No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families. It fails to collect $606 billion in annual revenue, much of it purloined by the unscrupulous and unaccountable affluent (including, famously, Donald Trump); this sum gets added to the whole country’s debt burden. The IRS still does some of its business by fax. Fax!
Enter the Trump administration, and the enigmatic policy figures of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The incoming president has tasked the two with leading a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, meant to deliver the lean, tech-savvy services that Americans deserve. Maybe with DOGE on the case, the IRS will finally offer a universally available free filing app. Or maybe the Trump administration will eliminate the agency entirely.
According to the scant details available about DOGE—gleaned from a Wall Street Journal opinion article; posts on Musk’s social-media platform, X; and public comments from members of Congress and Silicon Valley executives—Musk and Ramaswamy seem more interested in the second style of reforms than the first. The two are promising to cut regulations, shrink the executive branch’s head count, and eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of supposedly wasteful spending.
If this is the plan, then the plan is to make the government worse. The Trump administration seems to be promising not visionary change, but the same old right-wing same old: describing bloodletting as rightsizing, slashing regulations instead of pruning or refining them, blaming civil servants instead of empowering them, ignoring the desperate imperative for investment, and decrying executive overreach while engaging in egregious executive overreach.
What is most frustrating is that American citizens really do deserve a federal department dedicated to efficiency. They deserve better procurement, and less waste and fraud. They deserve tech-forward, elegant programmatic design. They deserve something better than a government that functions like a continent-spanning DMV, wasting countless hours of their precious time. The American people deserve DOGE. The American government needs DOGE. But Trump and Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE seems like a joke.
Despite its name, DOGE will not be a federal department. It will be a commission, one of many Washington commissions on efficiency and efficacy convened over the past century-plus. “The tradition of government commissions is that you have a blue-ribbon panel with famous people, respected businessmen, maybe a former president, get together to make recommendations, and nothing happens,” Donald Moynihan, an expert in public administration at the University of Michigan, told me. “That is one possibility here. And given where Musk and Ramaswamy are coming from, that might be the best-case scenario.”
Where are Musk and Ramaswamy coming from? The energy, aerospace, defense, automotive, technology, artificial-intelligence, media, and pharmaceutical industries. Between them, they’re involved in more than a dozen firms that are hemmed in by federal regulations, enforced by civil servants; several of those firms hold government contracts. Ramaswamy is reportedly a near billionaire, and Musk is a billionaire 340 times over. The two are drowning in conflicts of interest, as is Trump himself. Laws stipulate that advisory panels be “fairly balanced,” and that their members do not have opportunities for self-dealing and corruption. But what if Trump never constitutes DOGE as an official panel? Or what if Trump ignores or guts the General Services Administration, which enforces the rules?
All these conflicts of interests mean that Musk and Ramaswamy cannot ethically run DOGE. They are not qualified to, either. Perhaps this seems like a quaint objection, given the idiots and sycophants Trump has named for more obviously consequential jobs. Perhaps it seems like a silly objection, given Musk’s real prowess at using capitalism to make the impossible possible. But the government is not a business. It doesn’t compete like a business. It does not operate like a business. And it shouldn’t.
Our government has no competition. It operates on behalf of its citizens, scaling to their needs and desires. It prints its own currency, the world’s reserve currency, making its financial constraints orthogonal to those of households or firms. It proffers goods and services too important to leave to the markets. Neither Musk, Ramaswamy, nor Trump seems to appreciate this, instead treating the federal agencies like something to McKinsey-consult right before Christmas—to cut, gut, and abandon to the next investor, who might be able to squeeze out some profit.
Their misunderstandings are elementary, absurd. Consider Musk’s childlike proposal to slash $2 trillion from the country’s expenditures. There isn’t $2 trillion of wasteful nonsense to cut. Cutting $2 trillion means cutting Social Security, Medicare, and military spending, not public-television grants and research funds. The risk is existential for untold numbers of American seniors and for the standing of the United States as a defense superpower.
Ramaswamy has made a similar promise to get rid of half of federal employees. Why not 99 percent? That’s a fun number! Wouldn’t someone wanting to improve efficiency seek to make targeted cuts, rather than hit a prespecified figure? It’s almost as if these people don’t know anything about the civil service. Surely Ramaswamy does, though: He keeps pointing to Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Reorganization Act as giving the Trump administration the authority to make enormous head-count reductions. But the law does not give the White House the power to fire en masse, and its authority expired 44 years ago.
“In 1955, there were less than 1.5 million words in the U.S. Tax Code. Today, there are more than 16 million words,” the DOGE account posted on X. “Because of this complexity, Americans collectively spend 6.5 billion hours preparing and filing their taxes each year. This must be simplified.” The number of words in the tax code has nothing to do with the amount of time people spend preparing and filing their taxes. The tax code could be 100 times as long and the tax-filing process 100 times less onerous for individuals, if it were automated. Surely two smart businessmen must understand that.
Bumper-sticker math, shitposting, and YOLO-ing about public money and public affairs: This is Ramaswamy and Musk’s DOGE thus far. Maybe I am taking them too seriously, and too literally. Perhaps Musk and Ramaswamy aren’t going to slash the government’s head count just to slash the government’s head count, even if it means degrading public services, making the government less efficient, and wasting public funds. Then again, Musk is the guy who fired 80 percent of Twitter’s employees, cratering the social-media site’s revenue and costing himself billions.
Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed making the government more efficient in three central ways: eliminating regulations, reducing employees within the executive branch, and cutting spending, perhaps by killing whole federal agencies. First, DOGE plans to work with “legal experts” and “advanced technology” to identify regulations to cut. “This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Journal.
A few issues. Congress writes laws. The executive branch figures out how the laws will be implemented through the regulatory process. If Congress wants to change the rules, it has ways to do so, among them writing overriding legislation.
Plus, since the 1970s, federal agencies have performed cost-benefit analyses for new rules, weighing the costs to businesses and individuals against the benefits to the public. The accumulation of rules is a real problem; the process is bogged down in process. Yet Musk and Ramaswamy do not seem to be calling for tactical pruning. They’re calling for getting rid of huge numbers of regulations, fast. This would stimulate the U.S. economy by orgiastically fulfilling the demented fever dreams of every lobbyist in the swamp on the Potomac, all at once. Musk and Ramaswamy seem to be carrying water for the lobbyists carrying water for their billionaire friends, and, perhaps, for themselves.
One big tell—they have said nearly nothing about the extraordinary administrative burdens that the government places on individuals, not businesses: the time it takes to fill out the FAFSA, the lack of coordination between programs like Medicaid and food stamps and housing aid, the ancient online interfaces, the absurd waiting times, the horror of the disability-determination process, the misery of forms, the ridiculousness of having 53 unemployment-insurance systems instead of one. This is where DOGE could make a profound difference. But it wouldn’t make venture capitalists richer, so who knows?
After rules, people. “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Journal. “A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions.”
I challenge the idea that the bureaucracy is an “existential threat,” but I suppose that is unfalsifiable. What is falsifiable is the idea that the bureaucracy is “ever-growing.” The federal government directly employs roughly as many people as it did in the late 1960s, when Washington’s budget was one-quarter what it is now. If you include contractors, the government workforce has not grown since the early 1990s. If you include state and local employees, the share of Americans working for the government is historically low.
Nevertheless, Musk and Ramaswamy argue, “the number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.”
But the number of regulations within an agency’s remit is a nonsense yardstick—it’s like trying to tell how healthy you are by measuring how many cells your body has. Agencies aren’t just collections of rules. They do things. You should measure their performance by assessing how well they do those things. Musk and Ramaswamy aren’t talking about making the civil service better; they’re arguing, with no evidence, that public employees are unnecessary. This isn’t a politics of better. It is a politics of less.
After people, dollars. DOGE plans to cut “the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended.” This is a weird category to target. Expenditures on programs with expired authorizations aren’t inefficient or illicit. These are just expenditures on programs with expired authorizations—something for Congress to handle in its budget process. The biggest one right now is the veterans’ health program.
From there, DOGE has put forth a mishmash of good, bad, and warmed-over ideas, none of which adds up to $500 billion, or $2 trillion, or whatever their next magic number may be. Trump and Ramaswamy note that “federal contracts have gone unexamined for years,” and that the current procurement process is broken. (True!) They argue that the Pentagon “has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent.” (False!) They want to target “waste, fraud and abuse.” (Great!) But they don’t actually explain how they would go about it. (Boo!)
Musk and Ramaswamy have promised to work with Congress in its attempts to thin the budget, but the two sound like what they really want is to do Congress’s job for it. “Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote. “They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.” But just a few years ago, Trump was impeached in part because of his budgetary shenanigans—freezing military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine. Just this year, the Supreme Court affirmed Congress’s sweeping authority over federal spending.
DOGE’s power to cut people and regulations will be similarly limited. Trump, in his first administration, tried to get rid of civil servants by, in effect, reclassifying them as political appointees whom he could fire at will. Joe Biden won office before Trump could carry out his plan; experts have questioned its legality, and the federal labor unions have promised to try to block it this time around. Musk and Ramaswamy suggest that a Supreme Court ruling this summer gives the White House the power to get rid of regulations it does not like. But the decision is not retrospective: “We do not call into question prior cases,” the Court stated in its decision overturning Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Donald Moynihan told me that the authority DOGE is claiming is unconstitutional. Still. “Would the courts intervene with a preliminary injunction and stop them?”
Maybe DOGE knows better. I wish it did, because the federal government desperately needs a 21st-century reboot: agile digital systems, better bureaucratic practices, the fostering of a culture focused on delivering for citizens rather than adhering to rules.
Consider the IRS again. Denmark, Finland, Japan, Germany, and Australia are among the many industrialized countries that prefill their citizens’ tax forms, allowing individuals to contest the government’s math if need be. The IRS could do this. It has everyone’s tax data. Nine in 10 American families take the standard deduction and have pretty simple taxes to begin with.
I could think of a hundred similar initiatives, all of which start with asking not whether the government is too big or the civil service is bad, but whether Americans are getting what they want and need. Fixing these systems will require new laws and smart investment, and firing or alienating every public servant won’t help. But Trump and the leaders of DOGE don’t seem to want to restructure the government so much as eliminate it.
