“Move fast and break things” was Facebook’s motto in its early days. Given the speed with which Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has moved to begin its work implementing President Trump's directive to shrink the size and scope of the federal government, the social media giant may as well hand over to DOGE the rights to the slogan.
The list of federal departments and agencies that have been placed under DOGE’s microscope is long and impressive. In less than a month, employees of Musk’s entity have begun to investigate a wide range of federal offices, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the General Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration, the Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Agency for International Development, to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Earlier in the week, President Trump signed a new executive order, further delineating DOGE's brief. It’s called the “Workforce Optimization Initiative,” and it requires that 1) all hiring of new federal employees must be approved by each agency’s DOGE team lead; 2) only one new employee may be hired for every four old employees who leave; 3) each agency must prepare for “large scale reductions in force”; and 4 ) within 30 days, each agency must submit to the Office of Management and Budget a report on whether the entire agency or any sub-functions of the agency can be eliminated or consolidated, with military, immigration enforcement, and public safety jobs exempted.
A day later, the DOGE effort expanded even further, as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene chaired her first DOGE subcommittee hearing, focusing on improper payments and fraud. One of the witnesses testified that during the COVID-19 pandemic, criminals stole $1 trillion, 70% of which went overseas; a second testified that improper spending in the Medicaid program is on track to cost more than $1 trillion over the next decade, and that more than 20% of all Medicaid spending is improper.
The public approves of Trump’s efforts to hold back Washington’s spending. In a recent survey conducted for Tea Party Patriots Action by McLaughlin & Associates, 79% of the 1,000 survey respondents agreed that “Congress and the President must rein in Washington’s reckless borrowing and spending.”
DOGE’s early efforts are focused on shrinking personnel – the DOGE team at USAID, for instance, recommended that the agency’s 10,000-person workforce could be shrunk to 294, while workers at the General Services Administration were told to expect 50% staff cuts agency-wide.
As the DOGE initiative continues, after new Trump-appointed agency heads have time to conduct their program and policy reviews, the effort will expand to include revising and eliminating regulations. In this effort, Trump 2.0 is harking back to one of the singular successes of Trump 1.0, in which the president ordered that for every new regulation created, two old ones must be eliminated; Trump’s new executive order “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation” mandates that “for each new regulation issued, at least 10 prior regulations be identified for elimination.”
The rush of effort at the start of Trump’s second presidency is truly mind-boggling – but we must remember that no matter how good these executive orders may be, they can all be overturned by the stroke of a pen if the next president chooses. That’s why enacting H.R. 142, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act is so crucial to the long term success of the effort. This legislation would require that proposed federal regulations with a projected economic impact of $100 million or more be subject to an up-or-down vote in each house of Congress.
That idea, too, has strong support from the public – as the TPPA survey mentioned above revealed, 67% of the survey respondents agreed that members of Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, should be responsible for creating new federal regulations.
That’s good, because ultimately, the entire DOGE effort is about restoring accountability, strengthening our republic by once again connecting the personnel and the actions of government to those who elected them. For far too long, there’s been a disconnect – the people’s wishes, as indicated by election returns, have been ignored by a stultified, entrenched bureaucracy that believes itself to the be the arbiters of what government should and shouldn’t be doing. President Trump aims to overturn that disconnect – and in his efforts through DOGE, he’s on the right track.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
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