President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has drawn much scorn from Democrats. That’s not surprising: we live in polarized times. Whatever the issue, the partisan instinct is to take a position opposite to the opposition, and the combination of Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy only reinforces that compulsion.
But when it comes to efficiency, Democrats should refuse to take the bait. Democrats cannot be cornered into defending harmful and unnecessary bureaucracy, red tape, and wasteful spending. Instead, the party should fight for a very different vision of efficiency: a government committed to quickly and dramatically improving the lives of ordinary people and protecting them from corporate profiteers – in other words, from exactly the kind of people who need it. DOGE initiative will guide and populate the new Trump administration.
Musk and Ramaswamy are nothing if not ambitious. They want to “reduce the size of the federal government” and are targeting cuts of up to $2 trillion, or about 30% of the federal budget. Their proposals to do this include cutting funding for scientific research, arbitrarily firing federal employees and cutting defense spending.
Given that the military budget has grown significantly during President Trump’s first term, the Pentagon will likely be safe. But we can’t say the same for other areas that make up the bulk of government spending, including entitlements like Medicaid. It is more likely that DOGE’s proposals will align with the goals of Project 2025, the conservative plan to radically reform government by privatizing essential public services and concentrating power in the executive branch. After months of denying any knowledge of Project 2025, Trump has nominated one of its architects, Russell Vought, to lead the Office of Management and Budget. This means things like replacing career civil servants with Trump loyalists, eliminating regulations, rolling back civil rights and labor protections, abolishing the Department of Education, and more.
Of course, it’s not new for Republicans to salivate over the opportunity to destroy the government. Remember when anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said he wanted to “shrink government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”? What’s new is the way the government’s Department of Efficiency is repackaging the cruel and unpopular conservative ideology in meme-covered bottles, calling austerity, corporate deregulation and cuts to public welfare hip and cutting. Even the acronym DOGE is a reference to Dogecoin, a funny cryptocurrency with a dog theme. Indeed, it is not even a real government department, but an advisory committee. In other words, DOGE is a fake department named after a fake form of money.
And despite the images of Musk and Ramaswamy as men with bold new ideas, DOGE isn’t even a new proposition. In 1982, Ronald Reagan created the Grace Commission, led by businessman Peter Grace, which promised to “root out inefficiency” with the help of a counsel to business executives. Reagan promised to “drain the swamp” (a phrase Trump would adopt), but government bureaucracy has only grown in recent decades. Ironically, much of it was introduced by Republicans because they abhor the idea of people receiving “undeserved” government assistance – think poor single mothers receiving food stamps or the sick and disabled not having to worry about deductibles or co-payments .
Ordinary people, however, are hardly as hostile to government or as concerned about free riders as the right-wing ideologues about to seize power in Washington. What most people want is for government to work well and work for them. Numerous polls show that a majority of voters want the state to be more involved in health care, education, protecting the planet, regulating business and more.
Americans like big government when it gets results. Much of my family lives in Buncombe County, North Carolina, the epicenter of the recent devastation from Hurricane Helene. No one complained when government officials managed to repair storm-damaged water infrastructure in record time, condensing a job that would normally take a year or more into less than two months by working around the clock and finding creative ways to solve problems to solve. That’s one model of what truly efficient government looks like, and it’s the kind of government efficiency that Democrats should stand for.
Imagine if public transport was clean, fast, on time and free. Or the ability to quickly and seamlessly file your taxes by email in minutes, based on employer-filed income, as people in many industrialized countries do. Or what about the efficiency of knowing your kids can attend excellent public colleges without filling out broken FAFSA forms or relying on impossible-to-pay student loans? Why would applying for unemployment benefits or disaster relief through functioning websites and receiving fast and adequate assistance seem like a dream?
Efficient government programs should be of high quality and, where possible, universal. Means testing programs have been found to waste people’s time and drive up costs by adding layers of unnecessary bureaucracy. For example, our byzantine, for-profit health care system would be far more efficient if it were replaced with a well-funded public option, one that would free patients from having to file claims or fight to get reimbursed for life-saving treatments. Today, administrative costs account for approximately one-third of all U.S. health care expenditures. Americans spend almost five times more per person on administration than Canadians.
This kind of wasteful spending needs to be reallocated. That’s what anti-war and racial justice advocates have been saying for years. Why not cut bloated military and police budgets and reinvest the money saved in schools, mental health facilities, libraries, jobs and more? We need the government to build green homes, high-speed rail lines and renewable energy infrastructure, and we need to do this quickly – not get bogged down by procedural hassles, paperwork and pointless delays.
Unfortunately, improving government is not what DOGE is about. Consider Musk’s legacy on Twitter. Sure, he eliminated six letters when he changed the name to He even cut cleaning service, reportedly forcing at least one employee to bring his own toilet paper to work and hang it up with a coat hanger. Today the company is worth about 20% of what Musk paid for it. X may still be semi-functional, but it is a social media site and not an essential service. Unlike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration, if X collapsed, everything would be fine.
Ultimately, when Trump and his friends say “efficiency,” they mean “bullshit.” As Musk puts other people’s jobs on the chopping block, his net worth has soared to more than $300 billion. With improved access to federal financing for his vehicles and spaceships — and less burdensome government oversight from his enemies at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Trade Commission — he’s about to get even richer.
Every American, no matter who he or she voted for, deserves better than DOGE. Democrats don’t have to pretend to be in favor of small government, but they certainly shouldn’t embrace inefficient government. What they need is a clear, compelling vision of how government can and should be used efficiently for good.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
