In the new administration, billionaire Elon Musk has been appointed to head a new Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company and (very) short-lived Republican presidential candidate, after he spent $118 million of his personal wealth on the campaign to reelect Donald Trump as president. The fact that DOGE, the acronym for this new department, is also the name of a cryptocurrency that Musk is pushing, is no accident.
Musk may find this funny, but for the rest of us, the idea that more administrative bureaucracy is the way to efficiency—especially when that bureaucracy will have little to no authority—can be downright Orwellian. You see, anything that Congress attempts to adopt will probably face serious legal challenges since Congress, not an administrative agency, controls expenditures. If anything, DOGE reflects a lack of understanding of how government functions and demonstrates how grandiose campaign promises are based on fabrication. (Warning: It’s not a business.)
We should begin anew. Let’s say you are worried that the federal government has to be closely monitored since it is prone to waste, fraud, and abuse. You presume there is less efficiency because it’s the government and not a profit-driven private enterprise. What are you doing? The U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the authority to control the purse, is your main restriction and the one that takes precedence over all others without exception. All federal agencies are established by Congress, which also authorizes their budget and sets their mandates. Congress is the first place to start if you want efficiency.
Furthermore, a president cannot arbitrarily decide not to use funds that Congress has authorized. We have previously been here. Congress enshrined the legal power of Congress, not the president, to allocate expenditure after Richard Nixon withheld cash that lawmakers had allotted. This was accomplished in 1974 with the passage of the Impoundment Control Act. When Trump withheld aid to Ukraine while in office, he was determined to have violated the Act, which resulted in the first of his two impeachments.
Congress is responsible for closely monitoring spending, but since members and committees are always changing seats and majority status, it’s a lot to ask of them. Instead, a congressional agency should be established. Like the Congressional Budget Office, these agencies are answerable to Congress rather than the president, as is the case with executive agencies. Unlike the flimsy DOGE, which has no legal jurisdiction (even to exist, as it’s not being created by Congress!), this new agency would have the authority to audit every other government agency and its recommendations would ideally have the power of Congress.
Why is Trump not requesting that Congress establish this efficiency agency? For starters, it recently celebrated its 100th birthday and is (mostly) already in existence. As part of hundreds of steps to properly manage federal dollars, the Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s aggressive auditor, retrieved $70 billion from agencies in fiscal 2023. Experts in the fields they manage make up the GAO personnel, and these reserved technocrats are far more capable than they appear. According to the agency’s calculations, for every $1 spent, it returns $133 to the government.
Given that the GAO notes that Congress frequently ignores the most significant issues it identifies, the returns may be significantly higher. The organization creates a list of high-risk regions, or places where there is a high chance of waste, fraud, and abuse and where legislation needs to be changed. Some of the entries on the list date back to the early 1990s.
Effective leadership is what the federal government needs to fight unnecessary spending, not cowboy CEOs who have no idea how the government operates running a fictional agency with little authority. Better is due to Americans.
Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant. 2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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