I’m intensely ambivalent about fast-moving events in Washington, DC, where President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a joint venture with Elon Musk, is causing consternation. Whether part of a purposeful strategy or not, the administration is “flooding the zone” with activity, producing talk of “constitutional crisis” from critics who deplore loose talk from the president. We must sympathize, of course, with those who signed up for careers in beneficent government service, not realizing that their once unparalleled job security has resulted in resentment among many of their involuntary benefactors: taxpayers.

Couldn’t this all be done methodically within the rules? That is a common refrain from my fellow Hamlets, who see both the need for reform and the manifold risks this haste produces. Without taking a side, I share a story from my years in the government reform trenches that incline me slightly toward the current maelstrom.

When I was working on government transparency during the Obama years, I was trying to get data that would more readily reveal to the public what was happening in many areas, including federal spending. Among my efforts was to assess the quality of data the government published, hoping to induce progress. In 2014, I submitted my 2012 Cato Institute report, Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices, to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) in the Treasury Department in hopes of aiding its implementation of the DATA Act.  

My understanding at the time was that when appropriations bills came over from Congress, BFS would mark them up in pencil to interpret where money would go. Spending processes were that bad.

As part of this work, I emailed one David Lebryk at the Treasury, who I knew had signaled openness to reform. I was honestly seeking to learn the processes so I could work in bipartisan, nonideological collaboration to rationalize these systems and open more data to public perusal. I never received a reply.

I recently came across a video of one of Musk’s DOGE team describing what he found when he looked at the Treasury’s systems. The agency just sends out money on request. There’s no reconciliation process. Jaw-dropping.

Elon Musk reported on February 8th—believably to me—that payment categorization codes are frequently left blank, making audits impossible. Along with categorization, Musk would require a rationale for every payment in the comment field, which is also currently left blank. These are steps toward making federal spending more transparent and auditable.

Lebryk is a career Treasury official who headed the BFS for many years. He famously left after tussling for control with Musk and DOGE. One concern that has arisen since is that faceless and unaccountable DOGE staff have access to sensitive information about taxpayers and government payees. That argument doesn’t land for me, because that data has been available to faceless and similarly unaccountable bureaucrats all along.

One friend’s reaction to the story above was to say, “I’m glad the Band-Aid is being ripped off.” He intuits that slow and steady does not win the race in government reform.

Our government’s unaccountable bloat is a product of incentives. The Supreme Court dropped controls on federal power in cases like 1937’s National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel. Congress collectively found it could benefit by regulating lots of things and avoid political costs by delegating the hard questions to federal agencies. The agencies collectively were happy to oblige. Doing so grew their budgets, job security, prestige, and so on.

Reforms to tighten up spending or make things easier for taxpayers or entrepreneurs? Not so much, Congress and the agencies agreed. Lebryks across government haven’t instituted reforms they could have.

For decades, commission after reform commission has come and gone. Why? Because the small number of players with lots of skin in the game follow their incentives. They use the complex systems they inhabit—personnel rules, government contracting, the Administrative Procedure Act, agency-specific rules and protocols—to their advantage in countless ways. One of the more public of these is by advertising to a pliant Washington media the importance of their particular program, which is then parroted on air and in print. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard that cutting a particular program would have an infinitesimal effect on the deficit, I could pay off the national debt.

So I don’t love the speed at which things are happening, and I agree that the administration should act within the law. But maybe haste controls waste. I look forward to the winnowing process that retains beneficial reforms, ratifies through Congress the reforms that have pushed statutory boundaries, and reverses any reforms that, on net, don’t serve taxpayers.