DOGE

A missed opportunity

Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash

The DOGE freight train rumbles on. For the last month, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been terminating contracts and federal employees by the thousand. It’s creating chaos. Orders are issued and rescinded and then reordered, and workers are unsure if they have a job. On top of all this, the legality of what DOGE and the executive branch are doing is unclear.

There are a lot of things one could say about DOGE, and I spent several days trying to figure out how to even approach this post. My original intent was to try to write a balanced piece examining how DOGE was going about things in a ham-fisted way but may be successful in the end. The more research I did, however, the more that seemed too charitable of reading of Musk’s initiative. I also considered venting my frustrations that instead of focusing on what DOGE is doing, many critics seem to care more about calling Musk stupid and riling up their base than making any headway in blunting his policies. It’s astonishing how toothless the opposition has become. It’s far easier to find opponents of DOGE hurling grade-school insults than commenters who are coming up with paths to block its actions. This is bad for everyone: an effective opposition says, “We lost the last election. Let’s figure out why and offer a clear plan to voters on why they should choose us next time”. Having such an opposition is a necessary component of healthy democracy. “We lost the election, let’s insult those who won” is not in the best interests of the country, and doesn’t solve the problem.

But this isn’t supposed to be a political article. It’s supposed to be an economic one. Thus, ultimately DOGE comes down to this: what a missed opportunity.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, agrees that the methods the federal government uses for hiring, promotion, procurement, approvals, and everything else the federal government does, are ineffective. It’s always been said that while promotion in the civil service is officially merit-based, in reality, seniority carries the day. The severe drop in state capacity to build things is also well-documented. The procurement rules for federal spending are so complex that contracts are generally rewarded to those who know how to work the byzantine system rather than those who will do the best job. So there is a lot of room for improvement. Put someone like Mitch Daniels in charge, the former governor who froze tuition at Purdue for ten years, and watch the gains in efficiency build.

The DOGE approach, however, is not doing that.

First the layoffs. The federal government is a behemoth. It employs millions of people. That said, the federal workforce hasn’t grown in decades, especially as the US population has increased:

Over the last 50 years, the number of federal employees has had some ups and downs (I’m not sure what the occasional spikes are being caused by), but overall, the federal government has not become some massive leviathan of useless workers.

Crucially, even if the federal government was full of bad employees, the way to fix the system would be to get rid of the bad ones. Instead, DOGE has chosen to get rid of the new ones. This is not going to increase efficiency. This approach is being used because once federal employees work long enough, usually 1-2 years, their jobs are protected by law. New, or probationary, employees, don’t have that protection. So they were fired. Targeting new employees over ineffective ones is just the politician's fallacy of “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.” In this case, it probably went something like this:

“We need to fire bad federal employees who are just mailing it in or are not going to further the Trump administration’s aims. We want to do so by the tens of thousands.”

“Sorry you can’t do that. Most federal employees’ jobs are protected by law.”

“Most?”

“Well yeah. New employees are not protected, but there’s no evidence that new Federal employees are worse than senior ones. In fact, there is eviden-”

“Say no more.”

Musk, for all his faults, clearly knows how to run a company. The evidence is incontrovertible. Arguing with people who believe otherwise is as worthwhile as arguing with someone who thinks professional wrestling is real. So why is DOGE, an organization ostensibly devoted to efficiency, using ineffective methods? The problem is that running a government like a company doesn’t work. Musk doesn’t realize this. You can’t fire people from the government en masse the way you fire Twitter employees because, unlike a tech company, government workers can’t just be rehired. Federal employees need security clearances and have to go through background checks and so on. It’s a time and resource-consuming process.

Now, one could reasonably argue that the Federal hiring process is part of the problem. Fine. Then the solution is to reform the process, not leave the broken process in place and substitute the goal of “improving government efficiency” for “firing as many employees as legally possible”. Far from improving efficiency, firing probationary employees may ultimately decrease the efficiency of the federal government. Former federal employees I’ve talked to have confirmed my suspicions that the worst workers are often those who have been there the longest. Certainly not early-career workers who are trying to make their name.

Musk’s other mistake is to ignore politics completely. Firing a few hundred employees from the Department of Education isn’t going to be that noticeable to most Americans. Firing hundreds of National Park Service employees, however, is an own-goal. If there is one government agency people like, it’s the Park Service. Picking a fight with them is like trying to build a parking lot in Central Park. Even if it is a good idea, it’s not worth the political capital that will be spent. I suspect there is some malicious compliance among park employees trying to make the firings as noticeable as possible (do you have to close the bathrooms, or do you know that will make a headline?), but firing employees who aren’t customer facing and leaving the few agencies people like is obvious.

The best way to think about DOGE’s approach is through the parable of Chesterton’s Fence:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Or, more succinctly, “Do not take down a fence until you know why it is there.”

Looking at the list of DOGE savings, many of the cuts seem justifiable. Does the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) need to spend $217,000 on Wall Street Journal subscriptions or over $10,000 on a “furnishing expert”? Well here’s the thing. I don’t know. Telling CFPB employees that the agency will cover 75 percent of a subscription to the Wall Street Journal would likely show that a small to moderate minority read it regularly. I have no idea what a furnishing expert is.

Therein lies the point.

The cuts are defensible. But as long as I don’t even know what the money is being spent on, the expenses are defensible as well. It’s irresponsible to say that a cost that isn’t understood is a waste of money, and DOGE is clearly not performing due diligence. Maybe CFPB employees use the Wall Street Journal all the time to build evidence for its cases. Maybe the furnishing expert was an expert witness used in one of those cases. Or maybe both expenses were a complete waste. As long as that simple fact isn’t clear we shouldn’t go tearing down every fence in sight. Worse yet, DOGE isn’t destroying every fence in sight, because many, and all the most expensive fences, are beyond their reach. Instead DOGE is taking a wrecking ball to every fence that it’s allowed to, without ever asking why it is there.