Last update:November 17, 2024, 7:25 PM IST

Far from substantially reducing administrative costs, will a new department prove counterproductive and result in new bureaucracy piling on top of an already entrenched bureaucracy?

Elon Musk vehemently supported Donald Trump in the US election.

The relationship between President-elect Donald Trump and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, born perhaps out of their desire to Make America Great Again (MAGA), is the stuff of legend and will not be repeated. That it went as far as creating a new government department, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fueled animated media, including debate on social media. Far from substantially reducing administrative costs, will a new department prove counterproductive and result in new bureaucracy piling on top of an already entrenched bureaucracy?

A new department to tame existing departments is a play on the famous joke: consultants are the ones who lend you your watch to tell your watch. Only this time, the advisers would be replaced by more powerful executive politicians who are on a par with Indian cabinet ministers.

Be that as it may, Musk is a disruptor who a few years ago wanted to accept Bitcoins for his Tesla cars only to back down in the face of a severe coat-down from the Fed and the IRS, the two American institutions tasked with assiduously guarding the U.S. . the single legal tender status of the dollar. The fact that he himself has amassed cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, and asked his company Tesla to do so is of course a different matter, but reports of Trump’s push to relax cryptocurrency regulations are starting to sound ominous.

And, BTW, reports of Trump buying burgers with Bitcoin in a New York restaurant sound more ominous, especially for the Fed and the IRS. The president-elect’s defiance of the law no less should be ringing alarm bells, as is Bitcoin breaking the $90,000 mark.

Vivek Ramasamy, who along with Musk would be at the helm of DOGE, has made no bones about his intention – to cut the federal workforce by 75% and eliminate agencies like the FBI and IRS. Musk did much the same thing when buying Twitter – he fired 70% of the employees after he came in with a sink to get his message out. His love for puppies spun off from his love for dogecoin and now DOGE. Be that as it may.

Can such a ruthless approach be brought to bear on the federal bureaucracy in an ecosystem already marked by a free economy, devoid of controls except in the areas of currency, defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security? Dismantling regimes like the FBI and the IRS is simply unthinkable even in a capitalist economy like the US. However, DOGE’s mission to replace men with AI and digitization is worth watching, although AI has been found inadequate when it comes to human interface – we all get frustrated and demand to speak to a real person when an invisible robot of an online bank sends you in a daze by either sidestepping the question or innocently proclaiming a lack of understanding of the query!

It is hoped that the philosophy behind DOGE will not die an untimely death in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy and stiff opposition from Congress. Musk’s more conciliatory note that DOGE would not be a threat to democracy, just bureaucracy, if anything threatens to exacerbate tensions between civil servants and the federal government.

Why do we need a Department for Government Efficiency? Musk asks this rhetorically as he says in 2020 that the US government spent $4.5 million to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine. A swallow does not make a summer. An isolated example of government waste is not enough to condemn the entire bureaucracy as wasteful. In an odd reflection of Yes Minister’s satire, the new obsession with DOGE could be a throwback to the British sitcom Yes Minister, which had 1980s viewers in splits, squealing with genuine glee. Be that as it may.

Trump’s directive sets a clear deadline for DOGE: July 4, 2026. The symbolic timeline coincides with the nation’s 250th birthday, positioning DOGE’s success as a patriotic milestone. The Musk-Ramasamy duo’s work will be aligned with the Office of Management and Budget, leveraging private sector expertise to look for inefficiencies in the $6.5 trillion in annual federal spending.

However, swamp draining, startup efficiency, cost-benefit analysis, taxpayer return on investment are all rhetoric and the exception, given that government spending often defies these ideals and parameters. Traffic discipline, for example, is legendary in the US, but spending on traffic and road regulations cannot be scrutinized on the cost-benefit benchmark. After all, a robot cannot approach a traffic violator and stop him on the spot.

However, not all of the goals and measures presented are outlandish or utopian. Targeted savings of $2 trillion over the next five years will come from digitization, AI replacing people and merging departments. Equally sensible is the Washington DC relocation solution for government departments. American states already practice this by making obscure cities their political state capitals. That is, Albany is the capital of New York state and not NYC, Sacramento in California and not LA or San Francisco, Tallahassee in Florida and not Miami or Orlando. In other words, moving political capital away from commercial capital has always been a good cost-cutting measure, in addition to reducing pressure on scarce infrastructure resources.

Blockchain technology has been behind the acceptance and accessibility of Bitcoin. It is now under the DOGE regime, which is supposed to support the functioning of all government departments, thereby bringing transparency and making the system tamper-proof. But all these good measures are not essentially cost-cutting measures, but quality-improvement measures.

The writer is a senior columnist. He tweets @smurlidharan. The opinions expressed in the piece above are personal and solely the author’s. They do not necessarily reflect the views of News18.