Over this past weekend I saw several anti-DOGE protests in my neck of the woods. These were admittedly small. But I live in an Ohio county that went for Donald Trump by a 67 percent margin in 2024. This is Trump Country, by any measure.
In recent weeks, Elon Musk has eviscerated the federal government, radically downsizing some agencies, while eliminating others.
Musk’s proponents claim that he is performing a necessary surgery on a bloated federal bureaucracy. His detractors argue that he is cutting essential government functions—including some related to national security (!)—in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires.
So which side is correct?
We might start by examining historical precedent. President Trump is not the first POTUS to take pruning shears to the government. Nor is this a purely partisan issue. Major government downsizings occurred under both Reagan (Republican) and Clinton (Democrat).
On the other hand, government payrolls were expanded under Nixon and George W. Bush, both Republicans.
There are various reasons why government downsizing can be necessary—and desirable. The private sector, after all, downsizes, rightsizes, and reorganizes all the time. We can all name private-sector business entities that were thriving twenty years ago, but which don’t exist today. Should a government agency, once created, be sacrosanct?
And then there is our national debt: currently $36.56 trillion. It is no exaggeration to say that the United States faces a debt emergency.
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But anyway: back to historical precedent. On August 10, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 into law. The newly elected president was alarmed at the growing federal deficit, which was then a mere $290 billion—a fraction of its current size.
The 1993 omnibus bill included a mix of tax increases and federal spending cuts. It therefore found detractors on both sides of the political continuum. But the Clinton administration took advantage of a Democratic majority in Congress to push the bill through.
Naysayers said that the omnibus bill’s tax increases would be a drag on the economy. There were also complaints about cuts to government services and benefits.
But when Bill Clinton left office in 2001, the economy was booming, and Clinton had transformed the federal deficit into a federal surplus. Unemployment dipped below 4 percent—and that was mostly from a booming private sector.
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Throughout the spring and summer of 1993, Clinton explained his case to the American people respectfully, with plenty of numbers, and copious charts and graphs. He emphasized the shared pain of his deficit reduction efforts. (Taxes were increased on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of Americans, and certain business deductions—such as deductions for business meals—were scaled back.)
The Trump administration, by contrast, has accompanied the government cuts not with business increases on the wealthy, but with a sweeping set of tariffs that will be paid by consumers. A regressive tax, essentially.
President Trump has entrusted the government cuts to Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who once smoked weed on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Musk claims that he is cutting billions in waste and saving taxpayers trillions of dollars. Perhaps he is. But where is the data? Where is the oversight? Where are the economists and the management experts who might lend the effort some credibility, via third-party corroboration? (Or at the very least, a hint of a sanity check?)
And then there is the tone of the whole thing. Everyone knows seniors who are dependent on Social Security and Medicare. Most of us also know a government employee or two. My grandmother retired from the EPA in 1983, after a decades-long career with what used to be called the “civil service”. One of my former classmates currently works for the IRS. (As of right now, he still has his job.)
To describe these people as “parasites” or “freeloaders”—as has often been done in the rightwing media—is completely the wrong message and completely the wrong tone.
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We almost certainly do need to make significant cuts to the size of our federal bureaucracy. But these cuts should be better explained, and there should be some sense of checks-and-balances, a public confidence that this involves more than Elon Musk looking at an agency, and giving it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.
The cuts should be approached with methodology and seriousness, in other words: the sort of methodology and seriousness that would have accompanied a similar restructuring, under either a Democratic or Republican administration of the past. The sort of methodology and seriousness that would accompany a similar restructuring in any large private-sector enterprise.
Most of all: the process needs to be better explained. No one is sure that Elon Musk is applying any methodology or seriousness at all. Hence the alarm over what is being done, even in some corners of Trump Country.
-ET