In 2001, antitax activist Grover Norquist told National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Now, almost 25 years later, an activist DOGE billionaire is pursuing a strategy of dragging the government into the backyard, hitting it over the head with a shovel, and burying it. Working with a small team of young tech nerds and unclear legal authority, Elon Musk and DOGE have gone after agencies and their staffs with accusations of corruption and waste, demands for access to sensitive information, funding freezes (sometimes overturned by courts), and an apparent lack of understanding what the employees and the agencies they’re trying to reduce or eliminate even do. (For example, see its firing of workers on nuclear weapons programs and then its scramble to rehire some of those people for sensitive jobs.)
It’s almost like it matters who you put in charge of a project.
As we watch the tussling over the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the Presidio Trust, we see just one example of this roughshod approach to gutting the government. While some Democrats have been frustrated that their elected members of Congress aren’t stopping DOGE — how they would do that with no real power in Washington is a subject best left to social media rants — Republican members of Congress are starting to feel the heat, even in very red districts.
If the Trump administration really wanted to bring a revolution to the government and reduce its size and scope, it could do so. It has the unitary party control of all three branches of the federal government, and an energized base behind it. But, though its fast-off-the-blocks start might suggest otherwise, it is laying the groundwork for the failure of its effort by doing it in a method that is more reminiscent of an ’80s coke-fueled rant. The Democrats might be powerless to be an effective opposition, but the tactics used by Trump and Musk are creating an opposition that could make the president a lame duck in a little less than two years.
It’s almost like it matters who you put in charge of a project.
It doesn’t have to be this way. And, because there are good reasons for wanting to limit the power the government has over our lives, it shouldn’t be this way. In soccer terms, this is an own goal. But millions of people are being hurt in the process, rather than just one team’s playoff hopes.
I’m sympathetic to desires to dramatically change how government works to make it smaller and more efficient. It’s not just a right-wing or Republican dream. As numerous outlets have reported recently, the Clinton-Gore administration made a successful effort to reduce the size of government through buyouts and large-scale staff cuts. It reduced the size of the federal government by more than 400,000 jobs and thousands of pages of regulations. It succeeded; more than $130 billion dollars was saved; but it was done intelligently and with planning, jobs and responsibilities were reviewed, and the moves were authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation.
Or even before that, there was Senator William Proxmire (D-WI). He was the scourge of recipients of government grants because of his Golden Fleece Awards, which he issued whenever he thought the government was wasting money on something like a study to find out why people fall in love. And unlike the billionaires trying to starve the federal bureaucracy, Proxmire wasn’t hypocritical in his own life. He took the bus home from work, he had a small office staff, and he was famous for his frugality in campaigns; for example, in his last two campaigns, which he won by landslide proportions, he spent about $200 out of his own pockets to have his candidacy papers filed, and that was it. His campaign would consist of him greeting people with “Senator Bill Proxmire. Great to meet you.”
Far from shocking the nation with ill-considered firings across federal agencies, Proxmire’s even-keeled penny-pinching persona even served to redeem his office; he served in the seat previously held by Joseph McCarthy, whom he called a “disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”
It matters who you put in charge of a project, and it matters what the goals of the project really are. If you believe that Donald Trump and Elon Musk really just want to save money and make government more efficient, well, you’re welcome to your belief. But stable geniuses would execute a well-honed plan to meet those goals. As startled Republican lawmakers are finding out, though Trump might be protected by his MAGA base and Musk might be protected by having too much money and power to care about adverse reactions, the GOP reps are on the frontline. They’re getting the blowback that Democrats received when the Tea Party movement was created and resulted in a huge loss for the Democrats in the next midterm election.
So if you’re a Democrat worried about an out-of-control government, or you are genuinely concerned about the need to reduce government but know it has to be done well, just remember The West Wing’s President Bartlet when he cited Psalm 30:5: “Joy cometh in the morning, scripture tells us. I hope so. I don’t know if life would be worth living if it didn’t.”
