If America was built on one thing, it’s compromise. The politics of the half-loaf have always tempered more extreme factions in the republic and ensured the public good. Steady, thoughtful, and incremental change is the surest path to protecting liberty. In that spirit, I would like to propose some friendly reforms for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an agency that I have previously criticized.
Though its humble work hasn’t received much attention, the Trump administration’s governmental reform group is already behind some pretty big changes in how the nation functions. Some of these efforts have drawn unfair criticism from President Donald Trump’s legacy media critics. They have the temerity to claim that DOGE is causing plane crashes and leaking classified information, and violating federal law. It is essential to distinguish between these bad-faith attacks and genuine opportunities for improvement.
To start, it is worth clarifying some things about DOGE’s operations. The original pitch for DOGE was that it would be an advisory group of sorts led by Musk, who donated roughly a quarter-billion dollars to Trump’s reelection bid, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who briefly ran for the GOP presidential ticket in 2024. After Trump took office and Ramaswamy departed to run for governor of Ohio, it morphed into something that I think we can all say became a little more official.
The administration chose to take the U.S. Digital Service, an office under the White House’s direct control that works on government I.T., and rename it as the U.S. DOGE Service. There is some confusion about who currently serves as the service’s administrator. In legal filings, the Justice Department is conspicuously not identifying that individual, aside from denying that Musk, who is described as a presidential advisor with no legal power, is holding that post.
Trump and Musk seem to be of different minds on the matter: The president has said in public statements that he appointed Musk to run DOGE, and Musk clearly appears to be behind its day-to-day operations. All this confusion is, among other things, woefully inefficient. Either way, Musk cannot be expected to serve as the head of DOGE forever. He is the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies and a few private ones, some of which are not doing too well. Like Cincinnatus returning to his plow, so too will Musk someday return to his Cybertruck.
Since Musk is irreplaceable, DOGE should not even try. Instead, a multimember committee would be better suited to oversee its operations. In addition to giving DOGE some stability and continuity, the committee would be able to multitask almost as effectively as Musk. The Trump administration may not be able to find another South African billionaire to fire federal employees and cut federal programs—well, maybe they could—but they should be able to recreate Musk in the aggregate.
Another opportunity for improvement is DOGE’s transparency. DOGE officials already took control of the mysterious Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which supervises the Treasury’s payment systems, and placed staffers inside the shadowy Internal Revenue Service, which provides nearly all of the federal government’s revenue. This novel approach gives DOGE what British political thinkers once described as “the power of the purse.” Originalist legal scholars say that the term is an ancient reference to when William the Conqueror bought a Burberry handbag after his victory at Hastings.
Musk and DOGE have already taken a few positive steps on this front. They now have a website: One page lists the programs that they are cutting and the savings that will result, while another lists how much money the federal government spends. I would go one step further. Instead of a piecemeal approach to federal finances, it would be more efficient for DOGE to simply draft a budget for each federal agency and allocate funds to them directly from the Treasury. Repeating this process every year would also allow the committee to make changes as needed without inefficient disruptions.
Letting DOGE write the federal budget would give every American the clearest possible understanding of how their taxes are being spent. It would also avoid widespread confusion about whether funds will be distributed or not. DOGE staffers could even hold open televised hearings on perceived instances of waste, fraud, and abuse, and deliberate on potential fixes in public sessions. They could invite business leaders, academics, policy experts, and other stakeholders to comment publicly on what the best spending options would be. They could even issue subpoenas if any bureaucratic wastrels refuse to cooperate.
The efficiency benefits of a DOGE budget are also obvious. No budgetary moves would go into effect until voted upon by the entire committee. Instead of ad hoc funding decisions made on the fly, other stakeholders—states, cities, tribes, nonprofits, and so on—would have ample time to plan for changes in advance. The efficiency would be mutually reinforcing as well: No longer would DOGE staffers have to field desperate, last-minute calls from state officials or business leaders begging for the federal spigot to be turned back on.
Improving DOGE’s responsiveness is also essential to its public service mission. In recent weeks, its zeal for cost cutting has led to some awkward results. The Trump administration is currently scrambling to rehire key personnel at some agencies whose importance was not immediately obvious, such as the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Department of Energy ultimately reinstated almost all of the dismissed nuclear security officials. United States Department of Agriculture officials are also working to rehire ousted civil servants who were managing the bird flu outbreak on U.S. poultry farms.
Each of these reversals came after public outcry illuminated how DOGE itself was inefficient. This is a teachable moment. DOGE could avoid similar slipups in the future by making itself even more responsive to people’s concerns. Each of the members of the DOGE committee, for example, should be assigned to specific states to hear their residents’ concerns. A Central Valley farmer who is worried about water shortfalls after Trump drained key reservoirs last month for no reason, for example, could liaise directly with the DOGE members assigned to California. More populous states would naturally have more DOGE members assigned to them. It would not be efficient for Wyoming and Rhode Island to have as many as Texas and New York.
From there, DOGE members could also form subcommittees to focus on specific issues even more efficiently. Fox News host Jesse Watters made an impassioned plea this week for DOGE to not fire a longtime friend from his job at the Pentagon as part of wider job cuts there. Instead of using a national television broadcast, which is about as inefficient as it gets, Watters could instead contact members of a DOGE Armed Services Committee to find a more responsive solution to his concerns.
Perhaps the most important reform that DOGE could make is permanence. One frequent bit of disinformation from legacy media outlets and woke Democratic politicians is that Trump plans to install himself as some sort of dictator or king. Nothing could be further from the truth. Americans have every reason to believe that Trump will leave the White House without hesitation on January 20, 2029, at the end of his second term. There is nothing that he values more than the peaceful transition of power.
For that reason, if DOGE is to continue to scrutinize and supervise the federal bureaucracy, it should not remain under the White House’s control. DOGE’s efficiency mission is in safe hands under Trump, but his successors may not share his zeal for good government. The best long-term option would be to make it a co-equal branch, alongside the president and the courts. That would mean giving up some of its executive-branch power—no more mass layoffs of dedicated civil servants, alas—but it would ensure that it can carry out its important budgetary and oversight work for the long term.
You may have spotted a potential flaw here: If the president doesn’t appoint new DOGE committee members, where would they come from? Fortunately, there’s a tidy solution that comes right from the man who envisioned this arrangement in the first place. Musk has made clear that popular representation is the only legitimate source of power. “If the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means that, well, the will of the people is not being implemented and that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy,” he eloquently explained earlier this month when asked about DOGE’s legal woes.
Adding more elected officials to the federal government might seem like a risk. Isn’t the president enough, you might ask? I prefer to think of it as an opportunity. Presidents are already busy with maintaining peaceful relations with our allies and keeping our adversaries contained. All the byzantine work of crafting a federal budget, appropriating funds, and supervising agencies for waste and mismanagement would just be a distraction from the real work of the people. And to maintain DOGE’s legitimacy as a co-equal branch of government, the American people should be able to elect new members every few years or so. Since DOGE’s work is perfectly in line with Americans’ policy preferences, they will undoubtedly vote for it to continue.
Finally, if all of these reforms are adopted, a new name would be appropriate. Musk’s winking nods at a mid-2010s dog meme and a nonfungible internet token gave all of us a hearty laugh. But the Trump administration loves to rename things, so it should draw upon American history when looking to DOGE’s future. Did you know, for example, that the Founders created their own “department of government efficiency” when they declared independence from British bureaucrats in 1776? They called it the Continental Congress, or “Congress” for short. Fortunately, the name isn’t currently in use.
