By David Sirota
Dear Elon and Vivek:
Congratulations on launching the new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency! I’m confident that fears about plutocratic authoritarianism will be quelled by your willingness to create this federal department without any statutory authority to do so and to then run it from outside the government while you concurrently operate in the private sector. Bravo.
You recently announced that you are already in the process of hiring for DOGE, whose “team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget.” Please accept this cover letter as my formal application for a job in your new department.
My qualifications include roughly five years of service on Capitol Hill—including two years on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee—as well as years of reporting that spotlights government inefficiency. I also host a podcast and sometimes publish tweets, which I know are particularly important qualifications to you and the Trump administration. Oh, and lots of my Democratic Party haters in Washington, D.C. call me a “Bernie Bro,” so hiring me would be a great way to own the libs—another well-known Trump priority.
In lieu of a MAGA loyalty oath that will presumably be replacing the standard civil service application, please accept the attached memo as my job pitch. My particular application focuses on less well-known examples of government inefficiency than the Defense Department, which is so bloated and inefficient that it just failed its seventh straight audit and probably requires its own separate Department of Pentagon Efficiency (DOPE).
Here is a set of nonmilitary initiatives that could save America money and make our government and economy far less bureaucratic.
Terminate Bad Tax Expenditures
The federal government now spends roughly $1.5 trillion a year through preferential tax subsidies. These so-called tax expenditures mostly benefit the wealthiest 20 percent of the country, at the expense of everyone else.
For example, five years of the home mortgage tax deduction will cost taxpayers more than $200 billion, but 80 percent of the deduction’s benefits will go to the top 20 percent of households, and just 4 percent of that will go to middle-income households.
Similarly, the annual cost of retirement tax benefits is projected to reach $657 billion per year by the middle of President Donald Trump’s second term. Again, many of these tax breaks are structured to disproportionately benefit the wealthy—people like your friend Peter Thiel, who now has a $5 billion tax-free Roth IRA.
Ending or limiting these expensive tax preferences—and perhaps using the recovered money to expand benefits from an already-efficient Social Security system—could quickly save hundreds of billions of dollars, boost financial aid to the working class, and make the retirement system far more straightforward. One added benefit: Fewer Wall Street middlemen extracting ever-larger fees from the overly complicated tax-preferenced private retirement system.
Reform The Consumer Banking System
The U.S. government creates unnecessary inefficiency and red tape by effectively forcing Americans to obtain basic banking services from bureaucratic, for-profit fee extractors known as private banks. These institutions can borrow money from the Federal Reserve at discounted interest rates and then lend it to Americans at much higher rates. Then, banks can reap lucrative deposit interest rates at the Fed while paying Americans much lower deposit rates. Individual Americans, however, are prohibited from cutting out this middleman and simply banking with the Fed on their own. This system guarantees a massive upward transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street executives, while keeping Americans locked in a wildly inefficient morass of bank-industry red tape. The situation is exacerbated by the paperwork that banks use to make it more difficult for consumers to comparison shop for better rates. To end these inefficiencies, the government could require the Fed or the post office to offer basic banking services to all Americans; and/or a president could use existing executive authority to expand the Treasury Direct savings bond system into a basic consumer banking option. Additionally, a new Trump administration could enact the pending open-banking rule that would make it easier for Americans to shop for better rates among private banks.
Fix The Tax Payment System
Because the government’s tax filing system is so inefficient and complicated, Americans reportedly spend an average of almost eight hours a year trying to file their taxes—a situation costing the economy $413 billion in productivity. That’s on top of the $14 billion Americans shell out every year for tax-preparation services.
The good news is that there are straightforward ways to make this all far more efficient, if DOGE is willing to ignore the powerful tax-prep lobby.
For instance, the Trump administration could expand the government’s new—and wildly popular—free direct-file system (and it’s heartening to see that DOGE is considering this).
But President Trump could also think bigger and finally enact President Ronald Reagan’s proposal for a voluntary return-free tax system in which the government sends Americans pre-populated tax forms that they can choose to then submit with their signature. Thirty-six countries have already adopted this much more efficient system.
Eliminate Health Insurance Bureaucracy
The American government’s system of tax preferences and subsidies for the private health insurance industry has created a wildly inefficient health care system that drowns Americans in bureaucracy, drags down our entire economy, and produces worse overall health outcomes than other high-income countries.
DOGE could address this inefficiency problem through a program that President Trump has seemed to look favorably upon in the past: Medicare For All. That solution was outlined in a 2020 report from the Republican-run Congressional Budget Office: A Medicare For All initiative would save America an estimated $650 billion per year.
Such a system could achieve this in part because Medicare’s 2 percent administrative costs are so much lower than the 17 percent administrative costs of the bureaucratic, profit-extracting private health insurance industry.
End The Government Backlog
Making government more efficient means making it more transparent—but right now, the transparency system itself is a mountain of impenetrable red tape.
According to a recent federal report, the government’s backlog of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests has now topped more than 200,000—and just 14 percent of complex requests are responded to in the required 20 days or less. Meanwhile, the government is raking in $142 million in income from its PACER system that charges Americans fees to access the public’s own court records—fees that are predatory and cost-prohibitive for many of its citizens. If transparency is necessary for rooting out inefficiency and waste, then a government investment in fixing these problems will generate a big return on investment. That means increasing agencies’ budgets to more quickly process FOIA requests and eliminating all fees for federal court records.
Kill The Worst Corporate Welfare
Through tax-exempt municipal bonds, the federal government has spent billions subsidizing the cost of professional sports stadiums, despite almost no evidence that these subsidies significantly boost local economies or job creation. DOGE can recommend preventing such bonds from being used to finance stadium construction.
Through the U.S. Agriculture Department, the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on farm subsidies. As the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently noted, these subsidies not only disproportionately benefit the largest and wealthiest farms, they also support commodities for processed foods at the heart of the country’s chronic disease crisis. They can be significantly reformed or limited.
Through special tax breaks, the federal government massively subsidizes the fossil fuel industry, which distorts the energy market as cleaner energy becomes cost-competitive and fortifies an industry responsible for an increasingly expensive climate crisis.
These and so many other corporate welfare programs often waste money that could be used to make other efficiency measures—like tax code simplification—budget neutral.
Halt Wasteful Private Contracting
In their recent mission statement, DOGE leaders asserted that they will be “focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers.” Pursuant to that objective, the new agency should end the practice of government wasting taxpayer money on paying more for private contractors than it could pay government workers to do the same tasks.
In 2011, the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight reported that “federal government employees were less expensive than contractors in 33 of the 35 occupational classifications.” Additionally, the watchdog group found that the federal government approves contract billing rates “that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.”
One example of this trend: Government Executive reported in 2018 that an internal Pentagon report found that “jobs in the Defense Department are cheaper with civilian employees as compared to contractors”—and “in 10 broad job groups the Defense Department studied, contractors came in as the pricier option.”
Multiplied across the entire federal government, this is an enormous and inefficient cost, because roughly 40 percent of the federal workforce is now private contractors. DOGE should be looking to end the government’s private contracting for federal operations that can be done more cost-efficiently with a public sector workforce.
David Sirota is the founder, owner, and editor-in-chief of The Lever, a reader-supported investigative news outlet. He is also an Oscar-nominated writer and worked as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter.
Source: levernews.com, November 25, 2024