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The Atlantic: The American People Deserve DOGE
The Atlantic - (archived: https://archive.ph/9LbEG ) The American People Deserve DOGE
America has an efficiency problem, but Elon Musk is not the man to fix it.
By Annie Lowrey
No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families. It fails to collect $606 billion in annual revenue, much of it purloined by the unscrupulous and unaccountable affluent (including, famously, Donald Trump); this sum gets added to the whole country’s debt burden. The IRS still does some of its business by fax. Fax!
Enter the Trump administration, and the enigmatic policy figures of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The incoming president has tasked the two with leading a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, meant to deliver the lean, tech-savvy services that Americans deserve. Maybe with DOGE on the case, the IRS will finally offer a universally available free filing app. Or maybe the Trump administration will eliminate the agency entirely.
According to the scant details available about DOGE—gleaned from a Wall Street Journal opinion article; posts on Musk’s social-media platform, X; and public comments from members of Congress and Silicon Valley executives—Musk and Ramaswamy seem more interested in the second style of reforms than the first. The two are promising to cut regulations, shrink the executive branch’s head count, and eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of supposedly wasteful spending.
If this is the plan, then the plan is to make the government worse. The Trump administration seems to be promising not visionary change, but the same old right-wing same old: describing bloodletting as rightsizing, slashing regulations instead of pruning or refining them, blaming civil servants instead of empowering them, ignoring the desperate imperative for investment, and decrying executive overreach while engaging in egregious executive overreach.
What is most frustrating is that American citizens really do deserve a federal department dedicated to efficiency. They deserve better procurement, and less waste and fraud. They deserve tech-forward, elegant programmatic design. They deserve something better than a government that functions like a continent-spanning DMV, wasting countless hours of their precious time. The American people deserve DOGE. The American government needs DOGE. But Trump and Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE seems like a joke.
/snip
America has an efficiency problem, but Elon Musk is not the man to fix it.
By Annie Lowrey
No federal agency is as hated as the IRS, and perhaps no federal agency deserves so much hate.
The average American spends 13 hours a year completing the agency’s ugly, indecipherable forms. The process is so onerous that Americans fork over $10 billion annually to tax preparers, who nevertheless screw up an estimated 60 percent of their clients’ returns. The IRS audits low-income working families more often than it audits all but the very richest families. It fails to collect $606 billion in annual revenue, much of it purloined by the unscrupulous and unaccountable affluent (including, famously, Donald Trump); this sum gets added to the whole country’s debt burden. The IRS still does some of its business by fax. Fax!
Enter the Trump administration, and the enigmatic policy figures of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The incoming president has tasked the two with leading a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, meant to deliver the lean, tech-savvy services that Americans deserve. Maybe with DOGE on the case, the IRS will finally offer a universally available free filing app. Or maybe the Trump administration will eliminate the agency entirely.
According to the scant details available about DOGE—gleaned from a Wall Street Journal opinion article; posts on Musk’s social-media platform, X; and public comments from members of Congress and Silicon Valley executives—Musk and Ramaswamy seem more interested in the second style of reforms than the first. The two are promising to cut regulations, shrink the executive branch’s head count, and eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of supposedly wasteful spending.
If this is the plan, then the plan is to make the government worse. The Trump administration seems to be promising not visionary change, but the same old right-wing same old: describing bloodletting as rightsizing, slashing regulations instead of pruning or refining them, blaming civil servants instead of empowering them, ignoring the desperate imperative for investment, and decrying executive overreach while engaging in egregious executive overreach.
What is most frustrating is that American citizens really do deserve a federal department dedicated to efficiency. They deserve better procurement, and less waste and fraud. They deserve tech-forward, elegant programmatic design. They deserve something better than a government that functions like a continent-spanning DMV, wasting countless hours of their precious time. The American people deserve DOGE. The American government needs DOGE. But Trump and Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE seems like a joke.
/snip
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