After profitable a return to the White Home, President Donald Trump tapped Tesla CEO Elon Musk to go the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), a physique tasked with making the federal government more cost effective and extra environment friendly.
It’s an arduous and unenviable activity. Additionally it is not the primary such endeavor: Within the Nineteen Nineties, then–Vice President Al Gore undertook the same effort. What can we study from Gore’s expertise?
As president, Invoice Clinton famously declared that “the period of huge authorities is over.” Weeks into his time period, Clinton had announced “a nationwide efficiency evaluation” (NPR) to “reinvent” authorities. He put Gore accountable for the venture, which was later codified into regulation by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.
A devoted website stated the NPR initiative—later renamed the Nationwide Partnership for Reinventing Authorities—would make authorities “work higher, value much less, and get outcomes American [sic] care about.”
The NPR issued its first report in September 1993, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less. It listed 1,200 suggestions throughout all the authorities that, if carried out, it stated might save $108 billion in 5 years ($235 billion in 2024 {dollars}).
“If we comply with these steps, we are going to transfer a lot nearer to a authorities that prices much less and works higher for all of us,” the report concluded. “It is going to be leaner, more practical, fairer, and extra up-to-date. It is going to be a authorities value what we pay for it….And maybe the federal debt—that $4 trillion albatross across the necks of our kids and grandchildren—will gradual its rampage.”
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance research on the Brookings Establishment who labored as an adviser to Gore on the time, touted the NPR’s accomplishments in testimony earlier than the Home Committee on Oversight and Authorities Reform in 2013: “We diminished the federal workforce by 426,200 between January 1993 and September 2000,” she stated, “making the federal authorities in 2000 the smallest authorities since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president” whereas additionally “yielding $136 billion in financial savings to the taxpayer.”
The federal government did lower its workforce through the Clinton years, with the general variety of federal workers falling from 3.09 million in January 1993 to 2.75 million in September 2000—suggesting that Kamarck’s cited cuts outpaced hiring. Donald Kettl, a Brookings Establishment scholar who studied the NPR on the time, told a Senate subcommittee in Might 2000 that whereas some businesses shrank considerably throughout Clinton’s tenure, “three cupboard departments have grown: Commerce (particularly to handle the census); State (to deal with worldwide pressures); and Justice (to extend the variety of guards at federal prisons).”
These cuts additionally weren’t throughout the board: “Since 1993, the discount within the govt department workforce, not counting the U.S. Postal Service, quantities to roughly 400,000 jobs,” Stephen Barr wrote in The Washington Submit in October 2000. “The downsizing was fueled by the post-Chilly Warfare base closings and funds cuts on the Protection Division, the place about 70 p.c of the civil service cuts came about.”
A 1999 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report expressed skepticism concerning the claimed financial savings. “NPR claimed financial savings from agency-specific suggestions that might not be absolutely attributed to its efforts,” the report discovered, because the Workplace of Administration and Finances (OMB) “usually didn’t distinguish NPR’s contributions from different initiatives or elements that influenced funds reductions on the businesses we reviewed.”
The GAO additionally “recognized two cases the place OMB counted a minimum of a part of the estimated financial savings twice,” together with two suggestions that constituted “doubtlessly as much as $1.4 billion in estimated financial savings” on their very own.
Nonetheless, there have actually been extra profligate presidencies. Throughout Clinton’s tenure, the quantity of federal debt held by the general public barely budged, rising from $3.3 trillion to $3.4 trillion. The federal government even ran funds surpluses for a number of years, contributing tons of of billions of {dollars} towards paying down the debt.
Can Musk and Trump obtain that a lot? It will be a tough elevate.
Requested earlier than the 2024 election how a lot he thought he might lower from the federal funds—which at the moment tops $6.8 trillion—Musk replied, “I feel we might do a minimum of $2 trillion.”
Such a lower can be tough, however not unimaginable: The 2019 federal budget totaled $4.4 trillion ($5.4 trillion in 2024 {dollars}). Even adjusting for inflation, Congress might lower $2 trillion and spend solely $700 billion much less in fixed {dollars} than it did earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic.
However Musk walked again his prediction after the election, admitting in January that it was simply “the best-case final result” and that “I feel if we strive for $2 trillion, we have a great shot at getting 1.” In a post this week on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk stated he was “cautiously optimistic” he would attain his purpose of $4 billion per day in financial savings from the funds for fiscal yr 2026, which would scale back the deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion.
The GOP hasn’t been a lot assist: Though entitlements are the most important deficit drivers, the 2024 Republican platform pledged to “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE.” There’s equally no assure that Republicans can merely grow the economy sufficient to outweigh the deficit.
One tactic Musk has adopted is buyout-style affords to federal staff. That, because it occurs, is one space the place there are direct classes from the Al Gore expertise.
Final week the U.S. Workplace of Personnel Administration (OPM) despatched a mass email to federal workers with a “deferred resignation supply.” Anybody who accepted the supply might, it stated, resign instantly however get pleasure from full pay and advantages by the tip of September. (The e-mail listed February 6 because the deadline, however a choose has since delayed it till February 10. ABC reports that 40,000 workers have accepted the supply thus far.) There was a good quantity of confusion across the proposal, as when OPM despatched the message to air site visitors controllers however then clarified that they weren’t truly eligible for the deal.
The NPR, equally, offered federal staff “the lesser of $25,000 or the quantity of the worker’s severance pay” to resign. “There was an effort to scale back the variety of middle-level managers. Usually, nevertheless, the downsizing occurred on account of particular person workers’ responses to the buyout the federal government supplied,” Kettl stated in 2000. “There’s little information concerning the ensuing talent mixture of the federal workforce. There was little advance planning of what talent combine the federal authorities wants for the longer term.” Put extra bluntly, there was little assurance that they removed the deadweight and saved the folks with the perfect expertise.
Setting apart such particular classes of the Clinton-era effort, the NPR a minimum of affords us an off-the-cuff benchmark: If Elon Musk cannot convey large authorities below management, can he a minimum of cut back it as a lot as Al Gore?
