Though controversial to put it mildly, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its chainsaw-like efforts to eliminate agencies, cut the federal workforce and root out waste, fraud, and abuse have become so attractive in some quarters that state-level DOGEs are being considered in Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. But if we look closer, we may find that taking such action is cyclical.

Long before DOGE, there was the 1941 Truman Committee, the Reagan administration’s 1981 Grace Commission and Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Each sought something important: to cut costs and make government more efficient and effective. But why must they — most of all DOGE, which has begun dividing even Trump loyalists who support its overarching goal — be quite so brutal?

Is it occasional public frustration, like that of the gardener who, exhausted by the tedium of pruning shears, knows that the chainsaw’s work will last longer? Or is it a more necessary response to something fundamental about the governing process?

The problem centers first on a tragedy of the commons that’s known, but not always defined as such. Elected officials keep their jobs by never cutting anything and always spending more each year to make their constituents happy. Meanwhile, debt accumulates.

Philosopher Garrett Hardin’s original description of the tragedy of the commons was couched in terms of a shepherd bringing one more sheep to graze on an unowned pasture. The shepherd does not reckon much with the cost imposed on other shepherds, nor with the damage to the overused pasture. Where there are no property rights, each shepherd knows that if he cuts back, another shepherd will expand. Grass diminishes and all are left worse off.

“Therein is the tragedy,” explained Hardin. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

We develop all kinds of rules, customs, and traditions to avoid the tragedy, but the tendency for ruin is inherent in the situation. In politics, elected officials know what the shepherd knew: get while the getting is good. None can change the situation, but they might get their constituents a bite of dwindling grass.

Added to this is the human desire to do good works, especially so when some anonymous party — i.e., taxpayers — bears the cost. This is what economist Gordon Tullock famously called the “charity of the uncharitable.” When painful cutbacks come, we understandably cry out, “but the programs were doing a lot of good!”

Thus, we see federal spending on what the Congressional Research Service calls the human resources category — welfare, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and veteran benefits — rise from 6% of GDP for fiscal 1970 to 16% in 2024. Those same years, total federal debt as a percent of GDP rose from 35% to 120%.

Then, when compelled to back brutal DOGE-like actions, politicians tend to implicate other shepherds, be they prior administrations, the other political party, or government employees themselves.

When calling for a DOGE for his state, North Carolina’s House Speaker, Destin Hall, pointed out that “unnecessary government bloat and waste hurt North Carolina taxpayers’ wallets and divert funds that could be used for core functions such as public safety and education” — but did so without noting how so much waste had entered the picture in the first place. Hall’s South Carolina neighbor, Democrat State Senator Ed Sutton, noted that Republicans had controlled the governor’s office and both houses for more than 20 years and that “if there’s any waste in the state, it’s because they put it there.”

Is there a solution? Probably not, at least in a permanent sense. Once continuing federal deficits became morally acceptable during the Great Depression, we the people could no longer rely on Victorian temperance to ration the fiscal commons. Yes, there can be temporary balanced-budget stopgaps to bind Ulysses to the mast. But what can be done with legal paper or DOGE programmers can be undone with more paper or programmers.

Alas, there are no absolutes, just relatively absolute absolutes. Unless we start kicking out more elected representatives for doing what we ask and getting us our bite of grass, periodic DOGEs will be part of American life. More realistically, we might ask that the response isn’t carried out with chainsaw glee.

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(Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, dean emeritus of Clemson University’s College of Business & Behavioral Science, and former executive director of the Federal Trade Commission.)

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