Something like "DOGE" is long overdue for the U.S. Federal government

And should outlast both Donald Trump and Elon Musk

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

Someone asked me recently what I thought about what’s going on in politics right now. My response was basically, which politics? With President Trump’s return to office, he’s trying to do “everything all at once,” and it’s such a head swivel to even try to track the happenings, never mind the fact that I, like most people I suspect, am concerned with everyday, survival-based tasks most of the time. Trump is starting his second term with a blitz of “executive orders,” which is no surprise given recent presidents and history, but the thing about all these “bold declarations” is that we often don’t know what the implementation of them will be, at least not until courts start getting their say (and then mid-term elections after that).

Maybe that’s the first thing to say about what I think about the current politics, though it’s not a new principle or insight: I care about the impact of policies more than I care about the political posturing use of public words. When it comes to language especially, “We’re changing X to Y in X manual/policy booklet until they take power next time and switch it back” just isn’t as powerful as (both parties) apparently apparently think it is. Which is, in part, why I think we should stop 1) policing language so much and 2) trying to make “the other side” bend to a set of values they don’t believe in and instead 3) focus on improving the material lives of as many people as possible (poverty alleviation) while 4) coming up with solutions that don’t require values and metaphysical agreement in areas where we don’t and are probably never going to have them. That’s just the world we got dropped into; none of us choose it.

For one moment, let’s use a couple transgender issues as an example. I’ll give you an area where either side is trying to get a bending of the knee rather than the solving of an actual problem. First, bathrooms/locker rooms (and maybe even prisons). So one side wants “access” that aligns with the self-perception that they have about gender. Okay. The other wants protection from the possibility of predators (this might seem extreme, but we already have examples of this fear being being realized in certain contexts and then predictably censored) and perhaps even the privacy of being more comfortable in certain spaces with people who share your sex and/or gender. So the starting point is to see that both concerns are valid, even if you disagree with the extent to which a faction of people emphasize it. The obvious third-way answer here is the allowance of gender-neutral bathrooms. This hurts nobody! If you want to use them, you can. If don’t want to, you don’t have to. Bathrooms for the 97-98ish% are also still an option; they aren’t going anywhere and shouldn’t be.

Okay, pronouns. Now first of all, most people do not have this problem. They identify how they present and are perceived. There’s alignment rather than confusion. Also, most of our use of pronouns verbally is a subconscious act that we don’t think very much about. In writing, obviously we have more time to consider how we say something. But if you are a person who doesn’t fall easily in a traditional category of sex, or if you want to identify differently than you may appear (and are therefore at risk of someone referring to you by a pronoun you don’t want to be referred as), it therefore might be in your interest to introduce your preferred pronoun when you meet someone new or even throw it in your e-mail account or in your X profile. But that shouldn’t ever be a requirement! That’s just propping up a new problem for many people who don’t have a problem in this area. So what if someone deliberately mis-pronouns someone? It’s an interpersonal problem that requires an interpersonal solution. Set a boundary, just like you would if someone was consistently rude or insulting. People should not be getting put in prison or fired for their job (materially improve people’s lives!) for not saying things they don’t want to say. So the conservative gets to move toward on gender neutral bathrooms and the progressive gets to move on pronouns. With the slightest bit of a Libertarian influence only in the sense that, yes, freedom is good, and coercing people’s behavior and speech only creates resentment in the long-term.

The sports question is harder than bathrooms and pronouns, in my opinion, and the result is that both “sides” are pretending in a kind of way. The left pretends that it’s fair when Imane Khelif pummels several women and is rewarded with a gold medal; any girl who has a problem should just shut up about it. The right, on the other hand, pretends that there isn’t a small percentage of human beings who don’t fall cleanly into sex and gender categories that are the same. To get to a solution (again, one that doesn’t try to outlaw a values system, which there are plenty of people trying to do) requires more than on bathrooms or pronouns because it means either leaving some people out (of women’s sports) or a compromise on fairness/safety. So we’re probably in for a long-term conflict there, though I will say that letting people at a certain threshold of testosterones compete on the men’s side isn’t necessarily more, umm, exclusive than cuts on your high school basketball team. I wonder if a solution like the genderless bathroom might be worth exploring in sports (anyone who wants to can play, as long as they’re “good enough,” though that would be a helluva road toward profitability, as even this moment in women’s sports tells us when we look back. I use these examples, by the way, because some of what Trump has been trying (again, courts and future elections and activism in the short term will have their say) to decree has to do with these issues. And he’s doing that because most of the polling data is on his side in the matter.

