That Dog Won't Hunt?!
DOGE Might, Given Some Tools
Sorry, little Shiba Inu, Doge, I'm referring instead to to the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). By taking a look at DOGE and how the agency might reduce waste - - effecting a "turnaround" of sorts - - we can learn some lessons we might apply to improve both our own lives and our organizations.
THE TASK IS MONUMENTAL: Cleaning the Augean Stables
The greatest of the Greek heroes, Hercules, once suffered from a fit of madness during which he killed his wife Megara and their children. To atone for his actions, he placed himself in service of King Eurystheus of Mycenae, for twelve years. He was to do whatever labours were asked of him, and, in return, he would be granted immortality.
Of these Twelve Labours, the fifth was to clean the stables of King Augeas. The livestock in the stables were immortal, their dung production enormous. The stables, home to more than 1,000 cattle, had not been cleaned in three decades. That's a lot of poop!
Hercules was supposed to fail at this humiliating and impossible task. Our hero rerouted two rivers, the rivers Alpheus and Peneus, to cleanse the stables of filth in a single day.
In a previous post, "DOGE, Tread Carefully - Broken Glass Matters", I discuss the creation of DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Please read it, if you haven't.
Will these two, these two volunteers, make an impact? Can they clean the government stables?
The task they face is daunting, the task they face is pressing. In my pre-election post, "Peter, Parkinson, Praying For a Benevolent Dictator" I detail a number of the serious challenges facing our country; We've a short window of time to correct our course. I made the case for, well, DOGE. Revisit that post when you can.
" … I think they're bringing an exhilarating rush to the system of creativity, outside the box thinking, comfortability with risk and leverage. Amazing. And the reason I love it is, I mean in some respects this does feel like an intractable problem that we're up [against]. I don't think it is, but I think it feels that way. And we're bringing people that are trying to get to Mars. So I'm pretty sure they can handle the ability for us to balance our books and run a government that's that's much more efficient."
- Russ Vought, former Director of the OMB, current nominee for the position
In an opinion piece by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal on November 20, 2024, entitled "The DOGE Plan to Reform Government", we find:
In summary, they plan:
Regulatory Rescissions: Identify regulations that overstep Congressional authority, immediately pause them, and prevent their rising from the dead;
Administrative Reductions: Resize staffing to meet streamlined needs through employee transitions into the private sector and changes to both limit regrowth and enhanced accountability;
Cost Savings: Tackle waste, fraud, and abuse, including eliminating unauthorized spending and reforming purchasing.
Far more interesting for us to explore, is less the "what" they plan to do, and more the "how" they might do it.
DOGE HAS A VARIETY OF TOOLS AT ITS DISPOSAL
Contract Law
Two, recent, Supreme Court decisions have reigned in the power and autonomy of Federal Agencies, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024). These rulings clarify and strengthen the power of Congress: Federal agencies cannot enact major economic or policy decisions without explicit approval.
Think about it this way: Let's say you have a contract with another person for some work or activity. The court just ruled that the other party has grossly overstepped the boundaries of what it may do, systematically.
For DOGE, this is a tool that it can immediately use, proactively, or in the courts, retroactively, to redefine what is permissible, the boundaries of the mission of any given agency.
Moral Suasion
Moral suasion happens when we encourage people to change behavior by appealing to morality. In my previous "DOGE" post, I stated, "Musk's purchase of Twitter was widely criticized. I don't believe many understand the sheer genius of the move." It gives Musk and DOGE a platform to highlight government waste and to shame those who benefit from it.
Scholar J.T. Romans argues in the American Economic Review that moral suasion requires two elements to be successful: First, citizens must support it, and second, the people who have to be "persuaded" [not to waste] must be small.
GOBankingRates recently surveyed 1,000 US adults and asked whether they believe their tax dollars are being spent effectively or not. A majority, 56%, feel that their tax dollars are misused. A majority also believe they pay too much taxes. I'll remind you of another finding I mentioned in the "Peter" post, 80% of Americans disapprove of the job that Congress is doing! And, per my "DOGE" post and economist Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window, WASTE IS THEFT! This is the first of the Romans’ two conditions.
The number of people that DOGE needs to "persuade" is not overwhelming. There are 535 voting Members of Congress. Even if you add in another 500 high-profile individuals outside of Congress, it is still a manageable number. This meets Romans’ condition two.
Hey, Elon, ever read Alinsky?
"5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
"13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
- Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971
Thus, DOGE has the moral high ground. This must be exploited. Alinsky Rules.
