Government efficiency goals are great — but not at the expense of the American people

Donald Trump will not be the first elected leader who wants to fix inefficiencies and waste in government. But will he do it to benefit the American people or the authors of Project 2025? The two motives would produce vastly different outcomes.

Waste and inefficiency are present in any large organization, and the U.S. government is one of the biggest. Its 2024 budget was $6.75 trillion; it spends over $760 billion annually on goods and services, making it the world's largest single consumer.

Other national leaders have attempted to ferret out waste. In 1975, Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) introduced his monthly Golden Fleece Award to highlight questionable government spending. He found enough boondoggles to issue the “award” 168 times.

Proxmire panned the National Science Foundation for spending $84,000 to study love; the Justice Department for spending $27,000 to study why prisoners want to get out of jail; the Postal Service for spending $3.4 million to urge people to write more letters; the Federal Aviation Administration for spending nearly $58,000 to study the measurements of 432 airline flight attendants; and the National Science Foundation for determining whether sunfish get more aggressive after drinking tequila or gin.

In 1984, President Regan created the Grace Commission, a cost-cutting initiative that involved more than 2,000 corporate CEOs, management consultants and leaders from diverse sectors. They produced 2,478 recommendations; Reagan adopted many and saved more than $100 billion.

Now comes Trump. He’s asked the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to hunt for savings. However, their priorities are likely to be different from those of the bottom 90 percent of Americans, including the blue-collar workers and degreeless people who voted for Trump.

Trump has appointed one of Project 2025’s authors to direct the Office of Management and Budget — a signal that the controversial hyper-conservative blueprint will significantly influence his priorities. So will Trump’s own biases, with potentially devastating effect. For instance, a Lancet commission concluded in February 2021 that 40 percent of the Americans who died from COVID-19 had done so because Trump dismissed the advice of health experts.

Trump also has little interest in clean energy technologies and climate change, even though the reality of global warming — and the considerable benefits of fighting it — are indisputable. He has said he wants to roll back the clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. But the Treasury Department estimates the IRA would generate $137 billion in climate benefits for America over the next six years, help the U.S. avoid $2.5 trillion in damages, and save nearly $50 billion in healthcare costs, lost workdays and hospital admissions related to air pollution in 2030 alone.

Trump's transition team wants to kill the federal tax incentive for electric vehicles. But new research shows the "ambitious electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet, complemented by a substantial implementation of renewable electricity generation" could yield health benefits totaling as much as $188 billion by 2050.

Without the IRA, America's climate-altering emissions would be 4 billion tons higher in 2030 than under President Biden's policies. The pollution would negate all the carbon savings from clean energy technologies deployed worldwide over the last five years. Low-income and disadvantaged communities would lose the investments and jobs the IRA earmarks for them.

In addition, Trump's low regard for science could put the U.S. further behind China in the science race, especially in STEM fields. The Association of American Universities reports that, as a share of the national GDP, science investments by the NSF, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology are lower than they have been at any time since 1997.

If Trump were really interested in government efficiency, he would not fire the inspectors general established by law to identify and prevent waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies. The 74 inspectors general serve as independent, nonpartisan "central actors on government oversight." But Trump is not fond of watchdogs. As the pandemic raged in 2020, he fired the inspectors general in five Cabinet departments. Democrats accused him of removing them because they might find fault with his actions.

Project 2025 calls for eliminating or emasculating the Departments of Homeland Security, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many Americans may not know or appreciate what these agencies do, but they would once they're gone.

What should be on the chopping block? Oil subsidies come to mind, along with other taxpayer subsidies that benefit special interests and the rich more than the American people.

Excessive spending on the military-industrial complex comes to mind, too. The Nation reported last year that the Pentagon’s budget consumes more than half of federal discretionary spending “leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains.” The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that the average taxpayer is charged nearly $1,100 annually to support weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education, $43 for the CDC and $6 for renewable energy. It’s time to beat some swords into plowshares for America’s hollowed-out middle class.

Greater government efficiency is a worthwhile goal. However, we should watch whether Trump’s real motive is to reshape the government to reflect his badly misinformed opinions and Project 2025, whose vision of America is quite different from that of the Founders.

William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.

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