When he returns to the White House early next year,
President-elect Donald Trump plans to appoint Elon Musk and Vivek Rama Swami
to head a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
While not an official federal department,
the administration's plans for DOGE
are similar to the Grace Commission under Ronald Reagan
and the Reinventing Government, or RIGO, initiative under Bill Clinton.
The president will task Musk and Rama Swami's team
with researching, developing, testing,
and writing up actionable steps for Trump and his team
to effectively cut government spending and federal regulations.
In an op-ed last week,
Musk and Rama Swami laid out some initial plans
for tackling the bureaucratic behemoth in Washington.
They appointed two recent Supreme Court rulings,
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency
and Loper Bright v. Ramondo,
in which the court ruled
that federal agencies cannot impose regulations
dealing with major economic or policy questions
without specific congressional authorization
and that courts are no longer required to defer
to agencies' interpretations of their own authority.
In citing these cases,
the authors argue that a significant number of federal regulations
currently on the books are technically illegal
and therefore can and should be eliminated by executive order.
The two also professed their plans to trim the federal workforce
by requiring remote federal employees to return to the office
and to move agencies out of D.C. to regions of the country
more relevant to what they oversee.
The article ends with calls to cut funding
to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
to overall the federal government's procurement process,
and to address the significant amount of waste, fraud, and abuse
that taxpayers are forced to fund each year.
Musk and Rama Swami's plan
has gotten plenty of criticism and skepticism
from libertarians and small government advocates,
mostly because of its total reliance on politicians
who have every institutional reason to decline the cuts.
And last month I argued that even if Doge achieved everything
it set out to achieve,
it still would fall far short of what's needed
to get the country off our current path
to economic and societal destruction.
While the vision laid out by the two Doge leaders
in the Wall Street Journal is a bit more robust
than I had expected,
I still stand by everything I said in that piece.
But there is a component of Doge
and the broader movement behind it
that many free marketers are too quick to dismiss
or take for granted, the cultural component.
Anyone who understands that radical changes are necessary
to fix our current national predicament
also needs to understand how radical changes
actually come about.
As Robert Higgs detailed in his book on the subject,
the biggest, most consequential changes
to the American political and economic system
have all taken place during a crisis.
Generally, at any given time,
the public is not in favor of big sweeping societal changes.
Many may want them in theory,
but when it's time to actually sit down and make the change,
it's very hard to get enough people
to accept their lives being upended
for something they're only told
will make them safer and more prosperous
someday in the future.
But in the depths of a crisis,
when the status quo is bad enough,
it's much easier to get enough of the public
to passively or actively accept expansive changes
to how our society operates.
The strict speech controls and criminalization
of political thought implemented under Woodrow Wilson
were only really possible because of World War I.
The government's devastating economic power grab
under Hoover and FDR
could only have happened during the Great Depression.
More recently,
it was only politically possible
for the George W. Bush administration
to eviscerate the public's right to privacy
and launch a disastrous multi-trillion dollar war on terror
because of the horrific attacks on 9-11.
And the Fed was only able to get away
with its recent historic level of money printing
that fueled price inflation,
made most Americans poorer,
and generated much of the economic chaos we're dealing with
because of the government lockdowns in response to COVID-19.
Thanks to a number of ongoing government programs,
it's not a question of if we will face another crisis,
but which one and when.
For instance,
Washington's escalations against Russia
could prompt a severe Russian response.
What the American government has enabled Israel to do
to the people of Gaza
could lead to a major terrorist attack
on an American city
or the historic economic downturn
that was made unavoidable
by the Fed injecting a historic amount of cheap money
into credit markets
could suddenly materialize.
These looming crises
could provide the political establishment
with their next opportunity to grab power
they could not get away with grabbing in normal times.
Much of the political class's propaganda
is meant to prime the American public.
So when these crises hit,
their instinct is to look to the government for help
and to hand over more control over their lives
in the name of ending the crisis.
But crises also present opportunities for improvement.
Think of an alcoholic who wakes up after a bender
only to realize he missed his daughter's high school graduation.
The pain of that realization
could drive the man to pick the bottle back up
and sink deeper into his addiction.
But it could also drive him to finally begin
cleaning up his life.
The same thing can happen on the societal level.
It is unlikely
that the Doge team will just draft up
all the necessary cuts
needed to fix our many national problems
and that Donald Trump will simply implement them
on some random day
without facing serious and immediate political consequences.
The more likely path out of our mess
will resemble the alcoholic's path out of his.
If a crisis hits and enough of the public understands
that something the government did
is to blame for it
and that giving the same people who brought the crisis about
even more power is the worst possible response.
Comprehensive political and cultural solutions
would not only be possible, but likely.
This is why countering the political class's propaganda
and getting more of the public to see the truth
is a prerequisite for actually solving our issues.
That can often feel like a hopeless endeavor.
But look at how much excitement and energy
there is right now about Doge.
Musk and Ramaswamy are drawing a lot of attention
as they hype people up about cutting government spending.
They have embraced Ron Paul as an inspiration,
ally and advisor for the project
and their plan to start a podcast focused on their effort
ensures that it will remain at the center of the public's attention
throughout Doge's run.
Is the level of public awareness about the causes and solutions
to our problems anywhere close to where it needs to be
to put us on a better path the next time government intervention blows up
in all of our faces?
No.
But just as Trump's second victory demonstrated
that the establishment's propaganda can be defeated,
the enthusiasm for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's
Department of Government Efficiency
means we are already closer than many of us thought.
And that shouldn't be taken for granted.