But that’s not the only thing the new administration has been trying to throw its weight around about. Quite frankly, the most interesting thing to me that’s happened in weeks since Trump was sworn in has been this conflict between “special government employee” Elon Musk’s Department on Government Efficiency (DOGE) and a liberal sacred cow, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). I mostly think it’s good that the spotlight has shined on USAID for a moment, and they’re becoming a kind of symbol, a representation, for a larger thing, which is at the core of what populist types have been pissed about not just in the United States but in other places around the world as well. This notion that we will have huge intuitions that throw money around lavishly to make us look good and nice abroad while implicitly continuing to sacrifice huge portions of a citizenry who spend their lives working for meager wages in monotonous jobs while barely being able to buy a home, many folks spending their whole lives in debt, and oh, by the way, also get to foot the bill for things like USAID.

In this respect, following DOGE on X has been a little delicious for me, even though as a whole I find Musk to be kind of annoying (as both his genius and his diagnosis should have us expecting). I literally mute his personal page on X. I tried to read the Walter Isaacson biography of him because I do think he’s important, but I didn’t last very far because Isaacson does this very annoying thing that too many biographers do whereby he tries to cram every piece of information he ever learned about his subject into the book rather than just, you know, telling a good story, which requires the kind of strategic selection that any good storyteller is ever doing.

I don’t have any doubt that Musk (like Trump, to a differing degree) kind of likes being a troll and that the more power he is given the more he will see what he can get away with, the more he will abuse the power, misstep. Again, thank goodness for checks against such power. Including the president, by the way, who, when all the executive ordering is said and done, will—like all his recent predecessors—actually have to do the difficult work of leveraging his influence to get Congress to legislate in ways that have consequence for, you guessed it, the actual, material lives of the people who voted for him (and hopefully the ones who didn’t, too). Trump enters office this time with partisan advantages in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, so if this all blows up spectacularly, well, then they’ll probably get what they deserve for it.

And now seems like a good time to harken back to one of my initial points, which is that impact matters more than optics, and it almost certainly also matters more than “intent.” It matters more than who you’re trying to piss off. I suppose another assumption of mine would be: if we are paying for things, those things ought to returns to us in the quality of our lives. And if they aren’t, whatever the program is probably ought to be questioned. So rather than react to everything the man who easily won the 2024 presidential election does in his first month or so in office, there are certain things that I’m just in wait and see mode.

Tariffs, or the threat of them? I honestly don’t know that they’re good. But if they’re so bad, why do some countries use them? Is it bad for us but good for them? Really? Is it possible that Trump is, in part, using the threat of tariffs as a bargaining tool? With all of this—USAID sparring, any tariffs that get implemented—I suspect the better measure of these policies than “that’s mean!” will be (!!) the material impact on the American people. Maybe the price of eggs and housing and higher education and cars will just keep climbing at home. Or maybe not, but let’s know before we decide. And yes, people in other places matter, too, but in terms of the responsibility our government has, I’m okay with a morality that privileges Americans. Assuming we’re talking about economics, i.e. production and trade, not pointless wars. So if we send soldiers or a bomb into another place and kill a child, obviously we’re morally responsible for that act. If we stop trading with someone, much less so. Because we weren’t obligated to the trade (or aid) in the first place (anymore than they are with us).

So I think it’s a good idea to have something like DOGE in place. What about the Government Accountability Office (GAO)? Well, let’s start with: do they seem to be communicating directly with the American people? And I suspect the answer there is no. Maybe they try, but part of the problem is that they’re a little too…government-y? Too bureaucratic. Which seems to be part of what Musk is aiming his critique and program against. And while some bureaucracy is necessary for putting on any operation, as one who has worked a good bit in education, government, and the non-profit world, we could definitely do with way less of it than we currently have (and always seem to be adding to).

