When Elon Musk brandished a chainsaw on television, promising to slash government spending, many Americans cheered. Others panicked. Neither side addressed the real problem with government inefficiency — or its solution.
Musk’s recent shift in tone — acknowledging the need for caution, to measure twice and cut once — suggests the Department of Government Efficiency is learning this lesson, too.
DOGE fired probationary employees without understanding their roles and inadvertently gave Americans a crash course in what government actually does. Nuclear power plant operations were nearly compromised, Meals on Wheels deliveries were threatened and the U.S. egg supply was nearly jeopardized when swine flu containment teams received walking papers.
As a 20-year federal employee, I witnessed government's remarkable achievements and its maddening inefficiencies. I saw National Institutes of Health lead efforts to successfully map the human genome and achieve a sickle cell anemia cure in a patient, and I saw the FAA lead the world’s global airspace.
I also saw enormous waste, but it wasn’t lazy workers or fraud that caused it. The waste was the result of well-intentioned systems and requirements that have accumulated over the years, like sedimentary rock, layer upon layer, never to be removed.
Or, in other words, it’s the red tape, stupid.
Let me illustrate with an example so absurd you might think I'm making it up. Imagine a family with 12 children. The parents require each child to bill their siblings whenever they help each other. Tying shoes? That's $2.50. Homework help? $5.75 per session. When billing becomes complicated, the family hires an accountant, an auditor and a collections analyst. In the end, the children spend more time creating invoices than helping each other.
The government operates exactly like this with reimbursable agreements. Even though the government owns office space, for example, the General Services Administration charges "rent" to agencies. When agencies share equipment or staff, they create complex reimbursable billing agreements, shuffling money through a messy paper trail.
The idea behind this puzzling money-shuffle is full cost reporting. Congress wanted to know the full cost of a service an agency provides, including the cost of the space the agency occupies and the “help” it gets from sibling agencies. But the result is nearly meaningless (what happened with all those reports with “full costs?”), and it created red tape that spiraled out of control.
The solution: Eliminate GSA entirely and issue an executive order requiring all federal agencies to share resources without charging each other. This would create a bit of reshuffling chaos in the near term, but would save big money. It would eliminate $24 billion in administrative costs tracking transfers right off the bat. On top of that, it would get rid of $45 billion in premiums that agencies charge each other for services and free up $20 billion in projects delayed due to interagency ...
