Though controversial to put it mildly, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its chainsaw-like efforts to eliminate agencies, cut the federal workforce and root out waste, fraud, and abuse have become so attractive in some quarters that state-level DOGEs are being considered. But if we look closer, we may find that taking such action is cyclical.
There was the 1941 Truman Committee, the Reagan administration’s 1981 Grace Commission and Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Each sought something important: to cut costs and make government more efficient and effective. But why must they — most of all DOGE — be quite so brutal?
Is it occasional public frustration, like that of the gardener who, exhausted by the tedium of pruning shears, knows that the chainsaw’s work will last longer? Or is it a more necessary response to something fundamental about the governing process?
The problem centers first on a tragedy of the commons that’s known, but not always defined as such. Elected officials keep their jobs by never cutting anything and always spending more each year to make their constituents happy. Meanwhile, debt accumulates.
Philosopher Garrett Hardin’s original description of the tragedy of the commons was couched in terms of a shepherd bringing one more sheep to graze on an unowned pasture. The shepherd does not reckon much with the cost imposed on other shepherds, nor with the damage to the overused pasture. Where there are no property rights, each shepherd knows that if he cuts back, another shepherd will expand. Grass diminishes and all are left worse off.