Can Trump Maximise Efficiency ?

Within hours of taking office last week, US President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders addressing his campaign promises. He has granted full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders in front of a cheering crowd. President Trump also signed an executive order that targets federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished. The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponisation of the Federal Government,” states bluntly that the outgoing   administration and its allies used the government agencies to take action against political opponents. It accused that the outgoing administration was engaged in abusing prosecutorial power to overturn and transgress the democratic process.

Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission had been allegedly used to harass Trump by the previous administration. In fact President Trump’s executive order after he assumed the office has been criticized for being in line with his goals of revenge. It is also blamed that accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favoured Republican tactics during the recent years. Moreover, in line with the Republican Party’s emphasis on concept of lean and less government, new Trump administration aims to cut down the size of the government and radically improve efficiency. 

Wasteful spending

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX who is the world’s wealthiest man and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate in 2024, have agreed to lead this effort under Trump administration. The Department of Government Efficiency, entrusted to perform the task to prune the size of the federal spending and infuse efficiency and effectiveness in government, has evoked and ignited widespread discussion among the public policy experts in the US. Atlantic Council expert Stephen Goldsmith welcomes the idea and argues that President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is aimed at streamlining federal operations, reducing wasteful spending, and enhancing overall efficiency. 

Advocacy groups and politicians in US are taking sides on what programmes should be protected, eliminated, or cut back. Such a debate, if well managed, could in fact produce a valuable contribution to helping the state live within its means while also supporting necessary services and assistance. Standing between the status quo and a more responsive tomorrow rests an outdated bureaucratic form of government dominated by layers of bureaucratic oversight, rigid procedures, and resistance to change, argues Goldsmith further. This could be a historic moment for the federal government, not just because of the tidal wave of potential change, but also because almost one third of the federal workforce is eligible to retire in the next two years.

Unleashing the full power of change requires freeing federal employees to be more creative, data driven, and productive in their jobs. Moreover, by injecting competition and privatisation as drivers of change, taxes could be lowered, work force could be downsized while improving delivery of services. Government can go on a diet while concurrently performing its core functions in an effective manner. Layers of bureaucratic oversight, narrow job classifications, and union rules confine well-intentioned workers in narrow cells of activity. Of course, a reform effort should also include attention to agency redundancy, obsolete missions, and ineffective results. Yet the hard work of dieting should not be ignored, and public employees, if provided right tools stimulated by competition and encouraged by a culture of innovation, can produce meaningful changes.   

Another public policy expert John Donahue sees difficulties and argues that even in the best-case scenario, federal spending won’t radically shrink. The big bucks in the budget go to social insurance, national defence, and debt service. There’s waste in the federal budget but it’s mostly in well-defended pockets scattered here and there. But distinguishing the fat from the muscles and nerves is a delicate task for which Musk and Ramaswamy are in no way prepared. In the US private companies provide a vast range goods and services, from military hardware to Medicare and account for a huge share of federal spending. There’s nothing wrong with this, in principle. Delegating public tasks to the private sector can deliver big benefits for the citizenry. 

Sloppy contracting

Musk and Ramaswamy have an immense experience on the private-sector side of the table. They have intimate and detailed knowledge of the ways sloppy contracting cheats the taxpayer. To be most effective, large organisations like government with challenging and multifaceted missions need attention to the ways they operate and need to change those ways as conditions evolve. The federal government is no different, although changing the government’s operations without disrupting the delivery of services and benefits is hard, requiring detailed knowledge of the government’s activities and close coordination between the executive and legislative branches. 

If policymakers’ current attention to efficiency instils an enduring commitment to this work, that would be valuable. However, increasing government efficiency—or “reducing waste, fraud, and abuse,” in the traditional terminology—would not have a marked effect on federal deficits. Federal spending and revenue are in US now close to $7 trillion and $5 trillion, respectively, leaving a deficit of about $2 trillion. Holding federal debt equal to annual national output, as it is roughly today, would require cutting deficits by about $900 billion per year in the coming decade. However, it is difficult. There were similar efforts during the time of Ronald Reagan in the US, but not much could be achieved. Similarly, Bill Clinton stressed on reinventing the government but his mission did not succeed to the larger extent. 

(The author is presently associated with Policy Research Institute (PRI) as a senior research fellow.  rijalmukti@gmail.com)