Due in part to last summer’s soaring egg prices, a constitutional winter has arrived. Angry voters reelected Donald Trump to the White House while the Federal Reserve fought egg inflation. His first actions included appointing two tech billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, as efficiency czars. But what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — or more accurately, an advisory body — is proposing involves a constitutional ploy that will steal the sleep of James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution.”
Mr. Trump won by attacking the cost of groceries and convincing voters that government was wasteful and that only he could solve public grievances. His supporters included people tired of Bidennomics, administrative red tape, and the daily bureaucratic maze that wastes time, money, and patience.
President-elects often promise to address these issues. Most famously, former President Bill Clinton, along with Vice President Al Gore, launched the Reinventing Government initiative, which promoted basic business principles but looked to career civil servants for solutions.
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In stark contrast, President Trump’s first-term agenda of “dismantling the administrative state” failed to achieve the ultimate goal of making key federal positions open to hire in order to achieve some form of better government. . President Trump will once again attempt to overhaul the bureaucracy through DOGE, but this time with the help of businessmen whose constitutional ideas foreshadow a long legal battle.
What appeared in November as the DOGE plan was wall street journal This revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of government. Rather than using a scalpel to address administrative injustice, DOGE risks using an ax to create constitutional injustice.
DOGE’s lip service to eradicating “waste, fraud, and abuse” dismantles corporate watchdog agencies from the EPA to the FDIC and uses agencies like the DOJ and IRS to pursue presidential objectives without constitutional guardrails. It is a thinly veiled agenda aimed at political exploitation. This approach threatens the delicate constitutional balance that has sustained the republic for more than a century, dividing power between the three branches of government and a nonpartisan bureaucracy in between.
To foster this balance, DOGE could consider mission-driven recommendations from the good government community of public administration scholars and bipartisan research groups like the National Academy of Public Administration. They regularly investigate the best ways to make government more efficient and effective. Their past research findings can improve recruitment, program implementation, cost control, and other management techniques. These could have a substantial positive impact on government efficiency while allowing President Trump to leave a positive legacy for the civil service. Many of these efforts are already moving the bureaucracy away from technocratic and often charlatanized proceduralism toward more publicly engaged and proven efforts.
Instead, the DOGE blueprint blatantly ignores Congress (even under Republican control) and creates a “unitary executive” of government by presenting regular bureaucratic rulemaking as the bane of democracy. Defending the theory. Extending summer’s Supreme Court decision too much West Virginia v. EPA and Roper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo; The DOGE blueprint assumes the following: this The executive branch, with the support of a sympathetic judiciary, can “take action” such as reorganization, nullification of regulations, and injunctions.
Parliament must rise to this challenge and assert its position as the “first among equals.”Primus Inter Palace) is part of the three branches of the U.S. government. Congress created the administrative state through the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created a meritocracy for civil servants, and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which required participatory rulemaking in the creation of regulations. DOGE cannot simply cancel or replace current administrative regulations without judicial approval.
Even the world’s richest individuals must realize that countries are not corporations. No one ever said that efficiency is the reason for democracy. Efficiency is just one of the important public values, along with fairness, impartial competence, effectiveness, and accountability. Indeed, such conflicts between values are common in democracies and require expertise, impartiality, and experience from those involved in day-to-day governance. A culture of tech bros who want to “traumatize” federal authorities harms companies that rely on public safety and regulatory stability.
Oath-bound public servants, more than “shrewd managers” or “skillful evaders,” helped make America great. In the past, reformers who campaigned against bureaucracy often felt they needed to enlist competent bureaucrats (whoever they thought they were) to advance their priorities. It’s here. Trump’s loyalty test and DOGE actions will instead drive out such workers and prevent the best and brightest from serving. The next government has also promised to introduce a “Schedule F” reclassification of the country. This executive order, already attempted in the final months of the first Trump administration, created many civil service jobs built on competency and focused on supporting and defending government-backed policies. Transferring to this new category politicizes parts of the federal bureaucracy. president.
If Schedule F goes into effect during the first months of the second Trump administration, it would dismantle much of the federal civil service and likely rebuild agencies and competency-based workers that were being scrambled under the Biden administration. Recent conservation efforts will be undermined. It would allow federal officials to be arbitrarily fired based on the president’s perceived political support. This could begin to transform the federal bureaucracy into a 19th-century “spoiler system” in which political leaders award bureaucratic jobs to their supporters, regardless of their qualifications.
The nation’s founders established the separation of powers more than two centuries ago precisely to counter monarchical trends. But presidentialism, which has advanced since the Nixon era, now invites constitutional referendums on intentionally limited powers in the name of bureaucratic reform.
Musk and Ramaswamy risk returning us to the system of patronage, corruption, and incompetence that defined government throughout the 1800s and that past reformers eliminated. President Theodore Roosevelt also appointed a businessman to lead the reforming Keep Committee in 1905, and his progressive spirit and movement are exactly what DOGE seeks to reverse. Roosevelt confronted the excesses of capitalism amid public outrage. Today, we cannot ignore the alarming income disparity between the rich and the poor. But DOGE does not seek to draw attention to the fact that its leaders and the incoming Cabinet have a combined net worth of nearly $500 billion, a level that is rife with conflicts of interest. Despite the irony of two commissioners leading one efficiency group and tightening regulatory strangleholds, our economic system is mysteriously capable of collectively producing trillionaires. It looks like. But an overhyped overhaul that exacerbates inequality will further push Americans away from engaging in constitutional debates and defending protections they didn’t realize were lost.
As the DOGE action drags on in the courts, talented public servants retire, and the president’s power continues to grow even further, perhaps chaos is the real point. As competition from billionaire-controlled social media erodes press freedom and the ensuing rise of sectarianism, as separation of political parties tramples the separation of powers, the impulse that frightened the framers of the Constitution is Stronger than ever before.
“Could it happen here?” has been plaguing this country for a decade now. Today, a stalled Congress, a partisan judiciary, and an overreaching presidency may do violence to the Constitution in our lifetimes. If that were to happen, the constitutional catastrophe would make our current concerns about egg prices seem strange.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.
