The Political Foundations of the DOGE Scam
The Trump/Musk administration’s approach to cutting costs makes good political sense in the short-run. But from a longer-run governing perspective, it is a recipe for disaster.
At an unusually contentious cabinet meeting on 6 March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy got into an extended and heated argument with Elon Musk. Each side accused the other of lying. What was the burning issue at the heart of this confrontation? Ukraine? Immigration? Tariffs? No, the number of federal civil servants who should be fired immediately. Over the past several weeks, slashing the federal workforce has been the central goal of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). This has generated scores of lawsuits, many of which the Trump/Musk administration has lost. Now there is angry pushback from the Trump appointees responsible for running federal agencies.
Amid the chaos created by the frenetic initiatives of the Trump/Musk administration, a central puzzle is what the DOGE boys are trying to achieve with this assault on the federal bureaucracy. Are they simply smart-ass tech-bros trying to break things as fast as possible? Libertarians dedicated to substantially shrinking government? Or budget busters who really believe that they can quickly find US$2 trillion in waste, fraud, and inefficiencies in the federal government?
We do not know how soon this project will crash on the rocks of political and policy reality, or how much harm it will impose in the meantime. But an old chestnut of political-science wisdom can help us understand the logic of this unprecedented attack on federal administrators and the limits of its success.
In 1968, public-opinion scholars Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril published The Political Beliefs of Americans, in which they provided extensive evidence that Americans are “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” By the former, they meant that American voters are distrustful of centralised and bureaucratic government. They don’t like regulation or taxation (who does?). In the abstract, therefore, they prefer smaller government with fewer responsibilities to larger government with more benefits.
At the same time, Free and Cantril noted, Americans like the benefits, services, and protections provided by federal, state, and local governments. Only a tiny percentage of the public wants to cut spending on Social Security, healthcare, education, environmental protection, veterans’ programs, infrastructure, or assistance to needy children. Indeed, a majority usually want to spend even more on these programs. Over the past several decades, poll after poll has confirmed this. So has congressional politics. When Republicans have proposed major cuts in these programs, they have faced retribution at the next election.
One of the few programs to lack such support is foreign aid—largely because the public vastly exaggerates the size of the foreign-aid budget. Unsurprisingly, this was the first target of DOGE. It is likely that when the full consequences of these cuts become apparent, funding will quietly be restored.
Since Free and Cantril first noted this paradox, federal spending has grown by leaps and bounds, trust in government has plummeted, and the federal deficit has exploded. But public support for these greatly expanded programs has remained strong. After all, beneficiaries of these programs are numerous, highly attentive to proposed cuts, vocal, and organised.
Donald Trump seems to understand this: he recently opposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which when combined with interest on the debt gobble up nearly sixty percent of the federal budget. Add defence spending (which is likely to increase, notwithstanding the Defence Department’s promise to impose cuts) and politically sacrosanct programs for veterans, and there isn’t much left. A few members of the Republican congressional caucus are serious about cutting healthcare and safety-net programs. But Trump, always more attuned to public sentiment than to public policy, recognises the vigorous opposition this will generate, including among his base.
So, rather than use the congressional budget process to cut spending on popular programs (as the Reagan administration did in 1981–82), the Trump/Musk administration has mounted a spectacular—and in many instances illegal—assault on the federal bureaucracy. Their strategy is to attack the bureaucracy, but not the benefits and services it provides.
A leading example of this education. The administration has repeatedly trumpeted its efforts to eliminate the Department of Education. It has cancelled research grants (saving little money while throwing out studies that have already been paid for) and put the jobs of many employees in jeopardy. But it has shown little interest in reducing spending for children with disabilities, school districts with a high percentage of poor children, or even Pell grants that help low-income students pay for a college education. Meanwhile, it has promised to use the Department’s Office for Civil Rights to mount an aggressive assault on antisemitism on campus, purge DEI programs, and end affirmative-action programs. In the end, “eliminating” the Department means little more than transferring its various offices to other departments.
