2 min read

Efficiency Theater

Efficiency Theater
Nmikhatri, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I wrote some thoughts earlier this week about the ineffectiveness of DOGE.  I was particularly incensed about the desire of the new OMB director to inflict trauma on federal employees in an attempt to cause them to quit — such a lazy chicken$hit approach.

One commenter disagreed with me, saying, “At least it’s a beginning,” asserting that we need to cut government staffing and spending to address the deficit, or we would end up with “hyperinflation and the collapse of our society.”

Look, everyone is in favor of a more efficient government.  If there is waste, let’s find it and eliminate it.  No one will argue with that.  

But to say the DOGE effort is how we can get to a balanced budget?  This is akin to saying that climbing Mt. Rainier is a good start to getting to the moon.  It is never going to work and is a waste of time.

Smarter people than me (for instance, Paul Krugman) have pointed this out: No reduction in federal government employment will dent the federal deficit. You could cut staffing levels in half, which wouldn’t matter — that is not where the money is:

The DOGE exercise is “efficiency theater”.   All the turmoil makes it seem like significant progress is happening, but it is all a fiction.   

USAFacts has a nice visualization of the US budget.   It is worth playing around with.  If you do, you will realize that there are only four levers to pull to get the budget in balance — and 3 of them are political kryptonite.

  • Raising taxes.   Politically impossible
  • Cutting Social Security and Medicare.  Politically impossible.
  • Cutting Defense spending.   Politically impossible — and the world is not getting safer these days.
  • Grow the economy faster than expected to increase tax revenues.

Everything else is just rearranging deck chairs.  Our only path out of our budget woes is growth — precisely what the American economy is good at, relative to most of the developed world.  And that is where Elon’s talents and those of other sharp people should be directed, rather than the fiction of DOGE.