Commentary: Musk's efficiency department is highly inefficient

After spending $118 million of his personal wealth on the campaign to reelect Donald Trump as president, billionaire Elon Musk has been tapped to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency in the new administration with Vivek Ramaswamy, the chief executive officer of a pharmaceutical company and (very) brief Republican presidential candidate. It’s no coincidence that the acronym for this new department is DOGE, which happens to be the name of a cryptocurrency hawked by Musk.

Musk might find this amusing, but for the rest of us it can be downright Orwellian, the notion that the path to efficiency is through additional administrative bureaucracy, especially when that bureaucracy that will have tenuous, if any, authority. You see, Congress controls spending, not an executive agency, and actions it tries to implement will likely be met with significant legal challenges. If anything, DOGE shows how blustering campaign promises are built on fiction, reflecting a lack of knowledge of how government works. (Spoiler alert: It’s not a company.)

Let’s start from scratch. Say you are concerned the federal government is prone to waste, fraud and abuse and needs to be kept under close watch. You assume that because it’s the government and not a private company with a profit motive there’s less efficiency. What do you do? Your primary constraint, the one that supersedes all others with no exceptions, is the U.S. Constitution, which gives the power of the purse to Congress. Congress creates every federal agency, mandates their tasks and approves their funding. If you want efficiency, it must start with Congress.

And a president can’t decide on a whim not to spend money Congress has allocated. We’ve been here before. After Richard Nixon withheld funds allocated by lawmakers, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 enshrining the legal authority of Congress, not the president, to allocate spending. As president, Trump was found to be in violation of the Act when he withheld aid to Ukraine, a move that led to the first of his two impeachments.

Although keeping a careful eye on spending is the purview of Congress, it’s a lot to put on members or its committees, as both are constantly churning through elections and majority status. Better to create a congressional agency instead. Unlike executive agencies, which report to the president, these agencies report to Congress, just like the Congressional Budget Office. This new agency would have the power to audit every other government agency and its recommendations would ideally have the power of Congress, unlike the flimsiness of DOGE, which has no legal authority (even to exist, since it’s not being created by Congress!).

What’s stopping Trump from asking for Congress to create this efficiency agency? For one, it (largely) already exists, having just celebrated its 100th birthday. Say hello – again – to the Government Accountability Office, the hawkish auditor of the federal government that clawed back $70 billion from agencies in fiscal 2023 as part of hundreds of actions to properly steward federal funds. The GAO staff is comprised of experts in the areas they oversee, and these quiet technocrats punch well above their weight. The agency calculates that it gives back $133 to the government for every $1 it spends.

The returns could be much higher because the GAO points out that the biggest problems it finds are often left unaddressed by Congress. The agency curates a “high risk list,” or areas where the potential for waste, fraud and abuse is high and requires changes in law to fix. Some items have been on the list since the early 1990s.

What the federal government needs to combat wasteful spending is effective leadership, not cowboy CEOs with no sense of how the government works leading a make-believe agency with no power. Americans deserve better.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant.