The Unholy Grail

     According to the Wall Street Journal:

     WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump picked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and biotech company founder Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, to lead an effort to cut spending, eliminate regulations and restructure federal agencies.
     Trump said in a statement Tuesday night that Ramaswamy and Musk—the wealthiest person in the world, who oversees six companies—would lead what the president-elect called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The group’s mandate is to streamline government bureaucracy, the president-elect said.
     DOGE will operate outside of the federal government, Trump said, and will work with the White House Office of Management and Budget to implement its recommendations.

     If this government-department-that’s-not-a-government-department succeeds in shrinking the federal government, it will be an accomplishment worthy of much applause. My qualms are about the word efficiency, which means something quite different.

     Consider: When we call a machine or a process efficient, we’re saying that it does the job it was made to do with a minimum of waste. That’s a good thing… if the thing being done is itself good. But if the thing being done is not good, do we really want it to be done “efficiently?”

     A great deal – 90% or more – that the federal government does is Constitutionally unauthorized. Indeed, the Constitution was written and ratified to prevent Washington from doing it. I’m uninterested in “efficiency” at doing what should not be done. So the question in my mind is whether Musk and Ramaswamy see those things through a Constitutional lens. They’re very good men. I don’t doubt their benevolence. But I hope their vision isn’t of a federal government that still does everything it’s doing today, just for less money.