From what we have seen so far, the new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE appears to be concentrating on spending. That’s good, they are reportedly uncovering some massive government waste, fraud and abuse of power.
What is “spending”? Spending is the end state of the entire, huge budgeting process. Determining the federal spending parameters begins with the development of the President’s Budget submitted to Congress every year in early February. Congress then begins a well-defined but normally almost completely and irresponsibly ignored specific timelines to determined what will be spent, when and by whom during the next fiscal year.
While DOGE is into spending, we must also have an in-depth look at budgeting if DOGE is to be completely successful.
President Trump can accomplish both simultaneously, efficiently and effectively and thereby arrive at the desired end state. Keep in mind that every successful strategic plan must begin at the end; that is, by defining the end state. But if the president does not also launch a look into the entire Executive Branch budgeting piece, the overall plan will be only half-baked.
GROUND TRUTH:
A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable, federal government currently numbering over 4 million employees plus hundreds of thousands of contract personnel was never the vision or intent of the Founding Fathers. Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns; cease to be efficient, effective, and/or no longer perform the functions for which they were created. At that point, a large organization will tend to look inward and become self-perpetuating rather than value-added for the greater good.
Some or all of that applies today to the Departments and agencies in the Executive Branch of the federal government. This results in three major problems that desperately need to get fixed.
One, it costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually to maintain and sustain office space, salaries, health care and long-term retirement pay and benefit to the massive Executive Branch.
Second, and more importantly, the annual U.S. budget boils up out of this massive organization. Every government-funded program is maintained and sustained inside these bureaucracies. These programs are this organization’s product. General Motor’s product is vehicles; the Executive Branch’s product is taxpayer-funded programs. The question is, what is the value added of those programs? An in-depth review will undoubtedly find programs that have existed for decades, their original purpose no longer relevant; programs that sounded good at their inception but have failed in execution; programs to solve a problem that should have been the purview of state or local officials; programs initiated to solve a short-term problem but have lived on forever. The list is long. President Reagan summed up the problem with this statement, “Government is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
Why specifically do all of the organizational elements in the Executive Branch exist? For the most part they are formed to support a law, a regulation and/or an internal rule or one sent down from Congress or the White House. There is an interesting measure of an administration’s regulatory activity; it’s called The Federal Register. it is a daily journal of federal government activity that includes presidential documents, proposed and final rules, and public notices. It is a common measure of an administration’s regulatory activity.
Some recent administrations’ Federal Registry activity: According to government data, the Federal Register hit an all-time high of 95,894 pages in 2016, during the last year of the Obama/Biden administration (the Affordable Care Act contains about 17,000 pages of regulations). The first year of the Trump administration, 2017, there were 61,950 pages, the lowest recorded page total since 2001. In Bidens last 12 months in the White House, his administration created 3,248 new “rules” and finished out the year by publishing 107,262 pages in the Federal Register.
We are a regulation nation; an administrative state and it must get cleaned up.
In his first days in office, President Trump has declared that for every new regulation federal agencies must delete ten existing regulations. Not good. There is a quote that sums up that directive, “For every complex problem, there is a simple solution and it is usually wrong.” The point being, the process of deleting regulations needs to be a critical element in the bottom-up Executive Branch review wherein there will be direct and thoughtful linkage of regulations to organizations to budget to value added and then a thoughtful decision can be made as to whether the executing organization and regulation should go, stay or be altered.
HOW TO PROCEED WITH THE BOTTOM-UP PART OF DOGE
First recognize this will be a difficult process because we are talking about change, massive change, within each Executive Branch organization. We must recognize that for any large organization, especially one as large as the Executive Branch, change is very difficult. Fear of the unknown is a powerful human force, especially in government with an entrenched, layered bureaucracy that is stiff, stifling, and, in many respects, self-serving.
How does all this get accomplished? It will be a months-long tedious but critically important process. There are no viable shortcuts to re-thinking, re-designing, and re-structuring large organizations and making them be all they can and should be.
