When Jack Welch became CEO of General Electric in 1981, efficiency was the battle cry.  Over the next four years, GEs profits rose by 50%, whereas sales increased by only 12%.  A drastically reduced payroll was a major contributor to this performance.

Seventeen years after Welch retired, GE was dropped from the Dow 30.

The point is that financial success is a constant battle, and large corporations are plagued with bureaucratic inertia...as are governments.  But governments are monopolies and are thus insulated from many of the exigencies of competition.

This lack of competition has allowed inefficiency and other forms of corruption to accumulate and flourish in the public sector without any serious countervailing force.  The only brake on this continuing decay is taxpayer resistance — resistance to having their hard earned money taken by force.  And yet government, both national and local, has continued to expand, recklessly, since taxpayers have little, if any, leverage in imposing their interests.

DOGE is pretty much without historical precedent.  Governments are never inclined to reduce their size or influence.  Some historians point to the Civil War as a turning point where Washington, D.C. began to dominate the several states.  Others look at FDR’s New Deal, which turned D.C. from a sleepy Southern village into a bustling metropolis, where enormous alphabet soup–titled buildings sprang up like weeds as new bureaus and agencies were launched ostensibly to thwart the Depression.  I’m inclined to blame Pearl Harbor for making all of this change effectively permanent, as a genuine global emergency brought the nation together in pursuit of a common cause.

The worry about DOGE concerns its sustained existence.  Trump has a little less than four years to impose his will on a cranky bureaucracy.  Therein lie many powerful Deep-Staters who are more than willing to go to extremes to protect their nicely feathered nests.  Pulling the plug on this members-only welfare system is not for the faint of heart.  It takes both a strong commitment to the ultimate objective and a willingness to withstand the inevitable retaliation that will come from embedded suckers upon the public teat.  And yet this process needs to continue.

When Welch’s GE began to absorb the fairly similar RCA, many of the longtime hangers-on at RCA began to panic, since what had previously happened within GE had become fairly well known.  Such is now happening within our federal government.

What needs to happen is for the same dynamic to express itself in state and local governments.  The end result would be beneficial as far as efficiency in necessary functions and significantly lower the tax burden on the ordinary folks who usually get screwed by lofty spending agendas.  The end result is a generally improved standard of living.  Is this bad?  There are those who still think so.

What about all of the suddenly unemployed government workers?  We might as well add the expected loss of jobs likely to come from the adoption of artificial intelligence.  Back in the eighties and nineties, the advent of the desktop computer that had a mouse and ran on Windows happened to displace an army of middle managers.  Most were eventually absorbed into the economic continuum.  Some may just simply have chosen to retire — as will some of the soon to become former government workers.

What is also revealed by the DOGE onslaught and its beneficial consequences is that, instead of the political nuances of policy, the effort to pare down the gargantuan, overbearing statist apparatus is all by itself as an agenda.  There are Republican suckers on the public teat as well as Democrats.  Beyond all the usual bones of contention, reducing the size of the beast is unique as a topic of debate...at long last.

Image: JD Lasica via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).