Will Elon Musk Cut as Much Government as Al Gore Did?
In the early 1990s, Bill Clinton's administration set out to "reinvent" government. What can the mercurial Tesla CEO learn from their efforts?
After winning a return to the White House, President Donald Trump tapped Tesla CEO Elon Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body tasked with making the government less costly and more efficient.
It is an arduous and unenviable task. It is also not the first such endeavor: In the 1990s, then–Vice President Al Gore undertook a similar effort. What can we learn from Gore's experience?
As president, Bill Clinton famously declared that "the era of big government is over." Weeks into his term, Clinton had announced "a national performance review" (NPR) to "reinvent" government. He put Gore in charge of the project, which was later codified into law by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.
A dedicated website said the NPR initiative—later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government—would make government "work better, cost less, and get results American [sic] care about."
The NPR issued its first report in September 1993, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less. It listed 1,200 recommendations across the entire government that, if implemented, it said could save $108 billion in five years ($235 billion in 2024 dollars).
"If we follow these steps, we will move much closer to a government that costs less and works better for all of us," the report concluded. "It will be leaner, more effective, fairer, and more up-to-date. It will be a government worth what we pay for it….And perhaps the federal debt—that $4 trillion albatross around the necks of our children and grandchildren—will slow its rampage."
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who worked as an adviser to Gore at the time, touted the NPR's accomplishments in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2013: "We reduced the federal workforce by 426,200 between January 1993 and September 2000," she said, "making the federal government in 2000 the smallest government since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president" while also "yielding $136 billion in savings to the taxpayer."
The government did cut its workforce during the Clinton years, with the overall number of federal employees falling from 3.09 million in January 1993 to 2.75 million in September 2000—suggesting that Kamarck's cited cuts outpaced hiring. Donald Kettl, a Brookings Institution scholar who studied the NPR at the time, told a Senate subcommittee in May 2000 that while some agencies shrank substantially during Clinton's tenure, "three cabinet departments have grown: Commerce (especially to manage the census); State (to cope with international pressures); and Justice (to increase the number of guards at federal prisons)."
Those cuts also weren't across the board: "Since 1993, the reduction in the executive branch workforce, not counting the U.S. Postal Service, amounts to approximately 400,000 jobs," Stephen Barr wrote in The Washington Post in October 2000. "The downsizing was fueled by the post-Cold War base closings and budget cuts at the Defense Department, where about 70 percent of the civil service cuts took place."
A 1999 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report expressed skepticism about the claimed savings. "NPR claimed savings from agency-specific recommendations that could not be fully attributed to its efforts," the report found, as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) "generally did not distinguish NPR's contributions from other initiatives or factors that influenced budget reductions at the agencies we reviewed."
The GAO also "identified two instances where OMB counted at least part of the estimated savings twice," including two recommendations that constituted "potentially up to $1.4 billion in estimated savings" on their own.
Still, there have certainly been more profligate presidencies. During Clinton's tenure, the amount of federal debt held by the public barely budged, rising from $3.3 trillion to $3.4 trillion. The government even ran budget surpluses for several years, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars toward paying down the debt.
Can Musk and Trump achieve that much? It would be a hard lift.
Asked before the 2024 election how much he thought he could cut from the federal budget—which currently tops $6.8 trillion—Musk replied, "I think we could do at least $2 trillion."
Such a cut would be difficult, but not impossible: The 2019 federal budget totaled $4.4 trillion ($5.4 trillion in 2024 dollars). Even adjusting for inflation, Congress could cut $2 trillion and spend only $700 billion less in constant dollars than it did before the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Musk walked back his prediction after the election, admitting in January that it was just "the best-case outcome" and that "I think if we try for $2 trillion, we've got a good shot at getting 1." In a post this week on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk said he was "cautiously optimistic" he would reach his goal of $4 billion per day in savings from the budget for fiscal year 2026, which would reduce the deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion.
The GOP hasn't been much help: Although entitlements are the biggest deficit drivers, the 2024 Republican platform pledged to "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE." There is similarly no guarantee that Republicans can simply grow the economy enough to outweigh the deficit.
One tactic Musk has adopted is buyout-style offers to federal workers. That, as it happens, is one area where there are direct lessons from the Al Gore experience.
Last week the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent a mass email to federal employees with a "deferred resignation offer." Anyone who accepted the offer could, it said, resign immediately but enjoy full pay and benefits through the end of September. (The email listed February 6 as the deadline, but a judge has since delayed it until February 10. ABC reports that 40,000 employees have accepted the offer so far.) There has been a fair amount of confusion around the proposal, as when OPM sent the message to air traffic controllers but then clarified that they weren't actually eligible for the deal.
The NPR, similarly, offered federal workers "the lesser of $25,000 or the amount of the employee's severance pay" to resign. "There was an effort to reduce the number of middle-level managers. In general, however, the downsizing occurred as a result of individual employees' responses to the buyout the government offered," Kettl said in 2000. "There is little knowledge about the resulting skill mix of the federal workforce. There was little advance planning of what skill mix the federal government needs for the future." Put more bluntly, there was little assurance that they got rid of the deadweight and kept the people with the best skills.
Setting aside such specific lessons of the Clinton-era effort, the NPR at least offers us an informal benchmark: If Elon Musk can't bring big government under control, can he at least reduce it as much as Al Gore?
