Donald Trump

Jacob Sullum | 11.13.2024 4:50 PM

The name of President-elect Donald Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is tellingly ambiguous. Despite the "department" label, Trump says DOGE, which will be overseen by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, will "provide advice and guidance from outside of government." That makes DOGE sound more like an advisory committee than an actual federal agency (which would require congressional authorization). And exactly what Trump means by "efficiency," a potentially broad but possibly narrow concept, remains unclear.

Trump, who has never previously shown much interest in fiscal restraint, promises "drastic change," resulting in "a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy." With Musk and Ramaswamy's help, he said, "we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending."

Trump's invocation of "massive waste and fraud" is not new for him or for politicians generally. Presidents and legislators are perenially promising to root out "waste, fraud, and abuse," implying that such efforts could make a substantial dent in federal spending. Unlike, say, entitlement reform or cuts in military spending, that goal has the advantage of being politically uncontroversial. But the potential payoff, while nothing to sneeze at, is commensurately smaller.

Responding to Musk's suggestion that DOGE could identify "at least" $2 trillion in federal spending cuts, Manhattan Institute budget expert Brian Riedl told The Washington Post it was "absolutely absurd" to suggest that such savings could be achieved by targeting "wasteful and unnecessary programs." Alluding to Musk's business background, Riedl added that "there's a long history of the fantasy that one smart businessman will just identify trillions in waste, but that's just not how it works." Or as the Peter G. Peterson Foundation put it back in 2010, "curbing waste, fraud and abuse sound[s] great but would not produce very significant savings."

Although "waste, fraud, and abuse" clearly are not the main drivers of runaway federal deficits and debt, the sums involved are not exactly chump change either. Last March, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said federal agencies "reported an estimated $236 billion" in "improper payments"—defined as "payments that should not have been made or were made in an incorrect amount"—during fiscal year 2023. Medicare, Medicaid, and "federal pandemic unemployment assistance" each accounted for about a fifth of those improper payments. Two other significant contributors were the Earned Income Tax Credit (9 percent) and the pandemic-inspired Paycheck Protection Program (8 percent);........

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