Trump Dance and Government Efficiency

Trump dance aka The Donald

The NFL which used to be known as the No Fun League used to penalize teams for unsportsmanlike penalties for excessive endzone celebrations. Those times are gone. Now it seems that the celebrations are a bit over the top but allowed so long as they are not obscene.  I wondered if that policy will change now that some of the celebrations look a lot like the Trump Dance. In fact, CBS cut away from one celebration and was accused of doing so because the network is so anti-Trump. Who would have thought that the brothers would be doing the Trump Dance? Believe it. Now golfers, soccer players, and others are doing it. Of course, the left doesn’t like it and some have asked the NFL to stop it. For now the NFL has said it would not intervene. Anyway, the league has all those niffy George Floyd era slogans in the endzones and on the back of helmets. I am now waiting for the left to demand the banning of “YMCA”. Did I hear anyone say shut up and dribble?

Department of Government Efficiency

To the list of well known oxymorons add “government efficiency.” Like “military intelligence” or “civil war” the term government efficiency defies logic. By definition government can not be efficient because it does not have the profit motive. It makes no effort to minimize costs in order to maximize profits. It is inherently wasteful and inefficient. Its objective is often to maximize costs in order to not endanger future appropriations. There is no profit to be maximized either because there are no profits. The government workforce does not have to worry about being terminated if their company fails. Management is rarely fired. The Pentagon has failed 7 consecutive audits and yet its CFO still has a job, Don’t you think that there might be a wee bit of waste, theft and fraud in that agency? Yet no one in the Administration seems to care. As to how to save a few bucks, I have written before that if we terminated all the welfare agencies, fired all their employees and simply gave each poor person $20,000 a year we would save half of what we now spend on welfare. Now that would be efficient!

I presume what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to try to do is the minimize the number of government agencies/employees needed to perform certain tasks. We all know that there are redundant functions running through government agencies. We all know that government employees are often idle at work. There are even parts of the government that are out dated and no longer serve any purpose, yet they are still funded. However, Trump’s DOGE is itself redundant. If I were a cabinet member, I would resent the DOGE telling me how to become more efficient. Isn’t that my job? Why didn’t Trump just tell his cabinet that their budgets were going to be cut by a certain percent each year and it was their job to determine where to cut?

But Musk and Ramaswamy can do a service by recommending a consolidation of redundant government functions across agencies. To this end, all they need to do is look at GAO’s excellent annual report on duplication and cost savings https://www.gao.gov/duplication-cost-savings.  That will save them a lot of time and effort. They can also read Rand Paul’s annual report targeting government waste. The Heritage Foundation also publishes an annual report on redundancy. Ironically, the DOGE, itself, an example of government waste if all it does is duplicate the efforts already made to target the lack of efficiency in the federal government.

Musk is probably not going to have a fixed role in the Trump government. Ramaswamy would serve Trump better if he were director of the Office of Management and Budget. Trump should also coax Paul Ryan back into the government. For years, Ryan was one of the few politicians serious about containing the growth of the government and fiscal responsibility.

So Department of Government Efficiency? Not hardly.