Musk and Ramaswamy's DOGE echoes past budget promises that faced big hurdles

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy test drove their new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, on Capitol Hill this week, visiting House and Senate Republicans, who celebrated their promise of reduced government and dramatically lower federal spending.

But the duo kept their remarks short. While tossing out a number with a dozen zeroes in it – Musk has spoken of saving "at least $2 trillion" in federal spending -- they offered little by way of programmatic detail.

To their credit, they were there to hear from members who have been on the frontlines of the budget wars for decades. And if they were listening to people like Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who will now chair the House Appropriations Committee, they heard a cautionary note. Cole was among the members meeting with Musk and Ramaswamy this week and told the New York Times they were "trying to understand the full scope" of the DOGE project and "how much would be done by executive action."

People typically talk about "the budget," but the real business of spending takes place in the appropriations process, where the notional becomes real.

Such appropriations are the fundamental and ultimate business of Congress, as per the Constitution. Whatever the DOGE winds up offering or contributing, it cannot pass appropriations without Congress. Efforts to circumvent the Hill by using impoundment or other executive maneuvers will confront the Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974 – a major victory for Congress' spending powers in the year President Richard Nixon was weakened by impeachment proceedings that led to his resignation.

Yet the DOGE team has an unmistakable swagger, not unlike their sponsor in President-elect Donald Trump.

Still, for those with long Washington memories, DOGE stirs echoes of similar promises made in the past – that recall frustrations and futility.

Making it a mantra

Vows to shrink the federal deficit, pay down the national debt and "run government more like a business" have long been a stock element of electoral politics – especially in eras when populist anti-tax and anti-government sentiments were running strong. Candidates for office who have business backgrounds or MBAs have made it a mantra.

It was a component in Ronald Reagan's carefully constructed bid for the presidency in 1980, which decried a federal debt that was approaching $1 trillion. It was a scary figure at a time when that "T-word" had scarcely common usage.

In office, Reagan assigned the deficit and spending problems to his first director of the Office of Management and Budget, a young Republican congressman from Michigan named David Stockman. A former seminarian who spoke with great conviction, Stockman attacked bloat in the budgets of past presidents as if they were a species of sin.

Democrats, and not a few Republicans, were put off and pushed back. But Stockman was a true believer, not just in Reagan but in the power of the knife. He produced some of the most dramatic cuts in programs affecting mass constituencies that have ever been discussed.

Even the Senate Budget Chairman Peter Domenici, a Republican budget hawk in his own right, reminded Stockman of Senate "prerogatives" at a critical moment in Reagan's first-year confrontation with Congress. Ultimately, Stockman's mandate to cut spending collided with two other Reagan articles of faith: tax cuts and a vigorous military build up to challenge what was then still the Soviet Union. By the end of Reagan's first term, some spending had been cut, but tax cuts and a trillion in new defense spending had doubled and would soon triple that trillion-dollar national debt figure. And Stockman was out of government writing a memoir called The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.

Reagan then turned to a businessman named J. Peter Grace and a commission charged with finding efficiencies in the government. Grace and his cohort got into the weeds and made many useful recommendations, some of which the various agencies of the government adopted. But the optics were not so good when it was revealed that Grace's business, W. R. Grace & Company, itself had paid almost no taxes in the year Reagan appointed its chairman to head his commission.

Spending and taxes were a major focus for Reagan's immediate successor, George H.W. Bush. Without the benefit of any outside commissions, the first Bush managed to reach a compromise with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate that both cut spending and raised revenue the old-fashioned way -- through higher taxes.

It formed the basis for a relatively successful decade of budget policy that, in theory or on paper at least, made a balanced budget a practical projection prior to the year 2000.

But the tax component of that 1990 package broke Bush's "no new taxes" pledge and cost him substantial support in his own party. House Republican leader, Newt Gingrich, led a rebellion against the package, and conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan challenged Bush in the 1992 primaries, weakening Bush's bid for a second term.

That experience made higher taxes all but unmentionable in the GOP. That turn recognized the rise of an anti-tax and government-skeptical populism on the right that has been a major force in American politics ever since.