Information Technology
As previously mentioned, the internet, with the mass communication it enables, is a powerful tool. How about AI? Did you know that Musk co-founded the leading firm OpenAI and also has an AI with direct access to X, named "grok"?
Some speculate that an AI could be turned loose on government rules and regulations. Methinks one should.
"Is there a list of federal laws?
According to the Library of Congress, the total number of federal laws and amendments has not been tallied. Besides many volumes of the U.S. Statutes at Large that are published by year, there is no official, single list of all federal laws."
- USA.gov
One should be in shock from reading that, and then this:
"In an example of a failed attempt to tally up the number of laws on a specific subject area, in 1982 the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question."
- Shameema Rahman, Library of Congress, in response to the question, "How Many Federal Laws Are There?"
NO ONE KNOWS. It is a black hole; it might be harder to find your way out of this than it is to travel to Mars!
Civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate argues, in his book, "Three Felonies A Day", that the average person unknowingly breaks at least three federal criminal laws every day. This conjurs up the expression, "show me the man and I'll show you the crime", from the Stalinist-era in the Soviet Union and in Poland.
Opaque, labyrinthine systems of laws - - civil, criminal, and governmental - - imprison us all. Perhaps we need a national initiative to "debug" this code.
Questions one might ask an AI:
Can you give me a list of all laws that are vestigial, clearly irrelevant?
A list of laws [in area of concern A, B, C, etc.] which are contradictory to others?
A list of agency jurisdictions overlapped by the jurisdiction of another agency?
A list of laws out of line with "best in class", "best in breed", etc.? {plea bargains, as an example}
A list of laws, prima facie, unconstitutional?
and so on …
Could such an initiative gather the support to immediate suspend and render these offenders null and void?
Personnel Policy
"On Day 1, *instantly* fire 50% of federal bureaucrats. Here’s how: if your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired. That downsizes government by half. Absolutely *nothing* will break as a result. It doesn’t violate civil service rules because mass layoffs are exempt. SHUT IT DOWN."
- Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy)
I'm not a fan boy, but this is, actually, uhh, supported by science. In my "Peter" post, I discuss the Peter Principle, the idea that people in a bureaucracy are promoted to a level where they are no longer competent. Scholars Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo used an agent-based modeling approach to conclude, in 2010, that the best way to improve performance in an organization was to promote people RANDOMLY - - hello, Vivek, did you read this? Thus, firing RANDOMLY, by ending of SSN, is actually very smart. Let the remaining half pick up the pieces.
Another proposal, in the similar vein, is to relocate employees. It has been proposed that many federal agencies could be relocated, outside of DC, to other areas in the country. In an era of low-cost, instantaneous communication, there's simply no reason they need be co-located in reach of a horse and buggy ride.
Washington and the surrounding areas are extremely costly places to live and force workers to suffer long commutes. Agencies could also be located more closely to those areas and people they "regulate": Move the DOE close to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, for instance.
This would also be more fair, sprinkling government largess across the country, instead of merely inside the "beltway". Workers inside the beltway are also extremely homogenous, concentrated in a geography and concentrated by political orientation; relocating agencies would reinvigorate them. A further benefit is security: Does it make any sense to have all of our government located in a single, concentrated, urban environment?
Audits and Whistleblowers
It was recently reported that the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row, that is, the nation’s largest government agency can't account for its $824 billion budget. This is nuts.
"I'm the largest individual taxpayer in history, so I paid $10 billion in tax. I sort of thought maybe the IRS would send me a little trophy or something but I didn't get anything. Not even a cookie."
- Elon Musk
If you read my posts, you know I like steak. I was recently out with the family at a favorite steakhouse. The manager shares in-real-time customer reviews with the staff. It is instantly fed back to the server. Every one of us knows this is the new "now".
You just can't be invisible and unaccountable anymore. Everyone alive knows this. In a few years, when everyone who didn't grow up with a smartphone dies off, the lack of government transparency and accountability will simply be intolerable, inexcusable. And, excuses, graft, corruption, can and will be illuminated.
DOGE can speed that along by facilitating whistleblowing. Give maximum legal "overwatch" to them. Create a bounty system by which they are financially rewarded for revealing waste and corruption.
In the interest of brevity, I'll stop at those four "tool" ideas for now.
A couple of other major items, regulatory capture [of agencies] and anti-competitive conduct [by companies] are worthy of their own, future posts. I have serious doubts that DOGE can truly be effect unless it makes headway on these issues as well, as I believe they are intertwined.