Vice President Vance should lead this effort in concert with what Elon Musk and his team are doing on the spending issues. Vance should first set up a senior task force consisting of the deputies of all the departments, agencies, and commissions. They will be the change-agents and become the junkyard dogs of Washington.
Define the end state for this campaign. For example, the Vice President might say, “Over the next few months our task force will look inside every organizational element of the Executive Branch. We will assess their mission (is it relevant today), their structure (too many or too few people), layering (is it OK or dysfunctional), can the organization integrate (communicate) vertically and horizontally efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis? Is the organization as a whole agile (able to deal with change as a matter of course) and is there overall value-added for the government and especially for the American taxpayer?”
The process begins in every named organization by putting together a very detailed organization chart. That’s the essential visual element for the task force and it provides an immediate sense of size, complexity, and layering. Why the organization chart? Because it allows the task force to begin the analysis and restructure at the bottom of the organization. Without the org chart the process will just not work effectively.
Using the Department of Agriculture as an example, there are 65 different organizational elements that come under the headings of departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards and facilities. Inside them are departments, directorates, branches, sections, cells, and individual elements. Every one of those becomes a “box” in the organization chart. Each organizational box must list the name of the element, number of employees, and the grade of the leader, GS 10, 12, whatever.
Within the Department of Agriculture, for example, the Deputy Secretary, part of the VP’s senior task force, will form his/her own internal departmental task force. The Department Task Force’s first action will be to send out an internal memo to the leaders of every “box” to submit, in one week, “a no-more-than-two-page, font 12” report to the Deputy Secretary. The report format should include, as a minimum these six elements:
First, a one or two-sentence mission statement that describes what it is that element collectively does; for example, responsible for writing, executing, and enforcing Department Regulation 135, Beef Export Program, and reporting results quarterly to ………
Keep in mind that there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of worthless reports written every year by an entrenched bureaucratic mass that lives on forever sucking up tax dollars, stifling initiative, and being a roadblock to progress.
Second, the report should describe the grade structure of all the employees in the box.
The Department task Force will look at the grade structure for each of the boxes in the organization chart. Is it commensurate with the degree of complexity of the mission? Could two or more similar “boxes” be combined with fewer total people?
Third, describe a typical work week to include the number of meetings and amount of travel.
This can reveal a lot about an organizational element and its leader. Many meetings are just to fill up time, or are a daily social coffee clutch, or make the person in charge feel like he/she is actually “leading”. Many are a colossal waste of time. If employees have time to attend too many meetings, they probably are not very busy to begin with. Is the travel critical to success, nice to have, or perhaps just to fill up the workweek? Travel is very expensive and too many times it is the recipients’ worst nightmare, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.”
Fourth, what laws, rules and/or regulations guide that organization’s work?
This is a critical element in the review. Has this organization been acting out a scenario that is unnecessary or at least should better reside at the state or local level?
Fifth, a list, in single sentences, of major accomplishments in the past twelve months.
The task force will then determine if the accomplishments are in line with the mission or are just doing busy work?
Sixth and finally, a short statement of value-added. For example, without us the Department would not/could not do the following………
The Department Task Force will begin a detailed review of every input report. Their job is to ask, do we need Regulation 135 (Beef Export Program) any longer? If so, could this be done with fewer people? Could the same number of employees also be responsible for regulation 246 (Pork Export Program)? Do we need the report quarterly? And most importantly, what is the value-added of that organizational element to the overall Department’s mission? Was it formed long ago to solve a problem that no longer exists? Is it in fact harmful? Does anyone up the chain actually need the quarterly report or is it just a nice-to-know information?
By bringing together the three critical elements (the guiding law/regulation/rule, the number of people involved and the value added), the Department team then comes to the conclusion that there are not sufficient reasons to justify keeping that “box”.
Two things just happened. One, part of the Executive Branche’s annual budget just got cut out. Multiply that equation by perhaps thousands of similar actions and the President’s budget will be reduced by billions of dollars. Secondly, when the box goes away, so does the regulation/rule that caused it to exist. This reduces the regulation nation in a logical way.
Additionally, this type review and action will fly under the radar and not create Democrat or radical-left media hysteria about MAGA-reductions.
