Donald Trump isn’t the first president to target government spending and inefficiency. Some 30 years ago, Bill Clinton announced that he was taking a “historic step in reforming the federal government” to make it “both less expensive and more efficient.”
Clinton put Vice President Al Gore in charge of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. It was tasked with streamlining processes and cutting red tape, as Newsweek reported. The initiative delivered four consecutive budget surpluses — the last time there was a balanced federal budget.
President Clinton took a victory lap in his 1996 State of the Union address: “We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.”
That last line is positively quaint.
“(The Clinton administration) did what the Musk folks have said they’re going to do,” said Morley Winograd, Clinton’s REGO director during his second term. “Which is auditing the way each agency functions and looking for ways to make it more efficient and effective so that it would, in the words of the of the task force, ‘work better and cost less.’ ”
Thirty years later, them’s fightin’ words.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is auditing agencies and cutting budgets right and left. Working better and costing less is the order of the day, and it’s making Democrats apoplectic.
To be fair, Musk is using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, but the intent is the same: eliminate waste and boost efficiency. We’ve written about the billions spent on specious programs such as DEI training in Serbia, and taxpayers are rightly appalled at where their money is being spent.
Musk is, essentially an efficiency expert in service of the Trump Administration. Much the way these consultants hired by private sector companies do, Musk wants to know who is doing what. Workers are rarely fans of efficiency experts, they don’t want to have their output assessed and scrutinized.
But it’s hard to imagine any company would put up with a supervisor telling his or her subordinates “you don’t have to answer any questions,” as some agencies have directed workers in responding to Musk’s “What did you do last week” email.
That should be an easy question to answer, and the pushback should give taxpayers pause. We pay the salaries of federal employees, shouldn’t they be giving us our money’s worth?
And to all the Democratic leaders howling at the audacity of questioning how agencies are run, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found 72% of registered voters support an agency focusing on government efficiency. Seven in 10 also said government expenditures are “filled with waste, fraud and inefficiency,” including at least three quarters of Republicans and independents and 58% of Democrats.
Resist at your own election risk.
Musk’s tactics are ham-fisted, but the bottom line in ensuring the country’s bottom line is sound, is a good one and worth pursuing.
