A Threat to Bureaucracy
The new CEO looks at his company and finds it needs to operate more efficiently. He accomplishes this by laying off employees in unnecessary or unproductive positions and eliminates hundreds of unfilled Jobs. “Our size and structure can slow us down with too many layers,” he says.
Donald Trump? Elon Musk? No, the CEO is Brian Niccol who announced recently that Starbucks will lay off 1,100 corporate employees and eliminate unfilled positions in an effort to “reduce complexity” and focus more on the coffee chain’s core business.
Both Trump and Musk are businessmen – highly successful businessmen who know how to manage large and complex businesses. Thus the approach they are taking to rein in the waste, fraud and excessive spending of the federal bureaucracy should come as no surprise.
Through the mechanism of the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE Trump and Musk are seeking to achieve what presidents from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama pledged to do but failed to achieve: rein in the deep state. As a result, the bureaucracy-loving Left is in the midst of an epic melt-down.
The Left sensed the looming threat last summer when it attempted to make Project 2025 a campaign issue. That failed because Project 2025 was not a Trump campaign initiative. Rather it is a project of the Heritage Foundation, the nation’s leading conservative think tank. Heritage has been producing a policy blueprint at least since it released Mandate for Leadership in 1980.
The quadrennial document is a compendium of conservative policy prescriptions on a wide range of issues. Project 2025 is that – but with an added component. It is often said that “people are policy” and in the first Trump Administration the president’s policy agenda was blocked by un-elected deep state bureaucrats who consistently fought rather than implemented his policies. Project 2025 built a data base of people who could be hired and counted on the advance the presidential agenda.
To the Left this was a move designed to consolidate executive power. That is incorrect. Congress has a penchant for passing legislation light on details allowing the deep state to fill in the blanks. This abdication of power to the federal bureaucracy has resulted in over-regulation by a group of people wholly unaccountable to anyone. Project 2025 is actually a blueprint for returning power to the people by requiring Congress to fully do its job.
The Left has lost control of the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court of the United States. The deep state bureaucracy is its last bastion of control and one that heretofore has been untouchable, at least in any meaningful way. Project 2025 flips the script and replaces the socialist agenda of the Left with policies designed to empower free markets and restore individual liberty.
And Elon Musk is paving the way. Just like the Starbucks CEO he is cutting unnecessary positions and right-sizing the federal government. The national debt now tops 36 trillion dollars. We are on an unsustainable spending path creating an urgent need to slash spending.
This is not to say no federal government jobs or programs are needed – they are – but DOGE has already demonstrated there is waste, fraud and abuse on a breath-taking scale. DOGE has launched an “Agency Efficiency Leaderboard” which shows which government agencies have saved the most in cost-cutting measures. The board to date shows a total of $65 billion in savings.
The success of DOGE has spawned calls for similar state-level effort. State Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) is planning legislation to create a Pennsylvania Department of Government Efficiency. Mastriano envisions the PA DOGE having the “comprehensive authority to audit commonwealth agencies and instantly stop spending it finds to be unnecessary.”
“This initiative is a vital step in ensuring that every dollar spent is a dollar well-invested in the future of our state,” said Mastriano. Given that Pennsylvania is about to throw itself off a fiscal cliff a state-level DOGE would come none too soon.
The commonwealth has a structural budget deficit which the Independent Fiscal Office projects will put the state deeply in the red within three years. Despite that Governor Josh Shapiro has proposed a massive increase in state spending. That will hasten the state’s fiscal demise.
While the success of DOGE is being measured in dollars there is a more accurate barometer. The Left has once again taken to the streets and the howls of protest have reached a fever pitch. Their last bastion of control is being taken away. We the People are reclaiming control of our own government.
(Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly American Radio Journal and Lincoln Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.)
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