Why DOGE Will Fail

This essay was adapted from the author’s Understanding America Substack.

The thing about a chainsaw is that it’s really great for some tasks — say, chopping up a tree — and really bad for others — say, performing surgery. We don’t “support” or “oppose” chainsaws, we try to ensure that they are used appropriately. As Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency wreak havoc across the federal government, polarising everyone into “pro” and “anti” camps, we are mostly failing to draw these necessary distinctions between useful and harmful applications. Yet The Wall Street Journal’s report on Musk’s struggle to find and trim waste is instructive.

The Journal dives deep alongside that great white whale of government “waste, fraud, and abuse” known as “improper payments”. People with no experience in public finance are often appalled to learn the federal government makes more than $100 billion in improper payments each year. Some believe they have come across some extraordinary, untapped opportunity. The payments are improper, after all. If we stopped making them, look how much we would save.

But improper payments don’t persist because no one has thought to stop them. They persist — despite waves of legislation to document and reduce them, and concerted efforts to recover as much as possible after the fact — because a federal government that spends more than $6 trillion annually, often through programmes that require self-reporting of eligibility or run through partnerships with state agencies and private providers, is sometimes going to make payments that it shouldn’t. Reducing them is hard and comes with costs — fewer improper payments, for instance, often means more inadvertent refusals of proper payment. You know who is really good at avoiding improper payments? Your health-insurance company.

A DOGE dedicated to the hard work of making government more efficient could make headway on this problem. But it would take time and effort, the development of expertise, and collaboration with a whole host of parties with interests of their own. (It might also help if Team Trump hadn’t just fired the inspectors general of most of the agencies where the payments occur.) Likewise, enormous opportunities do exist to reduce federal headcount. A DOGE focused on reducing headcount could do that. But doing it in a way that makes the government more efficient would require knowing what work does need to be done in various agencies, who is doing what, and who is or isn’t doing it well.