegality is our problem. Tyranny is our problem.

The costly, destructive, un-American technocracy of the nanny state – unhinged and unlimited for generations now — is the massive nest of termites eating away at the foundation of the American way of life.

Let us pray that with the guidance and blessing of Divine Providence, the DOGE team finds a way to thread that needle, and restore the Constitutionality of our federal government again, just in time for our 250th Independence Day.

Image: Twitter screen shot

American Thinker