New voice on the right

Among the new voices on the right was that of H. Ross Perot, a Texan and an early high-tech billionaire who ran against Bush and the deficit and Washington in general as an independent candidate for president in 1992.

Perot was a billionaire at a time when there were not so many of them, and his suggestions about running the government more like a business hit home with many. For a time in June 1992, Perot was nearing 40% in national polls while the incumbent Bush and his Democratic challenger Bill Clinton were both below 30%,

Another businessman, legendary automaker Lee Iacocca, had flirted with a White House campaign for a time in the late 1980s, sounding the same theme. The implication was that any competent private-sector manager could do a better job than the politicians and bureaucrats who only served themselves.

Perot's campaign in 1992 and a sequel in 1996 eventually fell short, but the spirit he had unleashed with his independent bid sounded alarms in both the major parties. The issue of federal deficits and spending was only part of that spirit, but it was one the parties could at least attempt to address.

The Republican reaction was to back a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, which at least sounded like a solution. When the GOP next had majorities in both chambers, its leaders managed to get to two thirds approval in the House but fell short in the Senate.

The Democrats, meanwhile, put at least some faith in a new effort called the National Performance Review under the aegis of Vice President Al Gore. It was supposed to streamline the federal establishment, which Gore referred to as "reinventing government." Like DOGE, the impetus for REGO (as some called it) was to cut spending, reduce regulation and cut down the size of the federal workforce.

In pursuit of those goals, and backed by President Bill Clinton, Gore unearthed some of the work of the Grace Commission. Grace's operation produced a small library of recommendations but had too little to show for it in terms of real change. Clinton began his 1996 State of the Union by declaring "the era of big government is over" and highlighted six-figure reductions in the federal workforce as part of his reelection campaign.

Yet overall, spending kept going up. And at times it took major leaps upward such as the War on Terror in the first decade after 9/11 and the outlays to counteract the Wall Street meltdown of 2008-2009, caused by the mortgage-backed securities crisis. Spending and the debt scaled new heights after COVID struck and the economy staggered.

The need to look frugal

Through it all, administrations and Congress kept looking for ways to look frugal. One that won applause from inside government and out was the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, launched in 2010 during what some called the "Great Recession."

It was known as the Simpson-Bowles commission for its Republican and Democratic chairs, former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. It took seven months to produce an ambitious, balanced package that trimmed Social Security and Defense and also restrained some tax breaks and raised the federal gasoline tax.

But only 11 of the 18 members of the commission voted for the package, falling short of the required supermajority of 14.

In later years, there would be additional efforts, some with the support of the White House and some without. The House and Senate deal struck by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murphy in 2015 ended a government shutdown and revived the spirit of Simpson-Bowles.

But it too fell short of being the grand bargain some in both parties and many in the academic community were calling for.

Overall, each of these efforts learned what Gore and Grace and Stockman had learned: Whatever successes they achieved, federal spending kept going up because the "big fish" in the federal budget were not getting caught.

Where are the big ones?

The biggest elements of federal spending begin with interest in the existing debt. It was a trillion when Reagan ran against it in 1980. It tripled in the decade that followed, and it has tripled since then and tripled again. It now exceeds $36 trillion and is rising.

The next hardest fish to catch? Payments to American citizens through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' health benefits and other programs that do not need annual appropriations. That's more than half the federal budget right there. Payments under these programs essentially just send the bills to the taxpayers, yet the taxpayers have made it clear they do not want those payments to stop.

The third denizen of the deep that budget hawks cannot reach is the budget for defense or national security. The growth in that category has only slowed occasionally since Reagan came to office, and since 9/11 it has been more or less beyond challenge. At 13% of the budget it is almost two-thirds the price tag of Social Security. And any chance of curtailing it probably went out the window with the election of the current Republican majorities in Congress.

But responsibility for the current condition of U.S. finances rests on both political parties, and, ultimately, on the voters who keep returning them to office.

Still, clearly, efforts to root out government inefficiencies and slash spending, at least in message, continue. Stockman, by the way, at 78 is still at it, posting regularly to his David Stockman's Contra Corner, with a series of memos to Musk and Ramaswamy on "How to Cut $2 Trillion of Fat, Muscle and Bone." This week he was up to Memo #11.