Posted on November
24, 2024
Git Along Without DOGE
Musk panel is a cynical diversion
by
Daniel
Clark
If Donald Trump's "Department of Government
Efficiency" headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy doesn't exactly sound like
an original idea, that's because it isn't.
In 1982, President Reagan commissioned the Private Sector Survey on Cost
Control, also called the Grace Commission, after business leader J. Peter
Grace, who headed it. With the Democrats
controlling the House of Representatives at the time, few of its
recommendations were adopted, but its mission has since been taken up by a
nonprofit that Grace created, called Citizens Against Government Waste. What few budget hawks remain in the Republican
Party continue to rely on CAGW for its research and proposals.
You're
probably familiar with CAGW because of its annual Pig Book of wasteful pork-barrel
spending items, in which it calls out scores of outrageous earmarks, like a $3
million grant to research the effects of "climate change" on lobsters and
shrimp. In its "prime cuts" section, it
suggests more significant savings, like $3.1 billion per year by reducing federal
subsidies for mass transit, $3 billion a year by selling off excess federal
properties, and $414 million a year by eliminating the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
There's nothing new about being able to identify wasteful
federal spending, and this extra-governmental entity called DOGE has no more
power to act on it than CAGW does. When
Ramaswamy says "We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright," there's a
good reason why he doesn't spell out how.
Had he said, "We expect DOGE to compel Congress to eliminate certain
agencies outright," people would have been reminded why Donald Trump called him
a fraud only months ago.
Because Trump trusts Musk, on the other hand, there is
an opportunity for Musk to have a positive impact, by dissuading the president-elect
from contributing to the problem. If
only the sort-of Secretary of Efficiency would present him with the following
proposals:
* Do not embark upon a frivolous pursuit like
organizing a military parade in Washington, DC.
If Trump's bizarre determination to stage such an event in his first
term had been realized, is there any doubt it would have rated a mention in the
Pig Book?
* Do not provide free in-vitro fertilization to
everybody who wants it, as Trump repeatedly promised during this year's
campaign. For the purposes of this
argument, let's put aside the ethical concerns about arbitrarily creating and
destroying human embryos. The libertarian
Cato Institute estimates that this policy would cost the taxpayers $7 billion a
year, but even that figure might not adequately factor in how dramatically the utilization
of IVF would increase once it has been made "free."
*
Do not promise with regard to health care that "I am going to take care of
everybody," as Trump did in a 60 Minutes interview in 2015, explaining that
"the government's gonna pay for it."
* If congressional Republicans make another attempt to
repeal Obamacare, do not torpedo the effort by calling it "mean" and telling
them to "add some money to it," as Trump did in 2017.
* Do not work with Democrat mayors to rebuild America's
cities, as Trump said he would do in his speech after this year's Iowa Caucuses. The federal government had no role in
building New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and
San Francisco in the first place. It
makes no sense to subsidize the forces that are now busily destroying those
same cities. If Trump were truly serious
about fiscal discipline, the phrase "work with Democrats" would not even be a
part of his lexicon.
* Stop defending the status quo on Social Security and
Medicare, which combine for 36 percent of all federal spending. The truth be known, part of the purpose of
DOGE is to focus on discretionary spending as a diversion from Trump's
unwillingness to do anything about the pending insolvency of these two
programs. What we're supposed to believe
is that if we root out enough fraud, waste and abuse in other parts of the budget,
the two costliest items can be allowed to continue running on autopilot. They can't.
Without reforms to Social Security, benefits will be automatically cut
by 21 percent in 2033. The Medicare trust
fund is on course to be fully depleted by 2036.
There's no honest way to champion government efficiency while refusing
to deal with these problems.
Elon Musk could easily deliver these messages without
going through the pantomime of heading a pretend study group. All he has to do is discuss them with Trump
face-to-face. It seems as if the most
productive purpose of DOGE, if not to provide cover for Trump's fiscal
irresponsibility, must be to give him a good laugh at the expense of the ingenuine
and insubstantial Ramaswamy, for having so eagerly accepted an appointment to a
nonexistent post.
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