We’ve been hearing a lot about “efficiency” lately, with skeptics suggesting that this likely means revenge and wholesale elimination of departments rather than actual redesign of processes to achieve greater returns with less cost. But you may not have heard how the Trump efficiency DOGE tells fairy tales where they are heroes who overcome incredibly gigantic costs.
Carl Icahn, Trump’s first-term efficiency expert, says he fought more than $1 trillion in new regulations and more than 750 billion hours of unnecessary paperwork imposed on companies during President Obama’s eight years in office.
Total nonsense. That number equates to 375 million person-years (assuming a working year is 2,000 hours), which means that for eight years, 46 million people have quit their regular jobs and shifted their attention to filling out unnecessary forms, during a period when the working population average 120 million. Could a third of the country’s full-time workers quit their jobs without us noticing? During such a massive workforce loss, there were no shutdowns of factories, schools or hospitals, and no major supply chain disruptions. How could that happen? Perhaps Mr. Icahn was exaggerating?
Today’s designated efficiency experts such as Joni Ernst are equally creative. She mentions that the SNAP program wastes $10 billion annually on “bureaucratic blunders.” But for fiscal year 2022, the entire SNAP budget was $119.4 billion, of which only $5.5. billion spent on administration. Presumably there are some valid administrative costs associated with running a program of that size, so where is the $10 billion going to come from?
Sue Ravenscroft
Ames
This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: How Trump Efficiency Tells DOGE Fairy Tales | Letters
