WASHINGTON (TNS) — Like spoiled children finally told “no” by their parents, bureaucrats and beneficiaries of wasteful government largesse are howling at the shockwaves the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is sending through Washington.
NBC News called it “an unprecedented effort to shrink the federal workforce and slash federal programs.”
Unprecedented? Hardly.
The idea of cutting waste and inefficiency out of the federal bureaucracy is nothing new. Nor is the idea of looking to civilian business practices as models for improving administrative processes.
Both were first proposed — and implemented — by President Dwight Eisenhower, the general who led the Allies in Europe to victory over the Nazi regime and successfully balanced the federal budget twice in his first term.
In the 1952 elections, Republicans ran on a platform charging that the Democrats had “arrogantly deprived our citizens of precious liberties by seizing powers never granted” and “work(ing) unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism.”
Some things, it seems, never change.
As Joanna Grisinger of Northwestern University outlines in “The Unwieldy American State,” once Eisenhower was inaugurated, he moved swiftly to clean out the then-scandal-ridden IRS and Justice Department. He also sought to roll back federal interference in matters that could be easily handled by the states.
Eisenhower targeted growing problems with waste and inefficiency with a three-pronged strategy. First, drawing from his military background, he sought to implement a military-like efficiency in the Executive Office itself.
Second, he successfully achieved both spending cuts and reductions in agency personnel. Of course, this led agencies to complain (sound familiar?) that they were being forced to do more with less.
Third, in a move foreshadowing DOGE, Eisenhower announced that he had created a three-man committee named the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization. Eisenhower’s DOGE was composed of Eisenhower’s brother Milton, Nelson Rockefeller and Arthur Flemming. Rockefeller, as we all know, was a very rich, successful businessman (sound familiar?), while Flemming was then serving as the Civil Service Commissioner.
Milton Eisenhower recounted in his book, “The President Is Calling,” that Eisenhower saw many federal programs as “wasteful and inefficient.” His goal with the committee, Milton said, was to receive recommendations on how “to consolidate gains, improve the federal structure, and obtain full value for the billions of dollars spent on fairly new social programs.”
Eisenhower would continue reform efforts throughout his administration, urging Congress to give the president more control over the Executive Office and executive staff, a problem that Trump still faces today with a recalcitrant and resistant federal bureaucracy.
But, unfortunately, Eisenhower didn’t attempt to change the administrative state itself. James Reston, in a New York Times Special, wrote at the end of Eisenhower’s first term the following damning words:
“It is surely one of the great paradoxes of recent American political history that Republicans… should have swallowed the basic tinkering techniques of the past and not even attempted to repeal a single New Deal measure. If anything, they manipulated the Government’s influences over the economy with even more skill than the Democrats.”
History proved that, ultimately, cutting waste and inefficiency wasn’t enough. The 1960s brought a wave of new regulations as existing agencies flexed their de facto lawmaking powers. And subsequent Republican administrations did little to rein them in, or to stop the plethora of new agencies, commissions and boards from being created, as the federal administrative state has become a bloated monstrosity.
That is, until now.
DOGE’s goals are far from a historical anomaly. But DOGE is novel in a different respect. For perhaps the first time in the administrative state’s history, America is looking to dismantle an until-now unquestioned and unchecked bureaucracy.
There is nothing “unlawful” about that effort. The president can rely on anyone he wants for recommendations and advice, and none of DOGE’s recommendations go into effect until and unless the president orders them to go into effect.
Moreover, as the ultimate decider on national security and classification, the president can also give access and information to whoever he believes should get it, contrary to claims that it is illegal to give DOGE such access, unless there is a specific statute limiting the president’s authority that is within the constitutional bounds of congressional authority and not a violation of the president’s constitutional position as the head of the executive branch.
DOGE is a first step, and a necessary one, in dismantling the administrative state. But more must be done. That will take endurance, unrelenting effort by the president and his cabinet secretaries and, ultimately, cooperation from Congress to achieve the objectives that the president can’t accomplish alone through his constitutional authority as the head of the executive branch.
But until then we can only wish DOGE success in pursuing its rather unoriginal goals — to make our government an effective instrument that doesn’t waste taxpayer money on ridiculous, duplicative and unnecessary programs (like transgender comic books in Peru) and doesn’t abuse its power to tyrannize our citizens.
(Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow and Seth Lucas is a senior research associate in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.)
