Bloated American Administrative State May Finally Be Put on a Crash Diet

By Jose Niño

If Elon Musk and Vivek Rama­swamy have their way, the U.S. government could be in for a major facelift. President-elect Donald Trump nominated Musk and Ramaswamy to lead the planned Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE.

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DOGE is not a formal government agency, and it will mostly focus on reining in government spending. Only an act of Congress can create an official government agency.

Ramaswamy has been one of the most vocal critics of the administrative state, and has stressed the United States was founded on the principle that citizens elect their representatives to run the government. However, that model has been turned upside down with the rise of the modern-day administrative state, which has fostered the creation of a permanent bureaucracy that is unresponsive to the will of the voters.

In a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “The DOGE Plan to Reform Government,” both Musk and Ramaswamy highlighted that the majority of legal edicts aren’t laws passed by Congress “but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year.”

In a similar vein, the two heads of DOGE noted that:

Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies.

These civil servants walk around thinking they’re safe from being fired due to civil service protections.

The bureaucratization of U.S. politics has made the political process increasingly undemocratic and more detached from the interests of Middle America. Several conservatives have finally picked up on the necessity of putting the administrative state on a diet. Now, with Ramaswamy and Musk leading the DOGE initiative, there is a distinct possibility of fiscal restraint finally being exercised in D.C.

To reach that point, DOGE is apparently helping the Trump transition team recruit a team of “small-government” crusaders to work alongside the White House Office of Management and Budget. DOGE will focus on three reforms: administrative reductions, cost savings, and regulatory rescissions. The last reform involves Congress reducing federal spending by canceling budget authority for federal agencies prior to its expiration. Rescissions generally go after “unobligated” funds, which are funds that Congress has appropriated but still has not obligated for use.

All told, DOGE aims to slash $500 billion in yearly spending.

While DOGE is a worthy endeavor to bring about a more efficient form of governance, a more productive venture would be to have pressure groups turn up the heat on members of Congress. We don’t need another body or thousands of pages of studies to demonstrate that spending in D.C. is out of control, or the government is too bloated.  There are plenty of think tanks and investigative journalists who have exposed such waste over the last few decades.

Now is the time to act. For multiple decades, we have seen politician after politician promise the world in terms of reducing the size of government. Yet, once they’re in office, they end up doing nothing to roll back the size of the state. In fact, some even sell out altogether and become part of the very Washington, D.C. “blob” they initially campaigned against.

As is the nature of the beast in the D.C. Swamp.

What is required to break this institutional inertia is a thorough sweep of Congress. The present ruling class and its predecessors have demonstrated that they’re incapable of reducing the size of government. For that, they must be relieved of the burden of holding higher office.

The problem is right before our eyes — the political class. From here, a pressure campaign must be mounted to either compel these elected officials to change their ways or get unseated in the primaries. What DOGE is doing is laudable, though it’s simply not enough to get the country back to its constitutional roots.

A full-fledged crusade against D.C. leadership is needed for any meaningful reduction of government to take place.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. You can contact him via Facebook and  Twitter. Get his e-book, The 10 Myths of Gun Control at josealbertonino.gumroad.com. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “Jose Nino Unfiltered” on Substack.com.