This time, it was Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the once and future President Donald Trump’s joint leaders of a group dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency. But it sounded a bit like a pumped-up-on-steroids version of the Grace Commission, a group of business executives appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1982.
Like many candidates before him, Reagan had campaigned on cutting government waste, fraud and abuse. He appointed Peter Grace, the chief executive officer of a company that had grown from a chemical producer to a multifaceted industrial operation, to head more than 1,000 business executives recruited for the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.
They produced a 47-volume report totaling more than 22,000 pages that suggested ways to save $424 billion over three years. Note that this was when people were impressed with savings in billions rather than trillions.
About one-fourth of the proposals could be done through presidential action. The rest would require congressional approval. And that’s where many of the commission’s big-ticket items hit a bipartisan wall.
One Grace Commission recommendation that Northwest residents of a certain age might remember to sell the Bonneville Power Administration to a private entity.
Reagan suggested such a move in 1986, but the region’s congressional delegation, which was much more balanced then, locked arms in opposition, as did businesses and homeowners across the Northwest, even though all the states gave Reagan their Electoral votes.
A year later, Congress passed a law that prohibited even studying that sale.
Of the suggested $424 billion in savings over three years, actions by Reagan saved about $100 billion over that period. Citizens Against Government Waste, an organization set up after the commission turned in its report, estimates that has grown to a total of $2.4 trillion in the years since.
DOGE at least has a pronounceable acronym. It has two high-powered executives rather than one at its head. They received a generally positive reception from Republicans during their visit to Capitol Hill last week.
But like Grace and most members of his commission, neither Musk nor Ramaswamy have any experience in government even though they have experience dealing with government. That can create an opinion that government should be run more like a business. That often fails, because government isn’t a business that measures its success in profit or loss.
Republicans control both houses of Congress, which is something Reagan never had. But the Republican margin in the Senate is smaller than Reagan’s, and the margin in the House is a mere five votes. Presumably, any suggestion to sell the BPA would crash and burn because there are more than five Republicans whose constituents get their power through that agency.
Those margins mean that any proposals to convince Congress to cut programs that benefit a significant number of their constituents will be challenging, even if DOGE tries to paint them as “pork barrel” spending.
That’s when another saying, not nearly as old as the Chinese proverb, might take precedence. As former House Speaker Tom Foley liked to point out, “One person’s pork barrel spending is another person’s wise investment in the local infrastructure.”
