I will now sheepishly admit that when it was first announced, I was jealous of the DOGE — President Trump’s so-called Dept. of Government Efficiency. When I worked for the Obama administration, I proposed a similar initiative. Okay, fine — it was very different, but there were similarities. I proposed that an office be created with a mandate from the president to disrupt the bureaucracy and vastly improve outcomes for the American people.
That last part is where the proposed Obama DOGE differed from what we are seeing now. Our goal was to transform the government’s relationship with its constituents by reforming sclerotic internal systems with an emphasis on the creaky technology infrastructure.
I am a big fan of efficiency in government. When I was city administrator of Washington, D.C. in the mid-2000s, we worked to eliminate the worthless biannual safety inspections that used to torture D.C. car owners with hours-long waits at inspection stations. They had no discernable link to automotive safety.
Later, when I worked in Obama’s Treasury Dept., we pushed to eliminate the dollar coin, paper savings bonds, and an entire bureau. (I took a run at eliminating the penny, too.) At the General Services Administration (GSA), the government’s landlord, we surgically cut staff, reduced the federal real estate footprint for the first time in generations, and leased government-owned real estate that generates billions in revenue — including the former Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. That work made the government more efficient.
But beware of efficiency for efficiency’s sake. It is an output measure, not an outcome. It is akin to telling me your speed of travel but tells me nothing about your destination. In the DOGE we had hoped for, the “E” stood for effectiveness. Efficiency without effectiveness is fruitless. What people really want from their government is results.
A friend who knows some of the Trump DOGE-ers asked how one might cut 30 percent from the federal budget — one of their stated goals. That’s the wrong goal. Let’s instead ask what we want our government to accomplish and drive resources toward those outcomes.
Tony Blair, as prime minister of England, created the less colorfully named Delivery Unit to set audacious, meaningful, and specific goals for his government to reduce crime and improve health outcomes. Why not do that?
There are plenty of places to cut, but cutting to reach a random goal will only produce what we are now seeing: random outcomes.
One of the original DOGE heads suggested firing all federal employees whose Social Security numbers end in an odd digit. That would have guaranteed terrible results. But the current cuts to the federal workforce make that terrifying idea seem downright systematic.
There are many ways we can make our government perform better. You want to cut the size of the Internal Revenue Service? Allow it to implement its proposed electronic filing system. How about consolidating federal field offices into local post offices, making them more convenient and saving billions in rent? Let’s, like Canada, have one unified call center to answer all questions — a national 311. Let’s set specific state health outcome measures in exchange for Medicaid block grants as a replacement for the Byzantine system of individual rates, bills, audits, and an 18-month waiver process.
There are so many things one could do to make the government more efficient and effective. The problem is that in nearly every instance an entrenched bureaucracy is there to fight back. But this “deep state” isn’t federal employees. It’s the private parties that profit from those inefficiencies and those in Congress who protect them.
Here’s a pro tip for the DOGE-ers: instead of randomly firing federal workers, why not ask them what could be done better? At the GSA, we did just that, and its 11,000 employees generated 5,000 ideas that instantly saved the government millions of dollars.
Imagine what you could do if you inspired federal workers with a shared sense of purpose and an optimistic sense of what is possible. And then used your power and influence to defeat the real waste and abuse: the private interests that profit from our government not having the chance to serve its people effectively in the way they deserve.
That’s a dream DOGE. What we have instead is a nightmare.
Dan Tangherlini is a former administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Wellfleet.
