It’s not hard to lampoon DOGE, the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” sprung from the fevered brains of President-elect Donald Trump’s favorite tech oligarchs, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The DOGE has grand ambitions — eliminating government regulations, jobs and agencies and slashing federal spending by $2 trillion — but no powers.
It won’t be a government department or even a formal advisory committee, say Musk and Ramaswamy. Instead, it will be a “lean team of small-government crusaders” feeding the Trump White House ideas for cutting the “deep state” down to size.
They maintain, implausibly, that Trump can drastically shrink the federal government through executive orders alone. Apparently, they expect Congress and the courts to roll over and grant Trump autocratic powers to “restore” democracy.
But before Democrats dismiss the DOGE as just more MAGA trollery, it’s fair to ask — where’s their plan for making government more efficient and effective?
Inexplicably, that plank is missing from the platform of the party that believes in active government.
It’s not exactly breaking news that Americans have very low confidence in the government’s problem-solving abilities. Such low esteem grows out of a myriad of frustrating citizen interactions with public institutions of all kinds — schools, social service providers, public health systems; police and courts; local licensing and permitting boards as well as distant federal bureaucracies.
Especially skeptical are non-college voters. They believe Washington serves the interests and ideological passions of highly educated elites, not ordinary working people like them.
This helps to explain why Bidenomics failed to land with working Americans. In fact, White House bragging about “delivering” big spending bills likely intensified their skepticism, since tangible benefits were slow to materialize while soaring prices cut deeply into family budgets.
Democrats would be wise to resurrect one of Bill Clinton’s best ideas — reinventing government — and make it a centerpiece of a new strategy for winning back working Americans.
The first step is a frank acknowledgment that many of our key public sector systems are broken and need urgent repair. Democrats should be able to parry Republican attempts to enfeeble government without defending bureaucratic dysfunction.
For example, America’s K-12 system is mostly stuck in an old industrial model, where district bureaucracies and teachers’ unions impose one-size-fits-all uniformity on public schools. This command-and-control approach performed poorly during the pandemic, leaving a legacy of steep learning losses, declining enrollment and rising absenteeism.
But in cities like New Orleans, Washington and Indianapolis, a 21st-century model has emerged that expands parental choice, shifts decisions from central bureaucrats to autonomous school leaders, and uses performance-based contracts to hold all K-12 schools accountable for lifting academic achievement.
The Biden administration turned its back on these modernizing reforms, choosing instead to side with teachers’ unions defending the status quo. That has emboldened red-state Republicans to pass universal voucher laws giving even affluent parents incentives to put their kids into private schools.
To combat privatization and keep faith with low-income Black and Latino families languishing on waiting lists for public charter schools, Democrats must recommit themselves to bringing public school governance into the digital age.
Democrats also should update U.S. immigration laws and reduce illegal entry into the country to a trickle. They should push for more police protection for crime-ridden neighborhoods and merchants under siege by “smash-and-grab” gangs. They should dismantle massive homeless encampments in our cities that have become glaring symbols of government neglect and impotence.
In addition to reinvigorating crucial public institutions, Democrats should draw a bead on “bureausclerosis” — the proliferation of laws, regulations and bureaucratic processes that make government agencies so ponderous and inflexible.
Why does it take so long and cost so much to build things in America? In a forthcoming book, “Why Nothing Happens”, my colleague Marc Dunkelman unfurls vivid tales of how the government has degenerated from an enabler of progress into a “vetocracy” that forces new transportation, energy and housing projects to run a gauntlet of multiple agency reviews, public hearings and court challenges.
In “The Rule of Nobody” and other popular books on ossified government, attorney Philip Howard also has shown how public officials smothered by rules designed to micromanage human behavior have lost the authority to use their judgment to make reasonable trade-offs that balance competing public interests.
Like Howard, my organization has called for putting deadlines on environmental reviews and permit applications. We’ve also designed a Regulatory Improvement Commission that would give Congress a politically viable way to periodically get rid of outdated, superfluous and conflicting regulations.
Democrats also should consult specialists in institutional innovation like Michele Zanini and Michael J. Mazarr, who are developing an intriguing template for “post-bureaucratic” public institutions.
“People working in sectors such as defense, education, healthcare, and scientific research describe the same dynamics: crushing amounts of paperwork and bureaucratic process; severe constraints on their autonomy and independent decision-making capability; powerful barriers to reform and change; and ultimately, systems that do no promote human agency and dignity,” Zanini told me.
Instead of defending lumbering bureaucracies, Democrats should experiment with new public institutions that are flat and decentralized; that organize workers into small teams charged with getting specific tasks done speedily; that are armed with advanced technology, especially AI; and that reward workers who show initiative.
The aim here is not to take a chainsaw to the “administrative state,” as Musk and Ramaswamy propose. It is to design leaner, nimbler and more user-friendly public institutions that deliver quality services and enable citizens to solve their own problems.
A more dynamic and responsive public sector is not an impossible dream. And it’s too important a job to leave to an imperious president and the wealthy political dilettantes behind DOGE.
Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.
