13.1: Introduction

Elon Musk brandishes a chainsaw, a gift from Argentine president Javier Milei, in anticipation of cutting government waste with the new Department of Government Efficiency.

One week after winning the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE for short. Trump heralded DOGE as “‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time” (comparing it to the race to build the atomic bomb during World War II) and pledged that it would significantly shrink and simplify government. Though not an actual Cabinet department, DOGE would advise the Trump administration on how to root out waste, fraud, and excessive regulation. Elon Musk, the business mogul and world’s richest man, would oversee the project, leveraging his knowledge of the automotive and tech industries to bring a businesslike efficiency to American government.

From an outside perspective, DOGE’s mission may have seemed very doable, if not necessarily easy. Between civilians (as depicted in Figure 13.1 below) and military personnel, the U.S. government employs roughly four million people and spends trillions of dollars each year. Any organization of that magnitude is bound to have inefficiencies: all DOGE had to do was identify them. Moreover, polls routinely show that the Americans see their government as wasteful and oversized. Getting government to do more with less was therefore not only possible but popular. How hard could it be?

Quite hard, in fact. DOGE’s attempts to reduce the number of government workers through buyouts, layoffs, and reorganizations were swiftly met with protests and legal action. When DOGE did succeed in cutting positions and spending, it often did so in a hamfisted way, creating new inefficiencies and sometimes having to rehire some of the people it fired to fix them. Many of the cuts proved unpopular: yes, Americans wanted government to spend less money, but not on those things. By the time Musk stepped back from DOGE in the summer of 2025, even the most optimistic estimate of its total savings paled in comparison to the trillions of new dollars Congress was preparing to spend on tax cuts and border security. Government was getting more expensive, not less.

The contrast between DOGE’s ambitions and its accomplishments demonstrates some of the fundamental frustrations of bureaucratic organization. Trump, Musk, and the American people were correct to point out that the U.S. government is inefficient. Though there is widespread disagreement over which dollars are wasted and which are well-spent, some of this inefficiency is fixable, at least in theory. At the same time, many of the things Americans dislike most about their government are either natural parts of any such structure or necessary to support the things Americans like about their government. Some of the challenges that bedeviled DOGE may have been of its own making, but others were inevitable facets of how government works.

Figure 13.1: Millions of civilian U.S. government employees, 1940–2025 (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)