Evan D Morris
DOGE and the White House both say they have identified billions of dollars of fraud in the Social Security program, and they are now threatening to cut 7,000 employees from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Their claims about waste, fraud, and abuse in Social Security are wildly and obviously inaccurate—although this did not prevent the president from repeating them in his speech to Congress. In fact, administrative costs constitute only half of one percent of Social Security spending—a tiny fraction of the amount the current administration intends to add to the looming Social Security deficit by eliminating federal taxes on tipped income and overtime. The administration’s strategy is to expand the program while attacking those who run it. In this way, they claim, savings will magically appear.
In light of the Free-Cantril paradox, this makes good political sense in the short-run. But from a longer-run governing perspective, it is a recipe for disaster.
To understand why, consider the size of the federal bureaucracy that oversees the nearly $7 trillion federal budget. Despite the fact that the responsibilities of the national government are far greater now than in 1960, its civilian workforce is only slightly larger, about 2.4 million employees. In fact, the civil service is now a smaller percentage of the American workforce than when John F. Kennedy was president. Their salaries constitute only 6.6 percent of the federal budget. Fire them all, and the effect on the federal deficit would be minimal.
One reason that “big government” has not led to a bigger civil service is that writing cheques for Social Security or the Earned Income Tax Credit is a pretty simple task, even with outmoded computer technology. And the federal government writes a lot of cheques. Even more important, though, is the extent to which federal programs are actually carried out by others: state and local employees, private contractors, non-profits, universities, health-insurance companies, banks, and an army of consultants. John DiIulio of the University of Pennsylvania estimates that these quasi-government employees number twenty million, the real “administrative state.”
This, too, reflects the Free-Cantril paradox. Those who created and expanded federal programs since the 1960s recognised that programs in which citizens interact with subnational governments or private parties are more popular than those with a clearer federal bureaucratic signature. The result has been what Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls “the submerged state”—federally mandated and funded programs shorn of their identification with the federal government. Even Social Security, the biggest and most centralised of them all, is commonly presented as a self-help insurance policy rather than a government program.
As a result, most federal administrators do not themselves distribute benefits and services, conduct research, develop drugs, build highways or missile systems, or educate students. Instead, they fund third parties who do these jobs, and they are expected to ensure that these third parties do what they promise. Since they are overseers rather than service providers, fewer federal administrators will inevitably mean less oversight.
One of the leading ironies of the DOGE attack on “waste, fraud, and abuse” is that it has targeted so many offices whose main job is to improve government performance. That is what the inspectors general in various departments and agencies do, yet they were among the first targets of this administration. Later, the administration eliminated a small office in the General Services Administration devoted to improving government websites. Cutting thousands of positions at the IRS will mean less effective enforcement of the tax code, less revenue, and an even larger deficit.
Identifying and eliminating waste, fraud, and inefficiency is essential work, but it requires detailed knowledge of government programs, and it seldom discovers large savings in any one program. That is why the blunderbuss DOGE attack has produced such wildly inaccurate accounts of its savings and so many spurious claims about misspent public funds.
The appeal of attacking an unpopular government bureaucracy rather than popular government programs is readily apparent. The big question is how soon the degradation of the former will lead to a reduction in the quality of the latter. The long-term costs of reduction in support for medical research are immense; the short-term costs are nearly invisible. This summer, families who visit our spectacular National Parks might observe the consequences of inadequate staffing; it will be harder for them to see what happens when our National Forests are not adequately maintained.
God only knows what the Trump/Musk administration’s concerted effort to drive experienced professionals out of the Pentagon, the intelligence community, the FBI, the EPA, and the Justice Department will do to the performance of those essential organisations. Perhaps within two or four years some of the consequences will become evident to voters. Equally possible, though, is that the declining quality of administration will contribute to heightened attacks on “the administrative state.”
Meanwhile, the disjuncture between our “ideological conservatism” and our “operational liberalism” will produce partisan warfare, huge budget deficits, declining government performance, and even more distrust. Our leaders can either exploit this gap for short-term political gain—as the Trump/Musk administration has done—or try to narrow it by speaking honestly to the American people about their contradictory expectations of government.
