When is DOGE Going to Focus on Reducing Bureaucracy Rather Than Increasing It?

Government efficiency . . . reducing bureaucracy . . . eliminating barriers to innovation (such as permits that take forever and require 10,000 pages of documentation):

All great ideas!

Indeed, I've written many pieces about how to reduce bureaucracy in one area (science funding).

The problem with DOGE is that they are barrelling headlong in the exact opposite direction:

• Increasing bureaucracy,

• Reducing efficiency, and

• Putting more roadblocks in the way of good government and innovation

What has been the focus of DOGE so far? Reducing waste, fraud, and abuse. A good idea in theory, but reducing waste, fraud and abuse will inevitably lead to MORE bureaucracy and inefficiency.

To spell out the argument, consider a few scandals that were alleged by DOGE just this week:

• Government offices and agencies spent millions for Politico as well as "tens of millions" for the New York Times.

• Someone spent "$20 million on an Iraq Sesame Street show."

• The NSF funded a study on the effect of putting a shrimp on a treadmill.

• USAID "spent your tax dollars to fund celebrity trips to Ukraine"

As somewhat of a side note, all of those stories were highly misleading at best:

• Many Republicans, including the current White House, have been paying for Politico Pro because it is a useful service that tracks what innumerable agencies are up to (and there is no internal government equivalent).

• No one spent "tens of millions" for the New York Times -- that claim was utterly false, and was based on a search that found grants to anyone in "New York," including New York University and Columbia.

• "Sesame Street in Iraq" sounds a bit silly at first, but there is a very

  plausible argument that promoting an educational program viewed by many millions of Middle Eastern children could help lessen tension and anti-American hostility over time. Could be wrong, but it makes at least as much sense as the US government funding Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood for US kids for several decades.

• The "shrimp on a treadmill" story is old news from around 2011, and was

  debunked long ago--barely any public money was spent, and it was for an arguably good purpose (figuring out how water conditions affect shrimp health, which can help increase shrimp production by farmers).

• The video about celebrity trips to Ukraine was a complete fabrication.

To be sure, there have been many other allegations of useless spending. Some of them, mirabile dictu, might even turn out to be true.

However, there are still two enormous problems:

First, if you actually want to address waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, there is already an entire agency (the Government Accountability Office or GAO) that is full of earnest, non-partisan experts who have spent years identifying hundreds of billions in fraud and an additional $236 billion in "improper payments." GAO has even published a dozen reports in the past few years with over 40 recommendations for how agencies can reduce fraud and waste (and most of the recommendations have not been implemented!).

Start there! I mean, it is anything but efficient for a team with zero experience in government to recreate all of this from scratch. DOGE should start with the unimplemented GAO recommendations while trying to build up the subject-matter knowledge to do anything more than scrape databases without knowing what they're looking at.

Second, and more importantly, one of the biggest drivers of bureaucracy and inefficiency is none other than the desire to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

We've seen this happen over and over in government. Someone makes a fuss because $1 million or even $1 billion got misspent. True or not, everyone else gets busy coming up with new processes to make sure every i is dotted and every t crossed before anyone spends money in that way again.

Maybe USAID did spend $47,000 on a transgender opera in South America (although even that is questionable). But do you actually want every federal agency and program to add so much paperwork and approval processes that out of a $7 trillion total budget, no one can possibly find $47,000 to complain about? Good luck—and meanwhile prepare for a level of bureaucracy and inefficiency that has never been seen.

The optimal level of fraud, waste, and abuse is not zero. Trying to drive it to zero through ill-informed social media campaigns will just paralyze government.

Actual efficiency means figuring out how to get great results with a minimum of effort/time (which requires that agencies have at least some slack to make quick decisions that aren't going to be mocked on social media).

What we're seeing DOGE do instead is push government towards mediocre results delivered with tons of effort and time (i.e., to make sure that not even a tiny fraction gets spent on something that could be later deemed frivolous by social media grifters).

Time to rethink what DOGE is actually about: Is the goal to reduce bureaucracy and inefficiency, or to drive out every last penny of supposedly wasteful spending?

You can't do both.