How Pokémon helps explain DOGE

Is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cleaning house and gutting the federal bureaucracy, or overstepping the limits of executive power while failing to cut much spending?

Could it be a bit of both?

Part of the confusion about Elon Musk's DOGE stems from the fact that there have been not one, but actually three different versions of the project so far—DOGE has been evolving, like a Pokémon, almost since the day it was first announced.

The first form of DOGE was announced not long after last year's election, when Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were appointed to run the project. They vowed to cut $2 trillion in federal spending and to take on the administrative state, which is a sort of broad term for the collection of executive agencies that regulate every aspect of modern American life.

In a wild and chaotic first month, Musk canceled federal contracts, fired many federal workers, and shook up the executive branch—even though it was never really clear if he had the legal authority to do any of that.

There was also a lot of flagrant misrepresentation about its accomplishments. As of this week, DOGE's wall of receipts claims to have cut $115 billion by canceling various federal contracts and reducing the federal workforce. That's a big number, but it's only about 1.5 percent of the $7 trillion federal budget. And that "wall of receipts" has overstated the actual savings. One contract worth $8 million was erroneously counted as being worth $8 billion.

Any serious effort to cut government spending is going to require changes at the budgetary level. You have to stop wasteful spending before it starts, rather than trying to cancel contracts that are already on their way out the door.

On the other hand, rooting out a few billion in wasteful spending is certainly better than continuing to spend wastefully.

Still, DOGE's continuously evolving mandate calls into question whether it will be able to see through any substantial spending cuts or lasting changes to federal regulatory policy.

In an executive order signed last month, President Donald Trump gave it a new directive: identify and cut all regulations that the executive branch never had the constitutional right to impose in the first place. That's a bit ironic, since DOGE itself has been accused of exceeding its constitutional limits—but this still seems like a good development. When it comes to the regulatory state, there's certainly plenty that needs to be slashed.

Firing government workers doesn't reduce regulation. To cut the regulatory state, you have to actually eliminate the rules themselves.

Musk is right when he says that "you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that is responsive to the people. That's the whole point of a democracy."

For now, Musk's fans and critics will keep debating whether DOGE is revolutionizing government or wrecking important institutions. In reality, it seems to be somewhere in between those two extremes. Musk's attempt at cutting wasteful spending is a good thing but not tremendously impactful on the budget. Trimming regulations will be a slow, but important process. What remains to be seen is whether DOGE has the attention span to make lasting reforms.

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