The real questions confronting anyone who wants to reform the government and reduce the deficit are: Is there some better approach that could be carried out with less “chaos” and are we taking on unnecessary risk by using this philosophy?
There are many who support President Trump’s goal of streamlining the federal government to make it more efficient and reduce the deficit, but believe he is going about it the wrong way, moving too fast and risking too much. The word “chaotic” is often applied to the near constant stream of executive orders freezing budgets, cutting staff, eliminating entire departments, imposing tariffs, and more, some of which have been rolled back or modified almost immediately, sometimes after the courts have intervened. In their view, the agile nature of this process, where revisions are happening in real time, could cause some potential calamity, such as firing critical staff members responsible for protecting the populace from some threat, or various economic shocks including rapid revisions to the stock market, and they are not entirely wrong. Tariffs in particular, threatened, then rescinded, or imposed, tweaked, and then paused have undoubtedly caused significant swings in the market and jitters among the business community. It is also possible that there will be future consequences as a result of cuts to the government, though as I have opined previously, these disasters haven’t really happened yet. Even barring a significant calamity, there has been inaccurate data posted about these efforts at times, what Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency recently referred to as not “batting a thousand,” all of which contributes to potential confusion if not outright chaos. Even before the President took office for the second time on January 20, CNN’s Stephen Collinson was opining that “Trump and Musk unleash a new kind of chaos on Washington.” At the time, he cited Mr. Musk’s philosophy as encapsulated by biographer Walter Isaacson, “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat,” an approach that has also been characterized as “move fast and break things.” Last week, Mr. Collinson returned to this theme, claiming that government by “chaos” itself was “back.” Writing, “Six weeks in…as Trump makes gut-check calls to dismantle post-Cold War national security arrangements, the global free trade system, and the federal machine – all of which helped make the US a superpower – a new realization is dawning. There doesn’t seem to be a plan. Trump’s haphazard efforts to make peace in Ukraine, revive Rust Belt-heavy industry with 19th century-style tariffs and slash government are as improvisational as the ‘weave’ – his name for his stream-of-consciousness campaign screeds.”
Whether I’d personally choose the same language, there is at least some truth to Mr. Collinson’s descriptions and criticism from even more friendly quarters. President Trump has been disruptive to say the least and in some or even many cases, has adjusted his plans on the fly. In an ideal world, this wouldn’t be the case, but of course, such a world doesn’t exist in this universe. The real questions confronting anyone who wants to reform the government and reduce the deficit are: Is there some better approach that could be carried out with less “chaos” and are we taking on unnecessary risk by using this “move fast and break things” philosophy? In my opinion at least, the answer is clearly no in both cases. Perhaps, if we had a government that was operating like a reasonably well oiled machine, was organized in some comprehensible fashion, and wasn’t adding over a trillion dollars per year to the deficit, we might imagine some alternative. Fortunately or unfortunately, that isn’t the government we have, far from it.
Instead, the government as it is currently constituted is the largest, most complex, labyrinthine, impenetrable, unfathomable organization in the history of mankind. At a cost of close to $7 trillion per year, almost double the market cap of the world’s largest companies, the federal government is organized into 15 departments and more than 2,000 agencies, variously created by different acts of Congress without any consistent organization or mandate. There are some supposedly “independent agencies,” whatever that might mean. There are other regulatory agencies, government corporations, executive agencies, oversight agencies and more, each with its own purpose, in many cases overlapping, and each with its own legal justification and mode of operation save for those mandated by the Constitution. These various agencies and departments are augmented by some 1.5 millions “non governmental organizations,” NGOs, at least some of which are funded entirely by the government and act essentially as an extension of the government. The federal government alone is staffed by over three million, or almost 2% of every job in the United States, even excluding active duty military personnel, which number over one million. Full time staff are further supplemented by contractors, where there were 972,000 in the Department of Defense alone as of 2023. By some estimates, there are up to nine million of these contractors across the entire government, As far as I can tell, no one knows for sure, especially as the number varies from year to year, and many contractors are paid by third party contracts, which accounted for some $759 billion in federal spending as of 2023. Forget the fact that no one really knows how any of this works and there is no organizational chart in the world that could capture even half of this sprawl, no one in their right mind would intentionally design an organization like this and expect it to be anything except dysfunctional. For example, there are eight federal agencies involved in the distribution of means-tested welfare benefits alone. These include the Health Resources and Services Administration, which provides healthcare to low-income, uninsured, and other vulnerable populations, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Development, which advises the Health and Human Services Secretary on policy development, the Administration for Children and Families that promotes the well-being of children, families, and communities, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which helps poor people with mental disorders and substance abuse, plus the more familiar programs such as food stamps, temporary assistance to needy families, and more, some 100 of them. Moreover, according to the CATO Institute, the “exact number fluctuates from year to year.” On healthcare alone, “There are eight different health care programs administered by five separate agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. Six cabinet departments and five independent agencies oversee 27 cash or general-assistance programs. Altogether, seven different cabinet agencies and six independent agencies administer at least one anti-poverty program. And those are just the programs specifically aimed at poverty. That doesn’t include more universal social welfare programs or social insurance programs, such as unemployment insurance, Medicare, or Social Security.”
