Elon and Vivek, we need to talk about how to make DOGE successful

Dear Elon and Vivek,

I know that many people want your ear right now. Your new commission, DOGE (very clever logo, BTW), has essentially carte blanche to propose reforms. Your teasers about major changes in the making are receiving a lot of attention.

Here’s the challenge: History is littered with the wreckage of such commissions. Failure and irrelevance are the norm. If you want to avoid having your opportunity to reform the federal government become a punchline in the late-night talk shows, you need to be disciplined and systematic.

So, here’s some advice from a long-time federal bureaucrat that might help you succeed.

Schedule a briefing from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget … NOW. They would be delighted to share their expertise, because we are in a fiscal crisis. The deficit in fiscal 2024 was $1.6 trillion and is projected to rise steadily. Unfortunately, the recent political campaigns focused on how to spend more, not on fiscal sustainability. As a nation, we have decided to spend now and send the bill to our children and grandchildren. So, part of your job will be to create a sense of immediacy and convince Americans that it’s worth making sacrifices today to safeguard their children’s fiscal future.

You are throwing around huge numbers ($2 trillion in savings), which creates a lot of buzz but is red meat for fact-checkers. The brutal fact is that saving a lot of money in the federal budget requires going after entitlements. These, along with interest payments, comprise about 70 percent of the federal budget. If you want big savings, you need to follow the money, but entitlements are REALLY hard to change.

Which means you need to remember that …

It’s all about trade-offs. In government, there are rarely pure wins. Someone or some group loses while another gains. Reforms are possible, but the constituencies will fight hard for their benefits. As we say in Washington, one person’s waste is another person’s vital national program. So be ready for bitter opposition.

Fortunately, there are examples of successful reform efforts. For example, Congress agreed to five rounds of DoD base closures and realignments that reshaped the Pentagon’s base structure for the post-Cold War era and now save about $12 billion annually. This hurt the local communities in the short run. Most eventually recovered, but some never did. Not everyone benefits. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform, which succeeded in reducing welfare rolls by encouraging work, supporting those transitioning to the workforce, and discouraging dependency. Your team should study these bipartisan successes.

Don’t expect much savings from cutting “woke” programs. The president-elect and the Republicans in general campaigned against those programs. However, there’s not much money there. Costs in DoD (which has about half the federal workforce) run about $100 million per year, with similar numbers in other agencies. That may sound like a lot, but it is a rounding error in a $6 trillion budget. Such cuts may be emotionally satisfying for conservatives, but they are not significant as a budget issue. “Woke” is a policy issue.

Focus on a few big things. You won’t have time to dig into every corner of the federal operation. So, after your initial research, focus on a few big things that you want to change and go after them with specifics and in depth. Three to five is a good number for audiences to grasp without getting lost. Too many more than that and the effort loses focus. If you list “the top 30 actions the government should take,” people’s eyes will glaze over by the time you get to seven or eight.

Build a consensus and develop allies. I recognize that down at Mar-A-Lago, the talk is all about mandates and landslides. President-elect Trump’s victory was impressive and much greater than had been expected; He won all the battleground states, and Republicans will have control of Congress. But the popular vote was only 51 percent to 49 percent. The Republicans did extraordinarily well in Congress but hold very thin margins in both houses, three in the Senate and about three in the House (depending on appointments). To put that in perspective, Obama had an eight-seat margin in the Senate and a 69-seat margin in the House when he rammed through his health and stimulus packages. You will not be able to make reforms with brute political force.

Get tight with Congress. You need allies in Congress because Congress will need to authorize many of your proposals and can stymie most of the rest if it chooses. Make them an ally because you don’t want them as an enemy. A strong congressional relations group in your organization will be critical, but members will want to talk to you directly. They like being consulted, so take time to build some relationships. You have already started that process — excellent. Getting tight with them is not just about establishing a close relationship. Hoisting a few drinks in a relaxed environment (juice for Vivek) will help discussions about difficult issues.

Reach out to the broader community. Everyone in Washington LOVES to be consulted. It feeds our sense of self-importance. There’s also a lot of experience out there that you could harness. So have a series of lunches and dinners with former officials, academics, journalists, and think tank scholars. You will get a lot of good ideas and maybe avoid some pitfalls that hurt previous efforts. At the least, you will have a chance to lay out your vision and maybe co-opt some potential criticism. Remember — these people will be writing the op-eds on your efforts and shaping public opinion.

Stay close to the president and the White House. Right now, you have his enthusiastic support, and that is critical for success. However, the tides of politics can shift. If you appear to be proposing ideas that the president opposes or that are causing too much political blowback, that support will fade. You have already had a peak at what presidential anger looks like.

Reduce the federal workforce by eliminating the work. Making arbitrary across-the-board cuts is tempting because specifics get complex and controversial. However, arbitrary cuts will just shift the work to contractors. Government won’t get smaller or cheaper, just less visible. If you want to shift work to the private sector, reestablish the A-76 process, which sets up a formal mechanism for moving work from government to private industry. It was widely and successfully used in the Clinton and Bush administrations until shut down by the Obama administration.

Reducing regulations and eliminating functions will also eliminate work and, hence, workers, but you must be specific. There’s no budget line for “waste.”

Trying to make reductions through the “Schedule F” proposed in the first Trump administration won’t produce a smaller or better workforce. Instead, the workforce will be more cautious and less innovative as they hesitate to take action lest they displease the political establishment — the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish.

Disrupt the federal workforce? The federal government has formal rules for reducing the number of employees. Usually, that’s done by attrition — not replacing workers when they leave, so headcount drops gradually. If the reduction happens too quickly for attrition, then it’s done mainly by seniority. That’s what will happen if you succeed in making deep cuts. If you really want to shake up the civil service, have a one-time 5 percent reduction based on merit alone. Maybe make everyone reapply for their job. It would be traumatic since it breaks long-established expectations, but there’s 5 percent of the federal workforce who should be doing something else.

Beware the lethal embrace. Without specifics, the bureaucracy will respond by reshaping and then embracing any sufficiently vague reform. Many years ago, as a junior staff member, I was sent as an organizational representative to a meeting on how DoD would respond to an efficiency commission. A crusty old bureaucrat led the meeting. He said, “The department’s position is that these are all great ideas, and, in fact, we are already doing them or planning to do them. Now go back to your organizations and write up those responses for your section of the report.”

Hire some people who know government thoroughly. You have started online hiring, and that’s good. It will jump-start the commission. Your inclination will be to hire enthusiastic outsiders who want to apply their ideas from the civilian economy to government. That’s fine for generating ideas. However, you need a cadre of inside experts who know how to implement those ideas. That’s how you escape the lethal embrace. An enthusiastic but inexperienced staff might produce a passable report using AI tools, but it will be totally useless.

Don’t create a permanent organization for reform. You won’t be able to cover everything in the federal government the way you might like. That’s an inevitable trade-off. Maybe recommend having a similar commission periodically to “mow the lawn.” Maybe provide guidance for future commissions. However, the idea of creating a permanent bureaucracy in order to reduce bureaucracy is absurd. Disband DOGE when its work is done.

Get moving. You may think you have four years to get initiatives done, but you may only have two years to get approval for proposals that need congressional authorization. There will be congressional elections in 2026, and historically, the president’s party has lost ground—on average, 26 seats in the House and four in the Senate. If that holds in 2026, the Democrats will take control of Congress.

Hedging against that possibility is not pessimism or disloyalty, but realism. So get moving.

Best regards,

Mark

Mark Cancian is a retired Marine colonel now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).