The Most Serene DOGE The canals of government inefficiency are plied not by gondolas, but by war galleys
The President-Elect of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has begotten an inquisitorially-minded anti-waste institution dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The bicephalous institution (an initial red flag when it comes to institutions everywhere) is jointly run by noted tech giant Elon Musk (worth 330 billion dollars or thereabouts) and the pharma entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (a mere 330 times “poorer”). The department will not be an actual government body, which presumably would require Congressional complicity in downsizing the leviathan it helped create. DOGE will be a sort of outside consultant specializing in “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies” (Trump dixit). Presented as a veritable “Manhattan project for our times”, the nascent body is born under a feeble star sign (since the President relies on bipartisan support from Congress, not just a pen, no matter what Obama claimed back in the day), while also being coupled with unrealistic and exaggerated claims of two trillion dollars in yearly savings, which is a third of all federal expenditures outside those of interest on debt.
An argument-based discussion on DOGE is much more difficult compared to the easy (and flighty) way in which politicians converse on such subjects, with decibels, soundbites and zingers. An educated approach would have it divided between theoretical, historical and cultural lines of reasoning.
Theoretically, you can’t really debureaucratize a bureaucracy bureaucratically. This is because there is a difference in nature, not just in degree, between “profit-based management” (relying on entry-exit calculus expressed in monetary units) and “bureaucratic management” (rooted in the execution of non-commercial rules and imperatives). Not even a super-entrepreneur will be able to say if the state production of public goods and services is good or not, since the state does not sell them, but force them into your hands after rifling through your pockets. Therefore, the state resources can be made more efficient either by removing them from state hands (by privatizing its components and then eliminating the inefficiencies and trimming the fat), or by letting them become… informally transactionable (by letting politicians utilize them “privately”, through corruption and graft).
The state cannot be made profitable but, by limiting it and the sphere of forcibly socialized resources, these can be sent back to society for more efficient stewardship, through entrepreneurship and markets. The “uncomfortable” Mises told us this in his “Bureaucracy” great small book.
Historically, Trump and his merry Republican Administration possess a poor record on this kind of public spending purge and sanitation. They had an opportunity to jigger expenditures in his first term as well (2017-2021). However, they understood that the cynical yet conservative electorate is unmoved by sophisticated discussions regarding the rationalization of expenses and the risk of deficits, responding only to “tax cuts”. Trump applied the golden rule of procrastination: “don’t do today what you can put off unto tomorrow and the… Democrats”. The pandemic came, the economy caught a flu, the expenses went viral. Now and in the future, with the US self-delegating to itself the role of maintaining “law and order” globally, the federal budget is not in the best shape for large-scale experiments in fiscal discipline, the underlying factors being against such an approach.
And, obviously, big savings will not come from removing a third of the public servants (many of them to be replaced by private contractors, who are also paid and quite expensive), but rather by besieging the hard core of the “welfare state” – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veteran services. A no go.
Therefore, culturally, the already tottering American political community would suffer under tremendous stress by opening a “minimal welfare state” front, which would be infinitely more bitter than the woke vs MAGA polemics, the Wall with Mexico, the mass deportations, or US (dis)engagement in Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan etc. This, on the one hand. On the other hand, reforms usually occur during crises, not zen periods, and the way in which they occur depends on the moral fibre of the deciders: for instance, the incrimination of political opinions was possible under Woodrow Wilson because of the First World War, and the Great Depression led to massive state involvement in the economy under FDR. And so on, and so forth. What can lead to a battle with… state waste?
Such a question remains purely rhetorical, because the answers are also speculative. We could instead come back to the word “doge” and to the “2024 super electoral year” which brought Trump back to the White House and citizens worldwide close to losing faith in the goddess of liberal democracy.
Like Aristotle’s Greece, or the Venice of doges until 1797, the democratic selection had an assumed element of chance: for Venice, a lottery was inserted in a complicated iterative process through which the name of he who would serve for life would be selected. Once reason had done its utmost (in selecting a list of potential leaders), then something else must finish the job: intuition, chance, fate; and “chance” alone was found to be truly unbiased and objective, some would say. Walking forward across centuries in the convoluted democratic present, and taking a look to the “to be continued in 2025” Romanian (presidential) electoral season 2024 – one that was found guilty of being so much Tic…Talked, algorithmically infected, financially opaque, only to be, in the end, (un)constitutionally curtailed –, I wish, all of us, best of… luck in the brave new… democracy-lottery!