Not surprisingly, there is inefficiency, waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the entirety of the system, well beyond means-tested welfare programs. Last year, the Government Accountability Office, long before President Trump retook the White House and instituted DOGE, estimated that fraud alone amounts to losses of between $233 billion and $521 billion. As they put it, “No area of the federal government is immune to fraud. We estimated that the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. Given the scope of this problem, a government-wide approach is required to address it. The Office of Management and Budget, working with agencies and the oversight community, should develop guidance to improve fraud-related data—providing a more uniform approach to what data is collected and how. Also, Treasury should identify methods to expand government-wide estimates of fraud—prioritizing higher-risk program areas.” In other words, up to 7.7% of all tax dollars could simply be stolen, even forgetting the various inefficiencies, redundancies, and other waste undoubtedly “baked in” to this behemoth. Perhaps, this would be tolerable if anyone thought the government actually worked well and did what it was supposed to do. Generally speaking, people are willing to pay more and tolerate more from a product or service that delivers on its promises. Sadly, that isn’t the government we have, once again, far, far, far from it. Instead, we have a government that has presided over a litany of failures, large and small, over the past two decades or longer, one that continually receives heavy criticism about almost every aspect of its organization and operation from both Democrats and Republicans, even setting aside innumerable complaints from the average citizen. While some of this is undoubtedly political, based on who was in office at the time, I challenge anyone to name a major government success story since 2000. Even setting aside a near endless series of diplomatic and military catastrophes costing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, the country has been rocked by poor responses to disasters starting with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, financial shocks starting with the 2008 meltdown, challenges rolling out new programs including a complete failure to launch the Obamacare website even at a cost of $2 billion, and of course, the response to the pandemic, where government health agencies failed to produce a test, stockpile supplies in advance, and variously made up all sorts of public health policy based on everything from a high school science experiment to arbitrary distancing rules that “appeared” at some point with no scientific justification. Of course, we would be remiss if we failed to mention the crisis at the southern border, where somewhere around 20 million people streamed into the country in less than 4 years. Others would point to other failures, both large and small. As I claimed, the challenge, for anyone, is finding anything resembling success.
Under these circumstances, what precisely are we risking if we move fast and break something? This might be a reasonable argument if the government were successfully delivering on its promises. In that case, we would necessarily want to be careful in any changes we make for fear of affecting its ability to provide critical services, but when those critical services barely work to begin with, even assuming they don’t produce results that are counterproductive, how would we even know if any reform of the system caused the issue rather than the byzantine, incomprehensible nature of the system itself? Of course, detractors would blame any issue directly on the cuts, but given the nature of the baseline, that attribution would be almost impossible to make. Contrary to how the situation is currently framed in much of what passes for conventional wisdom, we do not have a high-functioning, reliable government staffed by selfless civil servants. We have an absolute mess, where dysfunction, inefficiency, waste, fraud, and abuse are so rampant that even the most dedicated and truly selfless employees will be completely stymied in their effort to improve the lives of the American people. This brings us back to the second question, The organizational and operational mess is compounded by an opaque, if not impossible to understand accounting system, where even data scientists have been unable to identify the reason for major expenditures and the most basic accounting processes such as categorizing payments to contractors and describing what was received for the payment are not followed. There is no one on this Earth who knows where this money goes, or in some (many?) cases even why. Some, perhaps myself included, might even say this was by design, but whatever the case, the government’s books cannot simply be audited and reviewed. They need to essentially be reconstructed and unwound, rebuilt from the ground up to make any sense of them. Confronted with this reality, and despite what progressives and even some Republicans claim, this is the reality, what alternative is there to moving fast and breaking stuff, save keeping the status quo and plunging us further over the fiscal cliff?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 