By Paulius @Adobe Stock
Challenging a Systemic Government Problem
As reported yesterday by James Freeman in the WSJ, Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne continue weighing in on Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
President-elect Trump said that DOGE, headed by entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, “will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” but that understates the magnitude of the challenge.
If reforming the federal government and reducing its burden on Americans were as simple as turning the theoretical insights of nuclear physics into a functional atomic bomb, it would have been done already.
DOGE faces an even higher hurdle—the government itself. The government is a blunt instrument that tries to fix complex problems. By its very nature, it creates incentives for policymakers, public servants, and their cronies that all conspire against the allocation of scarce taxpayer resources to the production of the most highly valued public goods and, instead, channels them toward politically favored projects that shouldn’t be contemplated in the first place.
Just Do Less
This problem is systemic and inherent to the government. Even the Government Accountability Office acknowledges that. It regularly documents extensive waste, fraud, and corruption across government programs and their poor results, even when they are relatively well implemented… real government efficiencies will only emerge from taxing less, regulating less, and doing less with an emphasis on supplying essential public goods at a low cost.
Large parts of the government cannot be reformed, the Cato authors advise.
They must be eliminated.
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