19 Nov Dodging DOGE
As you likely know, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, two extremely rich campaign surrogates for Donald Trump, have agreed to run the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the upcoming administration. This is great. Ramaswamy and Musk are both quite smart and creative, and certainly, the federal government could be run more efficiently. Moreover, as I noted on Election Day, the incoming president faces a serious government spending problem, which, if not addressed, could cause serious economic trouble for the foreseeable future. One can only hope that Trump’s two trusted allies will enjoy unprecedented success in reforming the federal budget and reducing its costs.
At the same time, there are reasons to be cautious, if not dubious, about the impact that DOGE might have on federal Leviathan. I will undoubtedly address many of these over the next few weeks, if for no other reason than to warn you – as well as Ramaswamy and Musk – what kind of challenges they will face. Let us start today with Ramaswamy’s declaration, made this past Sunday, that the chief goal of the new operation is to put the bureaucracy back in its place:
“The failures of the executive branch need to be addressed because the dirty little secret right now is the people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action. It’s going to be fixed through executive action,” he said….
“This is about restoring self-governance and accountability in America as well. Elected leaders, if they make the wrong decisions, voters have a great choice. You can vote them out and remove them. Most of the people making these decisions from health care to the Department of Defense are failing on effectiveness because they have no accountability. Historically, it’s been the view of many scholars to say that those people could not even be fired. Now we take a different view with the environment the Supreme Court has given us in recent years, and we’re going to use that in a pretty extensive way to move quickly,” he explained.
Again, this is all well and good, and it makes at least superficial sense. Nevertheless, Vivek makes a couple of mistakes here.
First, he assumes that the Supreme Court has given “the government” power that it has not given it. Specifically, he appears to believe that the Court’s overturning of Chevron Deference (via Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo) gives the government the power to undo the damage done by Chevron, by undoing rulings that utilize its precedent. Elsewhere, Vivek puts it more explicitly: “In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the Court ended Chevron deference, which means agencies can’t foist their own interpretations of the law onto the American people. Over 18,000 federal cases cited the Chevron doctrine, often to uphold regulations, many of which are now null & void.”
Unfortunately, this is not quite right. As the astute Russ Greene from Stand Together points out, the Loper Bright ruling specifically says otherwise: “By overruling Chevron, though, the Court does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Cheuron framework.” Rules utilizing Chevron Deference may be chipped away at, by executive order or legislation, but the tool required here is a chisel, not a sledgehammer.
A second mistake Ramaswamy makes is that he assumes that “bureaucrats” and the “administrative state” can just be put back in a box, as if their massive expansion and applied independence were the results of overspending and inattentiveness. This too is not quite right.
American bureaucracy is both unique and uniquely political. In many ways, it functions precisely like the bureaucracies in other Western polities, along the lines that Max Weber identified more than a century ago. In other ways, however, American administrative apparatuses – at all levels of government – are more overtly and independently political than traditional, Weber-esque bureaucracies. As I have noted in these pages countless times, American bureaucracy does not behave as it should or as other bureaucracies behave, in that it purposefully, as a matter of process, rejects control by its democratically elected overlords. I explain the history of this atypical and explicitly political in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital:
The publication of Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State in 1948 heralded a definitive break with the Wilson-Goodnow consensus on the rigid separation of politics and administration. As one scholar put it, The Administrative State “established the alleged indefensibility of the politics-administration dichotomy, so that, for about half a century, the dichotomy has been treated like geocentrism in astronomy: Perhaps it was once believed in, but now we know better.”
There was a catch, however. Waldo’s principal objection to the dichotomy was not based on a democratic or republican repulsion at the idea that the day-to-day function of government should be removed from the hands of the sovereign, which is to say the people. Rather, his objection was to the idea that administration could be “scientific.”…
Empirically, it is clear that Waldo’s assertions were correct, and that the process of administering the functions of government cannot be done in a purely “scientific” manner. In theory and practice, it requires the application of values. His contributions to the debate, however, were not interpreted as mere observations. They were, instead, taken as a license for administrators (and their educators) to become value advocates. In this sense, Waldo’s contributions constitute a watershed in administrative/bureaucratic practice in the United States, a rejection of pure positivism and a slide toward a more enduring antipositivism….
George Frederickson, a public administration professor at the University of Kansas…told the Maxwell School magazine that Waldo’s contributions included “three lasting themes in PA: social equity; democratic administration; and proactive, advocating, non-neutral public administration.”
In short, the American administrative state has a values-based bias toward aggressive, interventionist governance. This bias will remain, no matter how far back the bureaucratic weeds are cut, no matter how urgently and assertively agencies and bureaucratic staffs are trimmed or eliminated. This is a fundamental problem with American administration that cannot be solved overnight and will not be solved exclusively through contemporary expressions of political will.
To be fair, Ramaswamy is inarguably right that a big part of the solution is to force the Legislative Branch to reassert itself and re-take responsibility for actions. That is a necessary first step. Unfortunately, while it is necessary, it is hardly sufficient. To win the struggle against the Leviathan, we, as a people, will have to undo more than three-quarters of a century of theory, practice, and education advocating the explicit application of independent, democratically detached values calculations by American bureaucrats at all levels of government.
Ramaswamy and Musk are aiming to have their work wrapped up by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday. I wish them luck, and I hope I am wrong, but I fear that’s not really enough time to get started on such a project, much less finished with it.
