Clifford Winston

The economics profession should reflect on the fact that DOGE is proceeding without the input of economists because economists have downplayed the persistence and extent of government policy failures. Minimizing governmental shortcomings weakens the profession’s policymaking relevance. The legal profession should reflect on the fact that lawyers lack the requisite economic training to grasp the potentially adverse implications and social desirability of DOGE policies and actions that lawyers are facilitating and defending.

The economics and legal professions should cross-fertilize their intellectual strengths to enable future economists to formulate actionable policies and to inform future government lawyers about the implications of representing policymakers who may seek to adopt harmful policies. Cross-fertilization should begin in graduate economics and law school programs. New courses in economic policy analysis and practice for economists and lawyers interested in helping their professions contribute more effectively to the nation’s economic policies can help address the problems posed by DOGE.

I have defined a government failure as a public policy that “significantly wastes resources.” Government failure is the leading cause of resource misallocation in the United States because it encompasses the vast array of economic policy interventions that adversely affect the economy. Evidence abounds that federal government regulatory and spending policy failures result in hundreds of billions of dollars of persistent inefficiencies. When economists recommend efficient government policy reforms to correct government failures, they are effectively hoping for the best and have little justification for their recommendations because they are ignoring the extent and persistence of policymakers’ failures to adopt efficient policies. Importantly, economists are unable to revise their recommendations to take these persistent government failures into account because they do not have causal evidence that explains why policymakers institute inefficient policies and do not reform them.