A Caution on Efficiency

All America is abuzz with the news of President-elect Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Republicans hope DOGE will finally drain the swamp while Democrats shout that it is a stalking horse for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that they warned us about during the campaign. I noted the similarities between Project 2025 and DOGE in my recent commentary,I'm Beginning to Get It (published November 22, 2024). And many of the departmental nominees for the new Trump administration are authors of various segments of the 887-page Project 2025 plan. The goal of Elon and Vivek is to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget by eliminating waste and fraud and by making the government more efficient.

But I need to interject a word of caution here. Black Swan author Nassim Taleb wrote in his later book, Antifragile, about things that gain from disorder. As he says, "Simply, antifragility is defined as a convex response to a stressor or source of harm, leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility. " Maybe it’s simple for him. But as difficult as antifragility is to explain, it is pretty easy to understand what is fragility - things that break easily like China teacups.

Here is where my word of caution comes in. Efficiency is fragile. We learned that during Covid. International corporations had developed a highly efficient system of production and distribution that provided a large quantity of goods at low prices that still delivered great profits to those corporations. That was until Covid hit. And then the world fell apart.

While we all want a government that is efficient we do not want a government that is fragile. America’s Founding Fathers believed that democracies throughout history had proven to be very fragile and were destined to collapse into tyrannies. And the more democratic governments were, the more fragile they were. So the founders set out to create a form of government that assured the liberty of its citizens but which was not fragile. Many of the checks and balances they included in the US Constitution make the government inefficient. When asked by a passerby what kind of government the Constitutional Convention would give to the American people, Ben Franklin said, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The Founders created a constitutional republic. The word democracy does not appear anywhere in the Constitution.

And while the concept of antifragility was unknown in 1787 (and maybe even today), the proof of America’s antifragility was shown in 1945 when the rest of the world lay in ashes after the chaos of World War Two America’s strength and prosperity dominated the globe. The constitutional inefficiencies are built into the foundation of our republic but both the progressive Democrats and MAGA Republicans want to eliminate or ignore those checks and balances which keep them from implementing their agendas. The Supreme Court blocked many of the Biden administration’s attempts to ignore the Constitution. I think they will do the same if the Trump administration tries to do something similar.

The details of Elon and Vivek’s DOGE plan are yet to be known but they have noted that much of the waste and fraud that they want to eliminate arises from the unconstitutional assumption of power by the administrative state. Eliminating those kinds of inefficiencies would help to restore the constitutional order intended by the Founders. And that could be a good thing.