Donald Trump isn’t the first president to target government spending and inefficiency. Some 30 years ago, Bill Clinton announced that he was taking a “historic step in reforming the federal government” to make it “both less expensive and more efficient.”
Clinton put Vice President Al Gore in charge of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. It was tasked with streamlining processes and cutting red tape, as Newsweek reported. The initiative delivered four consecutive budget surpluses — the last time there was a balanced federal budget.
President Clinton took a victory lap in his 1996 State of the Union address: “We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.”
That last line is positively quaint.
“(The Clinton administration) did what the Musk folks have said they’re going to do,” said Morley Winograd, Clinton’s REGO director during his second term. “Which is auditing the way each agency functions and looking for ways to make it more efficient and effective so that it would, in the words of the task force, ‘work better and cost less.'”