A Word to the DOGE: ‘Reduction’ Is Not Synonymous With ‘Reform’

 As we have painfully learned since the Grace Commission, a revanchist, ravenous administrative state can survive and metastasize despite periodic efforts to trim its size and scope.

One of the more intriguing developments following Donald Trump’s reelection as president is the announcement of and recruitment for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the new entity has titillated supporters of smaller government.

(An irresistible aside regarding the acronym DOGE: the Doge of Venice “was the highest role of authority within the Republic of Venice… The Doge of Venice acted as both the head of state and head of the Venetian oligarchy. Doges were elected for life through a complex voting process.” It seems Mr. Musk has a taste for the wry.)

In many ways, the reaction of both the DOGE’s supporters and detractors echoes that of the Reagan administration’s 1982 Grace Commission, which was “a group of ‘outstanding experts from the private sector’ that would conduct an in-depth review of the entire Executive Branch and make recommendations for eliminating waste and inefficiency.” Hamstrung by the opposition of both the burgeoning administrative state and Congressional Democrats, the Grace Commission, at best, served as a foundation for today’s DOGE. The most critical lesson being that “reduction” is not synonymous with “reform.”

Already, the DOGE has commenced identifying egregious examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse and is compiling a list of prospective administrative state entities to downsize and/or eliminate. Such serious reductions in both the expenditures and scope of the administrative state are long past overdue, as Ned Ryun and Mark Corallo earlier averred in “Tearing the Leviathan Apart” here at American Greatness.

Yet, in the MAGA and Republican-Populist movement’s rightfully indignant ardor to tame the unelected, unaccountable administrative state that is ruling Americans as a de facto supreme fourth branch of government, the necessary reductions and eliminations will not prove sufficient for sustainable structural reform. As we have painfully learned since the Grace Commission, a revanchist, ravenous administrative state can survive and metastasize despite periodic efforts to trim its size and scope.

No, there must be an additional reappraisal and revision of the administrative state’s aim. Presently, the administrative state operates on the premise that an essentially unaccountable bureaucratic elite must control Americans to facilitate the facile functioning of the government. This is not only abjectly insulting and injurious to the public, but it is absolutely in contravention of the foundations of our nation. Bluntly, the elitist administrative state has endeavored to reverse the very premise of the American Revolution by once again placing the government on top of the people, thereby turning sovereign citizens back into subjects and the administrative state into a monarch that governs by the divine right of the elites.

For example, one of the most harmful consequences of the administrative state’s counter-revolutionary logic is how it has turned the social safety net into a trap for the poor rather than a trampoline to self-sufficiency.

When President Lyndon Baines Johnson aimed to build the bitterly ironically named “Great Society,” one of his chief opponents was a junior senator from New York: Robert Francis Kennedy. In harmony with the Catholic Church’s principle of subsidiarity, Sen. Kennedy believed that federal and state bureaucrats controlling the money and the strings by which the disadvantaged received their benefits would both increase costs and, more crucially, reduce their ability to become self-sufficient and control their own lives—in short, to be a sovereign citizen, rather than a subject of the state trapped in a soul-crushing cycle of government dependency.

President Johnson did not dispute Sen. Kennedy’s assessment. The president cynically ignored him and foisted a massive federal bureaucracy upon the poor. Why? Because President Johnson used government dependency to cement part of the base of the Democrat Party. Sadly, time has proven the accuracy of his despicable political calculation. While for generations this has abetted Democrats winning elections, as for the poor, the result is found in the lamentable adage: “America waged a war on poverty—and lost.” And, in the years since, we have lost far more, including control of the administrative state.

In the instance of addressing poverty, fixing the welfare state will necessitate reductions in federal outlays, but if the administrative state’s counter-revolutionary logic is also rectified, there will be sustainable, salubrious reform.

The goal of any federal anti-poverty program must be to foster self-sufficiency for the benefit of the recipient, not governmental dependency for the benefit of the administrative state. Increasing recipient control of their benefits will enable cutting out the administrative middleman. In turn, the tax dollars saved will allow for significant spending reductions in programs, thereby decreasing the size and scope of the administrative state; moreover, it can still maintain or increase benefits for recipients who, absent the overweening control of federal bureaucrats, will be empowered to begin their journey into self-reliance. Further, maximizing recipient control of their benefits is the greatest guard against a revanchist administrative state seeking to reclaim its powers.

Regarding such a reform’s further ideation and ultimate implementation, picking up Sen. Robert Kennedy’s mantle of empowering the economically disadvantaged and ending the administrative state’s control of them would be a fitting initiative to include in the growing portfolio of incoming Vice President J.D. Vance, who rose from humble, hardscrabble roots to his present position.

The federal Leviathan teems with opportunities for reductions coupled with revisions of the administrative state’s counter-revolutionary logic and aims. Crucially, however, that it teems with such opportunities is a testament to its obstinate endurance. Therefore, those seeking to bring the administrative state to heel must be cleareyed about the difficulty involved. After all, the abiding aim of any bureaucracy is survival—and, unlike a private sector bureaucracy that must live off the money it makes, a government bureaucracy can live off the money it takes.

On its X account, however, the DOGE expressed its own abiding goal: “The people voted for major reform.” That this reform will entail both reductions in spending and revisions in the administrative state’s counter-revolutionary aims remains to be seen. But it is certainly off to a propitious start.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/14/a-word-to-the-doge-reduction-is-not-synonymous-with-reform/