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I actually love the principle of it! Take a competent man, maybe CEO of a successful startup, make him the CEO of the government, and have him improve it. The FDR analogy is apt. It should work.
But that requires the attribute 'competent'. Elon should be competent. And yet. I see a lot of evidence that DOGE is swinging wildly, not thinking through the consequences of their actions or how they connect to their long-term goals. The executive orders really have been poorly worded, many appear to have been hastily drafted and made with ChatGPT (even cremieux agrees with that). These were not designed to be good test cases to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on impoundment. Judges don't like seeing chaos and poorly written, immediately retracted orders in a case about extending executive power. For a smaller-scale but illustrative example, cancelling Bloomberg terminals and politico pro because people posted about it on twitter was absurd. Those things are incredibly useful, and Elon is capable of knowing that.
And, as a political strategy, it's just as questionable. You can't cut the federal budget 20% by cutting DEI contracts, you'd need to cut special ed programs, student aid, social security, medicare, the military, etc. Other than the military, all those things are good! (edit: this was ambiguous - I meant cutting all of those things, other than the military, would be good). But it's going to be incredibly difficult to cut those without Congress, that's even farther out there than cutting USAID. And Trump isn't really doing anything to appeal to the swing votes in the narrow Senate or House majorities. So we're going to get small cuts, unless something else unexpected happens. And any plausible funding bill seems likely to cut taxes much more than DOGE's savings will be. The deficit keeps increasing. Voters won't notice DOGE's savings in the noise. So all you get, in terms of building political power, are the headlines about how DOGE CUTS $100M CONTRACT FOR VENEZUELAN TRANSGENDER HOMELESS SHELTER. it's good to cut that, but nobody's going to remember it four years from now during the next election.
What I'd want to see from DOGE are things like - streamline the TSA. Build a hundred nuclear reactors on federal land. Prosecute a lot more PPP fraud. Radically restructure the NIH to fund science better. This is building! I don't expect anything like that though. (That'd take more than a few months, and Elon said he'd only focus on DOGE for a few months).
It has been tried. The thing that got us the Impoundment Control Act was Nixon impounding!
And even ignoring that, given all the above, how new is this really? This administration wouldn't be the first one to try and trim government waste.
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