DOGE and America’s finances are no laughing matter | SONDERMANN | Columnists

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Of course, there is much to parody in the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to be led by those dynamic hobnobbers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Let’s start with the very notion that it requires two people, both with oversized egos, to lead a downsizing effort. Then there is the creation of a new “department” to ostensibly deal with a surplus of departments.

The DOGE acronym itself is a fully-intentional reference to some ancient internet meme which became the impetus behind Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency hyped by Musk. I can imagine the high-fives when they came up with that one. What’s better than supplementing a government machete with a bit of cross-marketing?

The “department” itself is not really a department. Instead, it is constituted as a presidential advisory commission. That won’t stop it from printing business cards for some campaign flunky soon serving as Assistant Deputy Associate Director for Strategic Initiatives.

Barbs aside, the country actually needs this to be a serious undertaking that delivers results going far beyond window dressing and grudge settling.

Our federal government is an unwieldy behemoth. Yes, it includes dedicated people and provides essential services. But that quality of personnel is not consistent across the board and those vital services come with plenty of less critical fluff.

In 2022, federal expenditures came to roughly $6.75 trillion constituting 23 percent of the country’s GDP. For those who prefer their numbers written out, that is $6,750,000,000,000. Plus or minus.

The government employs approximately 4.5 million people, about evenly divided between military and civilian personnel. Add in grantees, contractors and the like, and that count grows to nearly 10 million.

Even the most ardent government advocate and defender of the status quo will have a hard time convincing me that there is not serious opportunity for cost-cutting, efficiency and streamlining of this overly bureaucratic, overly regulatory colossus.

It extends beyond the basic arithmetic. Any garden, especially one of this scope, needs periodic weeding. Too many departments, branches, agencies and assorted other entities have grown detached and sclerotic.

Ezra Klein of the New York Times recently noted that government needs an Operation Warp Speed, the moniker given to the development of a Covid vaccine, for everything.

Klein pointed out that the first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later, 28 stations opened.

More than a century hence, in Obama’s first year in office, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act appropriated billions for high-speed rail. Fifteen years since then, you cannot find a single high-speed train anywhere in the country funded by that bill.

This is but one of many reasons why Democrats received so little public credit for the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Voters have yet to see them produce much of anything of scale.

As a nation, with a focus on the public sector, it seems we have become masters of showmanship, albeit with very limited ability to build things, think major infrastructure, or repair subpar services, think education.

All of which brings us to the one issue you would have found only on the side of a milk carton during this past campaign. That issue, dare anyone miss it, is the nation’s fiscal health as represented by its increasingly troublesome deficit and debt.

If you heard either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris address this with anything approaching earnestness or resolve, you were paying far closer attention than me. Moreover, now as president-elect, Trump appears determined to disrupt institution after institution, except for that most cherished American practice of spending beyond our means.

The numbers make the eyes glaze over. But they are inescapable. This year’s budget deficit alone is almost $2 trillion or seven percent of GDP. The national debt exceeds $36 trillion.

The glide path for both the debt and deficit over the next decade is ever upward, frighteningly so. When interest rates were modest, an argument could be made that such fiscal policy was affordable and viable. That is an impossible case to make in a higher-interest setting.

America’s fiscal management can be summed up in two words: Reckless and unsustainable. Most troubling of all, neither political side now demonstrates the slightest instinct to do anything but party on.

Were an incoming president truly serious about government efficiency and spending restraint, the duo he would put in charge would not be the showboats of Musk and Ramaswamy, but a pairing of Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and the president America needed but never got, and Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense.

Neither, however, are bootlicking denizens of Mar-a-Lago.

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