WHAT CAN GO WRONG?
Some of the Vice President’s senior task force may not be completely on board. Agriculture Department Deputy Secretary to Vice President Vance, “I’ve taken a look at the 100,000 end-strength in the Department of Agriculture and believe it is about right.” That person must be immediately replaced; they are part of the problem.
Some of the reports from the “boxes” to the Department task force will not be two pages in length. The box leader will want to make an impression and he/she will send in a 15-page tome. The senior task force leader must immediately scribble a note on the front page, “What is it you don’t understand about 2-page limit. Back on my desk by close of business.”
The point being, the Vice President and every leader on the senior task force must send a hard message about change; get with the program or be immediately replaced.
This process, will consume much of VP Vance’s time for a few months. He should routinely go to all the Departments and be satisfied they completely understand that their review of the input from the bottom-up is all about policy, practices, process, grade structure commensurate with overall responsibility, span of control, layering, and value-added. Are they tough enough, too tough, thorough enough, on the right track, or being overly protective of the status quo?
By frequently visiting the subordinate task forces, VP Vance will also be able to pick up strong points and failures and pass them along to other Departments as best/worst practices.
The leaders of the Executive Departments along with the VP’s senior task force members will conduct a monthly in-progress-review for President Trump where they will lay out their findings to date and get marching-orders for continued work.
WHY DO ALL THIS WORK?
One the most common attempts at downsizing, in my experience used numerous times over the past decades, have been to declare a hiring freeze and/ or order an across-the-board, for example, ten percent personnel cut, neither of which make any sense nor achieve any lasting positive results.
Second, what I have described above has never been done before. We have just allowed the Executive Branch to grow without ever undertaking a necessary pruning process
CONCLUSIONS
Once the task force has worked its way up from the bottom, looking at every element, their individual mission, and value added, then and only then will they be capable of looking back and seeing how many subordinate elements are off track, irrelevant, unnecessary or even counterproductive. They will then be capable of restructuring, re-aligning, re-tasking, reorganizing the subordinate elements to create an organization that is more focused, aligned, responsive, innovative, agile, and rid of pockets of resistance.
Having reached the top of the organization chart it is possible the Vice President’s senior task force could conclude that an entire department’s continued existence should be questioned. A prime example is the Department of Education. We know that education in America is a national disgrace and not getting better in spite of (or because of) the 4,400 employees and a 2024 budget of $79 billion; an $11 billion increase over 2023.
The task forces must be especially mindful of the phrase, “we provide oversight.”That is a red flashing light that an organization does not, in and of itself, produce anything of value. They simply exist to grade papers, expand their purview, inhibit progress and expend tax dollars.
During the process, it is important to not lose sight of the two-fold objectives. First, the objective is NOT to reach some specific lower end-strength number of federal employees. The objective is to rid the government of “boxes” in the organization charts that have no valueadded, they just exist because they have always been there. The end state is an organization that is leaner, more focused, more efficient, more effective, and agile. The second objective is to end up with an organization that has a much smaller and more realistic annual budget.
When completed, many positions, perhaps thousands of them, will be eliminated. It will then take a couple years of shuffling the deck by the Office of Personnel Management to get folks reassigned or retired, but it is within the art of the possible and worth the effort.
There is also a states’ rights issues in all of this. As the federal government grows, a natural outcome is that they over-reach into areas that are better and more effectively handled at the local and state levels. Federal over-reach tends to result in a one-size-fits-all approach to problem-solving and creates a stifling regulation-nation.
BOTTOM LINE:
Getting spending and hence debt under control will resonate with Americans and fit perfectly with the Trump movement for necessary governmental change.
We need to accomplish a number of really big things in order to move towards a balanced budget and away from continuously approving another debt-limit increase.
This dual VP Vance/Elon Musk DOGE undertaking is one of the keys to success and is clearly within the art of the possible. Without it, DOGE will be incomplete.
President Reagan got it right when he reminded us that:
“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”
“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of two books, Vision to Execution and Fix the Systems, Transform America as well as the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.