President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has met with plenty of scorn from Democrats. That’s not surprising: We live in polarized times. Whatever the issue, the partisan instinct is to take a position antithetical to the opposition, and the combination of Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy only intensifies that compulsion.
But when it comes to efficiency, Democrats must refuse to take the bait. Democrats cannot be cornered into defending harmful and unnecessary bureaucracy, red tape and wasteful spending. Instead, the party should fight for a very different vision of efficiency: government dedicated to swiftly and dramatically improve the lives of ordinary people and protect them from corporate profiteers — in other words, from exactly the kind of people who will lead the DOGE initiative and populate the incoming Trump administration.
Musk and Ramaswamy are nothing if not ambitious. They want to “cut the federal government down to size” and have set their sights on slashing up to $2 trillion, or about 30% of the federal budget. Their proposals for how to do this include cutting funding for scientific research, laying off federal employees at random, and trimming defense spending.
More likely than not, DOGE’s proposals will align with the goals of Project 2025.
Given that the military budget grew substantially under President Trump’s first term, the Pentagon will probably be safe. But we can’t say the same for other areas that make up the majority of government spending, including entitlements such as Medicaid. More likely than not, DOGE’s proposals will align with the goals of Project 2025, the conservative plan to radically remake the government by privatizing essential public services and concentrating power in the executive branch. After months of denying any knowledge of Project 2025, Trump has proposed one of its architects, Russell Vought, to head the Office of Management and Budget. This means things like replacing career civil service workers with Trump loyalists, gutting regulations, rolling back civil rights and labor protections, abolishing the Department of Education, and more.
Of course, Republicans salivating over the chance to slash government isn’t new. Remember anti-tax activist Grover Norquist saying he wanted to “reduce government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”? What’s new is how the Department of Government Efficiency repackages cruel and unpopular conservative ideology in meme-covered bottles, rebranding austerity, corporate deregulation, and cuts to public welfare as hip and edgy. Even the acronym DOGE is a reference to Dogecoin, a jokey, dog-themed cryptocurrency. Indeed, it isn’t even a real government department, but an advisory committee. DOGE, in other words, is a fake department named after a fake form of money.
And despite Musk and Ramaswamy’s images as men of bold new ideas, DOGE isn’t even a novel proposal. In 1982, Ronald Reagan created the Grace Commission, run by businessman Peter Grace, who vowed to “root out inefficiency” with the help of a counsel of corporate executives. Reagan promised to “drain the swamp” (a phrase Trump would adopt), but government bureaucracy has only grown in the decades since. Much of it, ironically, has been put in place by Republicans because they abhor the idea of the “undeserving” getting public assistance — think poor single mothers receiving food stamps or the sick and disabled not having to worry about deductibles or co-pays.
Ordinary people, however, are hardly as hostile to government or worried about “free riders” as the right-wing ideologues about to take power in Washington. What most folks want is for the government to work well and to work for them. Plenty of polls show that majorities of voters want the state to be more involved in health care, education, protecting the planet, regulating business, and more.
Americans like big government when it delivers. Much of my family lives in Buncombe County, North Carolina, the epicenter of Hurricane Helene’s recent destruction. No one complained when public officials managed to repair the storm-damaged water infrastructure in record time, condensing a job that would normally take a year or more into less than two months by working around the clock and finding creative ways to problem-solve. That’s one model of what truly efficient government looks like, and it’s the kind of government efficiency that Democrats should stand for.
Means-testing programs have been shown to waste people’s time and drive up costs.
Imagine public transportation that is clean, fast, on time, and free. Or being able to quickly and seamlessly e-file your taxes in a matter of minutes, based on employer-submitted earnings, the way people in many industrialized countries do. Or what about the efficiency of knowing your kids could go to excellent public colleges without having to fill out broken FAFSA forms or rely on impossible-to-pay student loans? Why should being able to apply for unemployment benefits or emergency disaster relief through functioning websites, and receiving swift and adequate assistance, seem like a pipe dream?
Efficient government programs should be high quality and, whenever possible, universal. Means-testing programs have been shown to waste people’s time and drive up costs by adding layers of unnecessary bureaucracy. Our byzantine profit-driven health care system, for example, would be much more efficient if it was replaced by a well-funded public option, one that would free patients from having to file claims or fight to have life-saving treatments covered. Today, administrative costs make up around a third of all U.S. health care expenditures. Americans spend nearly five times more per person on administration than Canadians pay.
This type of wasteful spending should be reallocated. That is what anti-war and racial justice advocates have been saying for years. Why not trim bloated military and police budgets and reinvest money saved in revenue-starved schools, mental health services, libraries, jobs and more? We need the government to build green housing, high speed rail, renewable energy infrastructure, and we need it done fast — not bogged down by proceduralism, paperwork and pointless delays.
Sadly, improving government isn’t what DOGE is about. Consider Musk’s legacy at Twitter. Sure, he eliminated six letters when he changed the name to X (talk about efficiency!) but he also laid off about 80% of the staff, including those who worked in vital areas like security and fraud. He even cut the janitorial service, reportedly forcing at least one employee to bring their own toilet paper to work and rig it up using a coat hanger. Today the company is worth roughly 20% of what Musk paid for it. X may still be semi-functional, but it’s a social media site, not an essential service. Unlike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration, we’d all be fine if X collapsed.
In the end, when Trump and his buddies say “efficiency” what they really mean is “boondoggle.” As Musk puts other people’s jobs on the chopping block, his net worth has ballooned to over $300 billion. With improved access to federal funding for his vehicles and spaceships — and less pesky government oversight from his enemies at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Federal Trade Commission — he’s poised to become even wealthier.
Every American, no matter who they voted for, deserves better than DOGE. Democrats don’t need to pretend to be for small government, but they certainly shouldn’t embrace inefficient government. What they need is a clear, compelling vision of how government can and should efficiently be used for good.