The corporate world obviously isn’t exempt from this problem. I switched phone companies during the height of the Covid pandemic because my customer experiences with my former company were so bad that they made my newer company seem super competent. Just because I could show up to a store and get my problem solved. But last week, I dropped my phone and broke it. I had to go to four stores (!) to just replace the phone. Some places didn’t have the one I wanted, others had it but said they couldn’t sell it to me and set it up because mine was a pre-paid plan. Finally, I switched to a post-paid plan and a place sold me a phone that all of the stores had displayed. Than the poor worker souls in front of me worked together (there were at least 3 weighing in and swapping devices at various points) to press lots of buttons and input all kinds of information which has become our techno-hell lives before finally getting me out of there in what took more than an hour for me to pay them money to (in terms of impact) wipe my old text messages. When I finally had my new phone, every time I added a new app (which I had on my old phone) there were multiple screens that I had to click through to actually get to the service I wanted. This is not living. It is dying a very slow death.

Now some people have pointed out, and they’re correct, that the D.C. bureaucracy—problem or not—is a very minor part of the U.S. budget deficit and ultimately national debt. If that critique is coming from the left, they aim almost invariably at the military as what should really get scrutinized. And I agree, actually: while I don’t want to be naive, and while I think the U.S. needs to have tools to fend off potential foreign actors who don’t want the best for our country, I have no doubt that our very-expensive military operations are full of inefficiencies. Which ought to be evaluated on a somewhat regular basis. Some of my friends with military experience would be the first to admit this!

On the other hand, if the critique of the smallness of USAID and the like is coming from someone who isn’t primarily on the left, they might point out, also correctly, that our entitlement programs are actually a bigger expense than our military. And I don’t doubt that their inspection ought to be part of a DOGE-like operation, too! In this respect, I actually liked some of the way Andrew Yang got the Universal Basic Income (UBI) conversation going. Someone economically smarter than me would have to be involved, but I wonder sometimes if you couldn’t use UBI to reform the inefficiencies of our entitlement programs. Not all of which are bad, by any means. But if you had different levels—employed or unemployed, able-bodied or disabled, young or retired, family or single—and then your various categories corresponded with a monthly amount of money that at the very least would get your rent/mortgage paid for plus groceries if you were without an income for a month, wouldn’t we also be freer to make employment decisions that lined up more closely with our desires and therefore were less inclined to be connected to people’s desperation? Wouldn’t this be better for all of us? Yes, the businesses that most rely on making people miserable would have to die or reform. And we’d be better for it. If we really wanted to go crazy with it, we could even create systems whereby people could gift their monthly amounts—until further notice!—to other people or even government programs like, say, the military or roads or right back into the UBI system.

Okay, but isn’t keeping government accountable the media’s job? I think so, though I kind of like that DOGE not only has the ability to make transparent what certain bureaucrats would love to be mostly hidden from the American people but that they also have a sword in the fight. It’s almost certainly not going to be able to accomplish everything Musk promises, but I have no doubt that they will free up some money that was not being spent well, and this will be an improvement. The other problem with traditional media is they unfortunately are a very segregated lot. As in, most of them are Democrats, so they’re not very good at keeping Democrats accountable. Because most of them are Democrats, the Republicans have in turn created their own media structures, which are usually just as hack-ish. It’s almost like it would be purposeful to fill certain media companies with both Democrats and Republicans who would have to contend with smart colleagues who disagreed with them on a regular basis so that they weren’t just “on the same team” (or only against) whomever was in power.

And what about DEI? I still think the ultimate fate of DEI lies within the people who are most passionate about DEI. What is the program, exactly? Is it just the compliance work of a human relations department? In which case, no wonder it’s not very popular. Or is it basically just a coded, at-work expression of the goals of most progressive Democrats? If yes, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when people not in that camp say “no.” Is it just an attempt to invert a power structure, one big struggle for control? If yes, don’t be surprised when there’s a counter-reaction.

But if DEI is aiming at something better and more interesting than these things, like a real wrestling with identity that could lead to our improved seeing of each other (even when among people who have different life experiences and ideologies and goals) and engaging our conflicts through the inevitable messes of relationship, well then that would probably not be something that’s as threatened by the cutting of a few budget line items precisely because it’s so needed from a much broader coalition.