Inefficient and reckless: Why DOGE could be so dangerous

For conservatives, “inefficiency” is something of an all-purpose invective against government, often used to justify aggressive efforts to cut back programs that benefit millions of Americans. So it is no surprise that one of Donald Trump’s first major actions as president-elect was to announce the formation of a Department of Government Efficiency or "DOGE," with billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at its helm.

Trump touted this initiative as paving the way to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” But it has already drawn widespread criticism. It faces legal barriers, raises serious concerns about corruption and — because it is adding another layer of bureaucracy — could itself be considered an example of government inefficiency.

Even if we bracket such criticisms, however, that still wouldn’t address the most alarming aspects of this initiative.

For one, government reorganization efforts like this are not only really hard, but almost always ill-conceived. Similar streamlining schemes have been attempted in recent decades by people with far more talent and expertise than dilettantes like Musk and Ramaswamy. In light of the complexity involved, it is easy to see why even these produced little of lasting value.

The underlying premise of this operation — that current administrative structures create inefficiencies due to an unnecessary multiplicity of agencies whose responsibilities overlap and are uncoordinated — is also flawed. Efficient administration, though important, is not the only characteristic of good government. In fact, whether a regulation is effective at promoting the public interest is at least as important. Drastically cutting an agency’s budget in the name of efficiency may cripple its ability to promote a robust competitive market or public and environmental health — costs to society that often vastly outweigh any budget savings.

What’s more, the most efficient government program will often be one that makes policymakers unaccountable to the American people. Such conflicts require policymakers to consider the tradeoffs involved when the pursuit of efficient governance structures risks sacrificing effectiveness or accountability.

The effort also disregards the fact that federal authority to address social problems is often desirable and necessary, and that federal efforts to handle these matters are more efficient than devolving them to the states. The choice between centralized or decentralized authority requires careful consideration of trade-offs between efficiency, effectiveness and accountability.

Decentralized authority, with the states largely in control, has the capacity to spur experimentation and diverse approaches, and it can enhance accountability by placing authority in the hands of state and local government officials. But centralization can promote efficiency by taking advantage of economies of scale, and it can create effective and equitable governance mechanisms by ensuring all jurisdictions adhere to uniform, minimum standards. Even if states play an important administrative role, it may be advantageous to preserve federal authority to exercise some functions, such as information gathering, to prevent 50 different standards for products or manage interstate problems.

While overlapping agency authority may appear “inefficient,” this design is often necessary for effective and accountable governance. It can ensure regulatory effectiveness by allowing one agency to address a problem that another has failed to address. Overlap can also help avert “regulatory capture,” which occurs when an agency ceases to fulfill its mission due to excessive influence by the industry it is charged with supervising. Overlap can also promote accountability because each agency can serve as a watchdog over the other. These redundancy benefits are especially valuable for avoiding national security, environmental or market disasters.

Similarly, coordination between regulators may be a desirable way to avoid conflict and promote harmonization. Coordination can increase both efficiency and effectiveness by pooling the resources and expertise of multiple institutions. It can also avoid efforts by one institution to free ride on the efforts of another by clearly allocating responsibilities to each.

This is not to say that efforts at rooting out government inefficiency can’t be valuable, provided they are carried out objectively and grounded in evidence. For example, as we learned in the aftermath of the Iraq War, coordination among multiple agencies is not always desirable. There, excessive coordination among intelligence agencies stifled creativity or led to groupthink, resulting in the mistaken conclusion that Iraq contained weapons of mass destruction.

But the idea that slashing federal agencies is a magic bullet for achieving good governance is as wrong-headed as it is simplistic. It ignores the existence of multiple and often competing governance values, how promoting more effective and accountable governance is at least as important, and the context-specific nature of accommodating those values.

In willfully ignoring these important lessons, the new DOGE represents a reckless and misguided attempt at blunderbuss reform that is likely to produce lasting damage to our governing institutions and to public health, our economy and the environment.

Alejandro E. Camacho is the Chancellor's Professor of Law at University of California, Irvine. Robert L. Glicksman is the J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the George Washington University Law School. James Goodwin is policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform.

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