OPINION:
Republicans, at least in public, seem to be excited about Elon Musk and his boy band careening through the federal government, creating mayhem wherever they go.
One can hardly blame them. Believers in smaller, more efficient government have played Charlie Brown to big government’s Lucy for the past 100 years. Mr. Musk promises something most conservatives have wanted for a couple of generations: a serious effort to root out wasteful and corrupt government spending.
That all sounds great, looks like progress and feels like something everyone can and should support. However, there are a handful of problems.
First, and most important, the idea that federal spending is somehow unmoored from congressional preferences is nonsense. Every dollar the federal government spends is put in its place and directed to its purpose by a member of Congress or someone in an administration. More ominously, almost all of those expenditures have been ratified by members of Congress of both parties. In short, there are no accidental, “wasteful” or “abusive” expenditures. There are only expenditures that have been approved by Congress and signed into law by a president.
Second, the number of people employed by the federal government — about 2.3 million, with another 3 million or so government-adjacent contractors — is only tangentially related to the amount of money the federal government spends. In the last fiscal year, the federal government spent about $6.7 trillion. About 70% of that was transfer payments (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security), payments to states and interest on the debt. The remaining $2 trillion is split more or less evenly between defense spending and everything else the government does.
Most federal government spending — the transfer payments and interest on the debt — is just machines cutting checks and has hardly anything to do with the number of personnel employed by the government.
Along that same line, the savings generated by the activities so far are fairly modest. Taking Team Musk at its word, it has negated about $60 billion in federal spending. That’s not nothing, but it does represent less than 1% of current federal spending and is about half what we will probably spend in an emergency supplemental for California’s recovery from its wildfires.
Third, it is true that some parts of the government, especially the regulatory functions, are so sclerotic that they can damage the economy.
The tricky part here is that reducing the number of personnel may actually worsen the problem. For example, under pressure from various directions, including those they regulate, some recent firings at the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and elsewhere have been reversed.
It turns out that knowing something about how the government works and what some parts do may be relevant with respect to who gets sacked.
Finally, this somewhat shambolic effort costs the administration and the Republicans political capital. A group of senators recently asked Team Musk for contacts in each agency to whom their caseworkers could direct questions and problems. Republican members of Congress have endured what is, of course, performative and manufactured hostility at public meetings. However, the drops in President Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s approval ratings is measurable.
It would be a shame if Team Musk’s efforts, which are tangential to the president’s actual goals of improving the economy and doing something about immigration, wound up muddying the waters enough to complicate and retard tax reform or other material policies.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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