Musk vs Gore

Photo by Bob McNeelyWhite House Photograph Office, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Government spending is out of control. Debt is rising. Markets are spooked. Federal agencies are rife with dyfunction. In an effort to address this, the President puts together a task force to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, downsize the federal government and make it serve the needs of Americans better.

Am I talking about DOGE? No, I’m jumping in the Wayback Machine and talking about the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR), a program instituted by President Clinton and managed by Vice-President Al Gore. From wikipedia:

During its five years, it catalyzed significant changes in the way the federal government operates, including the elimination of over 100 programs, the elimination of over 250,000 federal jobs, the consolidation of over 800 agencies, and the transfer of institutional knowledge to contractors. NPR introduced the use of performance measurements and customer satisfaction surveys, and encouraged the use of technology including the Internet. NPR is recognized as a success and had a lasting impact according to government officials who worked on or were influenced by it under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

NPR put together an extremely effective process for streamlining government. Its initial proposals were developed after six months of intense consultation with almost every agency in the federal government. The cuts were implemented by a combination of internal department changes and Congressional legislation. The latter proved to be the limiting factor: Congress refused many of the recommended cuts to programs. Had they acted on more of NPR’s recommendations, the savings would have been even greater.

NPR was not the first organization designed to cut government waste. FDR has the Brownlow Committee; Truman had the Hoover Commission; Reagan had the Grace Commission. All of them managed to streamline government and cut spending although all fell well short of their goals thanks to Congress hedging on spending cuts.

I bring this up to demonstrate that the concept of President Musk’s DOGE is not novel. We’ve done this before and we’ve done it effectively. But the contrast between previous efforts to streamline the government and the goat rope that is DOGE could not be starker.

In contrast to NPR, DOGE is not working closely with each federal department to identify wasteful spending; instead it is dispatching a Scooby Doo gang of teenage hacker miscreants to pour through government data. As a result, it is firing critical personnel then having to hire them back, making false claims about programs because it can’t be bothered to get the details right and making insane claims of fraud that turn out not to be true:

Over the past few days, President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting benefits — a “HUGE problem,” Musk wrote, as his Department of Government Efficiency digs into federal agencies to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

…

Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type. This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago. The news organization WIRED first reported on the use of COBOL programming language at the Social Security Administration.

…

A July 2023 Social Security OIG report states that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.” And, as of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.

In short, nothing in this claim is remotely true and a two-minute phone call to someone within the Social Security Administration would have confirmed this. In fact, if Elon had bothered to look at his own data, he would have seen that just under 100,000 people over the age of 100 receive Social Security benefits. Which is pretty close to the estimated 101,000 centenarians currently living in the United States.

DOGE has also talked about going after Medicare and Medicaid fraud. This is, in fact, an area where tens of billions could be saved. The problem, as our own Em Carpenter pointed out, is that we already have agencies tasked with identifying Medicare and Medicaid fraud. They’re ignoring the Medicaid Fraud Control Units and thus throwing away massive amounts of real expertise.

That is the common thread in all this chaos: DOGE is making unforced errors because they are failing to consult with people who actually know how the government works. As Mike Masnick points out:

It’s worth noting that the US government already has established, professional watchdogs with actual expertise in tracking down waste, fraud, and abuse: the Inspectors General (whom Trump illegally removed upon taking office) and the Government Accountability Office. These are people who know how to follow the money, understand federal contracting rules, and can tell the difference between waste and, you know, normal government operations. (A distinction that seems to elude the DOGE crew.)

DOGE seems determined to ignore these existing competent oversight bodies, perhaps because their methodical, fact-based approach doesn’t generate enough social media buzz with which to fluff Musk’s ego.

The many agencies that try to stamp out fraud could use a helping hand. DOGE could be bringing in new innovative tools to make their jobs easier and more effective. Instead, it is trying to reinvent the wheel with popsicle sticks and getting basic details wrong. And because they don’t know what they are doing, normal government expenditures start to look like fraud.

Even on the rare occasions DOGE gets the details right, they are still usually wrong. DOGE often conflates “things Elon doesn’t like” with “waste” and cuts it, causing chaos. It went after USAID with a sledgehammer, causing immense suffering for USAID workers abruptly abandoned in foreign countries. Just to cite one area of need, they closed PEPFAR clinics, causing thousands of babies to be needlessly born with HIV infections that could have been prevented.

How exactly is this serving the taxpayer?

Moreover, many of the savings they are claiming are illusory. Because DOGE is bypassing Congress and running roughshod over federal employment laws, there has been an explosion of lawsuits.¹ Fighting these lawsuits costs money and DOGE is unlikely to win all or even most of them. So some of these “spending cuts” are going to be reversed.²

All in all, DOGE is claiming to have saved the taxpayers $55 billion, which would be a nice chunk of change.³ But one of the lessons the Trump people have learned is that when you lie to the American people, you don’t actually need a veneer of plausibility to your lie. Just make something up out of whole cloth and let the commentariat do the rest.

DOGE’s actual savings, assuming they even exist, are closer to $8 billion, with much of that likely to vanish. Only $16 billion is actually itemized and $8 billion of that is because a contract was erroneously listed as “billion” instead of “million”. Even then, there are shenanigans such as counting contracts that have already ended as “savings”.

Even if that $55 billion number plucked from the ether were real, it can be contrasted against the Republican budget plan which includes $400 billion in new spending, $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and, to balance it out I guess, $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

Party of fiscal responsibility!

DOGE is such a disaster, I have come around to belief that cutting government spending isn’t its actual purpose. Consider:

• DOGE is granting Musk unprecedented access to personal, business and financial information. This information is worth billions.
• DOGE has heavily targeted agencies with which Musks’s businesses are having ongoing legal fights.
• While it may not be cutting spending, it has a propaganda firehose through Twitter to make exaggerated claims of success, claims that are being dutifully echoed by Right Wing grifters.
• Almost all the “waste” it is identifying are MAGA bete noires: foreign aid, public health, science, “DEI”, CFPB, etc.

In short, nothing I’m seeing strikes me as a serious effort to cut government spending. If that were the case, DOGE would have gone silent for six months, pulled in experts from every field, learned from the existing watchdogs and then presented Congress with a massive list of programs to cut. It would have done what NPR did, only with a new suite of sophisticated tools.

Instead, we have a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Big splashy tweets to convince the public that DOGE is saving massive amounts of money while Elon and his droogs make off with a king’s ransom worth of financial data. And … that seems to be what the MAGA base want. So I expect it to be touted as a success for the next four years despite its manifest failure.

1. The legal firestorm may be intended. Many within this Administration, including Christian Nationalist OMB director Vought, think the President should be able to ignore Congress on spending and simply “impound” money he doesn’t want to spend. The precedent of Clinton v. New York is pretty clear on this but SCOTUS has been willing to contort the law, the Constitution and their own precedent to service Trump, so who knows how that will go.
2. What Elon is doing reminds me of another Clinton-era commission — Hillary Clinton’s healthcare task force. Its doings were kept in such secrecy that the public didn’t even know who was on it. Many lawsuits and Congressional hearings later, it presented a healthcare reform plan that crashed and burned faster than the Chiefs’ offensive line. It was such a fiasco that I know people who think it was deliberately botched to delay healthcare reform for over a decade.
3. Although they absurdly talking about issuing checks to the taxpayers for several thousand dollars for this savings which (a) is bad math; and (b) defeats the supposed purpose of reducing the deficit.