The Mass Deportation of Bureaucrats

When you go to a concert, there is usually a warm-up act (or two) before the A-lister takes the stage. Circuses follow a similar pattern, saving the “center ring” for the main attraction.

Well, my friends, of all President Trump’s cabinet picks and other appointments, I have a feeling that two of the top performers are going to be Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who were named to oversee the proposed Department of Government Efficiency.

Do you remember when Nancy Pelosi said a few years ago that the federal government’s budget had been “trimmed to the bone” and there was no more fat? Well, Elon and Vivek have three words for the woman who was named by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) as the “Porker of the Month” on more than one occasion: “Hold our beers!”

At a recent gala at Mar-a-Lago hosted by the America First Policy Institute, Ramaswamy thanked President Trump "for making sure that Elon Musk and I are in a position to start the mass deportations of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bureaucracy."

"And I don't know if you've got to know Elon yet, but he doesn't bring a chisel, he brings a chainsaw, and we're going to be taking it to that bureaucracy," Ramaswamy added. "It's going to be a lot of fun."

For his part, Musk is on record as saying that he hopes to reduce the federal budget by $2 trillion per year. "There are so many [agencies] that people have never heard of, and that have overlapping areas of responsibilities," the richest man in the world said last month. “Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency will fix that”, he added during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania.

Considering that the entire federal government operates on a $6.7 trillion annual budget – about 1/3 of which is earmarked for mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) – Musk’s goal is being called unrealistic by his critics. However, Musk has never been one to listen to his naysayers and the success of his Space X program demonstrates that he isn’t afraid to shoot high… and shooting high means reducing the number of federal agencies from 400 to 99.

Some economists are tepidly supportive of Musk’s efforts, such as Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who managed the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review, an effort to cut government spending in the 1990s. "Frankly, it does need to be done again, so every few decades you really need to look at everything," she said. However, Kamarck remained skeptical about Musk and Ramaswamy’s chances for success.

Clinton’s NPR was able to eliminate 300,000 federal jobs, part of the reason why the budget was balanced late in his second term (some of the other reasons were a Republican congress led by Newt Gingrich, higher corporate and individual tax rates for high income wage earners, increased revenues due to the tech boom, and defense savings known as the “peace dividend” following the collapse of the Soviet Union).

That proves it can be done. It also wasn’t the first time that a president was intent on reducing federal spending and the size of government.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan created the Grace Commission, led by wealthy businessman J. Peter Grace, the CEO of W. R. Grace & Company, a chemicals company. About 150 business leaders volunteered to serve on the commission, which ultimately recommended 2,500 reforms, according to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Although most of them weren’t implemented due to a noncompliant congress, the recommendations formed a blueprint for those reformers that followed… like Gingrich, Musk, and Ramaswamy.

Skeptics claim that DODE isn’t yet an actual government department and that all spending bills must originate in Congress, specifically in the House of Representatives. Both points are valid, but also smokescreens being used by critics (mostly Washington insiders and career bureaucrats trying to defend their turf as well as their lucrative pensions).

After all, wouldn’t an outside-the-government agency tasked with eliminating waste and inefficiency have a better vantage point from 30,000 feet above the Washington swamp? And although the Constitution clearly states that Congress alone has the authority to appropriate money, nowhere does it say that all the allocated money has to be spent.

With the United States more than $36 trillion in debt and our annual interest payments surpassing the entire defense budget, it is time for Ramaswamy to wield an axe and Musk his chainsaw. As they say, drastic times call for drastic measures… such as Vivek’s proposal to shut down the Education Department, the FBI, and the IRS while reducing the federal workforce by 75%.

Kamarck still thinks it can’t be done because, according to her, "Every single thing in the federal government is big and complicated, and there are layers and layers of complexity." Doesn’t she see that “big”, “complicated”, and “layers and layers” is the problem?

She also lost me when she added that “Al Gore (yes, that Al Gore, the discredited climate alarmist) and I relied on hundreds of experienced civil servants to tell us how this worked.”

C’mon Elaine, everyone knows that Al Gore is the poster child for an oversized and intrusive government bureaucracy… and asking civil servants to admit that they are overpaid leeches is like assigning a fox to protect the henhouse. It just ain’t gonna happen!

I always found it ludicrous that whenever a congressional impasse leads to a government shutdown, they send all “unessential workers” home… only to recall them from their furloughs/vacations with backpay. If they really are unessential, why not send them packing permanently?

Better to follow the words of Thomas Jefferson when he said, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

In other words, it’s time to clean house… and Elon and Vivek are just the guys to do it.