Donald Trump is far from the first president to promise he would make the federal government more efficient — he even had such a policy in his first term — but the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, plan outlined by entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy appears well thought out and, if executed diligently, could produce real benefits for taxpayers.
Back when Trump was still a Democrat, his future wedding guest President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review during his first term and then renamed it the National Partnership for Reinventing Government for his second term. Both efforts were tasked with identifying federal policy changes that would make the government “serve customers better.” Clinton’s initiative even had some encouraging results, including the adoption of electronic tax form filing by the Internal Revenue Service.
Fast forward 20 years and Trump’s first presidency tasked each department head with implementing a “One-In-Two-Out” rule, which required federal agencies to rescind two federal regulations for every new one implemented.
“This will be the biggest such act that our country has ever seen,” Trump said at the time. And Trump did manage to overturn a record-high number of Obama regulations, helping to create the strong pre-COVID economy that voters still remember today.
Now that Trump is returning to the White House, Musk and Ramaswamy are promising a much more thorough and strategic remaking of the federal government. The pair will serve as volunteers themselves but have said they will work closely with employees at the White House Office of Management and Budget to identify regulatory and personnel policies that would reduce regulatory burdens and make government more efficient.
That DOGE will work closely with OMB is key because, as the entity’s own website says, “the core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch.” Importantly, OMB staff report “directly to the President” and are in charge of oversight of all federal agency procurement, financial management, and personnel policies.
Additionally, since 1981, OMB has also housed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA, which is the central clearing house for all federal agency regulation. Any new regulation, or regulation rescission, most go through and be approved by OIRA. If you wanted to grab the federal government’s ability to make law through the regulatory process, and not by Congress, by the neck, OIRA is exactly the agency you would want to control.
“Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government,” Musk and Ramaswamy recently wrote. “That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year.”
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Musk and Ramaswamy are correct: The current regulatory state is not how the founders envisioned our country being governed. And if a president wanted to liberate the economy from the burdensome and inefficient regulations of unelected bureaucrats, OMB would be a great place to start.
Unfortunately, however, much of what DOGE can accomplish through OMB will only be temporary. The next Democratic president — and there will eventually be one — could simply undo everything that DOGE accomplished. If Trump wants to achieve real, long-lasting change, he is going to have to work with Congress to change the underlying statutes that transferred legislative power from Congress to the executive branch in the first place.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
