Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne

The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with identifying reductions in federal bureaucracy and wasteful government spending in coordination with the president and the Office of Management and Budget, comes at a time when the federal government and all Americans must confront three uncomfortable truths:

  1. The federal government often fails to deliver on its objectives, even those few constitutionally enumerated legitimate functions, while weighing down the economy with regulations that prevent market and nongovernmental actors from addressing major social and economic problems.
  2. US economic growth, while stronger than much of the rest of the developed world, has been significantly lower in the past 25 years than the quarter-century beforehand, reducing American living standards below what they could have been.
  3. Government debt, already historically high, is set to explode to unprecedented levels on policy autopilot over the next three decades, risking some combination of high inflation, slower growth, and federal default.

These three challenges were either worsened or created by the growth and metastasis of an unwieldy federal government and its associated administrative state. The government tries to do too much, so it overspends and overregulates the private sector. The federal government tries to be all things to all Americans—regulator, taxman, protector of individual rights, and Santa Claus—and ends up fulfilling very few of its roles, at a catastrophic cost to the life, liberty, private property, and prosperity of Americans.

DOGE’s focus on reversing a decades-long power grab by regulatory agencies that has strangled American businesses, shackled consumers, raised the costs of innovation, and imposed an intolerable bureaucratic burden on all Americans is welcome.