It’s an abiding promise of newly elected American presidents: The executive branch henceforth will be liberated from the perils of waste, fraud and abuse.
President-elect Donald Trump, in his contribution to the canon, has announced he’ll create the Department of Government Efficiency, led by tech impresarios Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The aim, Trump says, is to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
There’s reason to be skeptical about Trump’s ambitions for this body. And many previous efforts along these lines — from the Truman Committee to Al Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative — have failed to tame the federal leviathan. But the goal of getting taxpayers better value for their money remains eminently desirable.
As a start, any effort of this kind requires setting achievable goals — and Musk and Ramaswamy have already emphasized a good one. They want to get federal workers back to the office. Long after the pandemic, government buildings are still conspicuously underpopulated. In his 2022 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden called on federal workers to return to their offices, and his administration has periodically urged people back to their desks, but with little apparent effect.
A recent report on telework arrangements at four agencies found that one (the Veterans Benefits Administration) has failed to collect the data it needs to manage the system effectively, and that the other three (the Farm Service Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) haven’t evaluated telework’s effects on performance. There’s little here to allay taxpayers’ suspicions that absence from the office means less work being done.