will-the-bureaucracy-and-its-allies-roll-back-the-trump-administrations-efficiency-drive
Andrew Cockburn is out with a smart piece at Harper’s in which he catalogs the failure of past presidential efforts to trim back the federal bureaucracy or dismantle key government agencies have largely failed due to pushback by the permanent government and its allies, and forecasts a similar fate for the Trump/Musk “efficiency” drive.
But this time may be different. Musk’s DOGE has already done significant damage – dismantling the Agency for International Development, freezing enforcement of civil rights laws, foreign bribery prosecutions and more, plus pledging to put other agencies on the chopping block. All of this is being done at a speed not seen before.
Nonetheless, Cockburn is right that there will be mounting push back against the Musk/Trump pledges to dismantle the government and sharply cut back some key domestic programs. The recent rebellion of cabinet members over Musk’s assumption of authority over basic functions yielded a pledge from President Trump to henceforth treat Musk to an advisory role, with cabinet members getting the last word.
And the Department of Government Efficiency has suffered some reputational hits due to exaggerated claims about the savings it has yielded, and firings of essential employees, like individuals assigned to promote safety in the Department of Energy’s nuclear warhead complex.
Some Republican constituencies have also started to push back – some publicly, some privately – against the so-called efficiency drive, ranging from Steve Bannon, who sees Musk as an interloper who doesn’t have the true interests of the MAGA movement at heart, to farmers protesting the loss of business from elimination of AID food aid programs.
Whether all of the above – combined with public pushback from a growing part of the public – will roll back the efficiency drive remains to be seen. To some degree it’s a race against time, as the cuts are coming at warp speed.
A true efficiency drive would take time to analyze which federal programs are essential and which are not, and which employees are absolutely needed to ensure public safety and sustain basic government functions. That is not happening under Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach.
Meanwhile, aside from some proposed cuts in civilian employees, the major beneficiaries of Pentagon largesse – the big contractors – have so far been largely untouched. And the announced goal is to plow any savings back into other Pentagon programs, not save money for the taxpayer.
There is also a question of how fast opponents of the Trump agenda overall can gather enough strength to effectively push back against the cuts that have been proposed and implemented thus far, and what role the courts and the Congress will play in shaping the national agenda.
The biggest impact may come from the outcome of the reconciliation bill under consideration in Congress. The House version would add $150 billion in Pentagon spending over four years while calling for $2 trillion in cuts from other parts of the budget and tax cuts worth $4.5 trillion over the next ten years.
Nothing is written in stone, and the end result is uncertain, but there is no guarantee that the promises to shrink the federal government to the point that it can no longer carry out certain key functions will fail this time around. The results are in the balance, with many voices yet to be fully heard, and the effects of the Musk agenda in communities around the country, red and blue alike, yet to be fully felt.
