DOGE Has Been a Smashing Success

When compared to the most likely alternatives, DOGE has cut as much government as one could hope for.

Whenever Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) raised the hackles of left-wing activists for opposing some trillion-dollar progressive priority during the Biden administration, liberal writer Matt Yglesias would defend the senator on the grounds that he was performing above replacement value.

Instead of comparing Manchin to other progressive senators, Yglesias argued lefties should compare him to his most likely replacement, which would almost certainly be a very conservative West Virginia Republican.

All things considered, he was the best West Virginia senator progressives could reasonably hope for.

I have a similarly sunny assessment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The looming close of the Trump administration's first 100 days in office, and Elon Musk's announcement that he is stepping away from DOGE, have provoked a lot of critical retrospectives.

The $1 trillion that Musk claimed DOGE would save has been downgraded to $150 billion, and even this figure might not stand up to closer scrutiny. The many grants and employees terminated by DOGE have been reinstated, at least temporarily, by the courts.

Federal government experts argue that few of its cuts have actually made the government operate more smoothly. As one Reuters headline pointedly declared, "100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency."

Libertarians may well feel that the whole DOGE effort has been a massive letdown.

Compared to an ideal effort to shrink the size and scope of the federal government, DOGE has indeed disappointed. However, when one considers the most realistic alternatives to DOGE, its record actually looks pretty good.

The most obvious point of comparison to DOGE is the Kamala Harris administration that didn't happen.

Harris would most certainly not have launched anything approximating DOGE. If she governed remotely similarly to her predecessor, we could have expected another four years of rapidly expanding government.

Under the Biden administration, federal spending rose by $4.7 trillion, and $2.5 trillion was added to the deficit, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Innovation Center. Meanwhile, regulations finalized under former President Joe Biden added an estimated $1.8 trillion in regulatory costs.

The new spending was obviously done with the consent of Congress. Much of the additional regulatory burden was a result of the Biden White House's "whole of government" initiatives whereby agencies were told to go around finding rules that could be tightened in the name of equity, environmental justice, and more.

So, it's true that DOGE didn't come anywhere close to meeting its $1 trillion savings goal. But the cuts it has made already put it in the black compared to what a Harris administration would have done.

DOGE can also be ranked as a success when compared to what the Trump administration could have done instead on the small government front, which is to say nothing at all.

Donald Trump is not a libertarian. He's not even a remotely small government guy, as his recent actions on trade and immigration demonstrate. He's staffed his administration with fewer traditional free marketers than past Republican presidents.

Nevertheless, the president was willing to give Musk a remarkable amount of string to fire federal workers, terminate federal grants, and downsize whole agencies.

Milton Friedman, when asked about the free market reforms undertaken by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, liked to say that the real miracle in Chile wasn't that those reforms worked but that a military dictatorship was willing to try them in the first place.

Something similar could be said for DOGE. Its success isn't that it's been super effective at shrinking the government, but rather that Trump let it happen at all.

The fact that DOGE did happen raised the hopes of small government reformers that we might see a lot of executive energy devoted to a steady, methodical, and congressionally supported effort to shrink the state.

But that was never in the cards. Steady and methodical is just not how the Trump administration approaches anything.

Witness the utter chaos that's erupted over the administration's tariff policy. Tariffs are one of the few things that Trump himself clearly believes in. His administration is full of similarly committed protectionists.

And yet, even on this issue, the administration can't decide how exactly it wants to impose punishing trade barriers, or if it even wants to impose punishing trade barriers at all.

One couldn't reasonably expect Trump to approach a cause he's clearly not committed to with more care.

For all the chaos that DOGE has unleashed, it's hewed pretty closely to the initial vision that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out for it in their joint Wall Street Journal op-ed published shortly after the 2024 election.

The two promised to use executive orders to shrink the federal workforce and rescind agency regulations that should have properly been passed by Congress.

That's more or less what's happened. The DOGE teams within federal agencies have fired staff en masse. The White House has also issued a steady stream of executive orders instructing agencies to identify and repeal federal regulations not supported by an underlying statute.

One could argue that all this could have happened without DOGE's characteristic chaos bordering on bungling incompetence.

But even bungling incompetence has an upside.

Making the federal government a less secure place to work and a less reliable funding partner means fewer people will want to work for it, and fewer organizations will rely on it for funding.

Encouraging the best and brightest federal workers to leave government employment might not make the government operate more efficiently. But it will make the economy operate more efficiently by shifting talented people from unproductive bureaucratic work to a profit-seeking private sector.

DOGE was not the libertarian moment. One could dream about what a Rand Paul administration could have accomplished with the aid of a Congress stuffed with Justin Amashes and Thomas Massies.

But the country didn't elect Rand Paul as president. It elected Donald Trump.

The relevant benchmark for DOGE's performance isn't how much a highly competent effort to shrink government could have accomplished. Rather, it's what the most likely alternatives to the DOGE would have accomplished.

Every plausible alternative would have resulted in more government than what we got with DOGE. On that metric, it's been a smashing success.