DOGE

I am a fan of DOGE, and I will tell you why: my 9-year experience in the Federal government.

From 1998-2001, I was an intelligence analyst at the Coast Guard Pacific Area. What were my responsibilities? To analyze intelligence pertaining to Pacific fisheries and publish reports periodically. How many was I supposed to publish? Well, none, but typically, I would average one 500-word piece a month, which made me ten times more productive than anyone else in the office. Now, I write about 5,000 words a day. The guy before me did practically nothing over the course of three years. But all I heard about was what a great guy he was. What a great guy. Except he didn’t do shit.

People would come into the office, take off their coat, sit in their chair, and stare at the screen, not touching the keyboard, over the course of an eight-hour day. I am not making any of this up. They would sit there and breathe oxygen. For my part, I was taking 2-hour lunches to go be a lunkhead in the gym, but at least I was more productive than anyone in the office. At one point during my tour there, they assigned a radarman warrant officer to work under my tutelage. I set him on writing some intel reports. It came back “xsylk frtbt ishoy grsmr.” He was actually illiterate. The Coast Guard, in its infinite wisdom, assigned a guy who was illiterate to a job where you had to write. The point here is that nothing had to get done. If we didn’t do anything, there were no consequences. There were actually consequences to doing things. If you wrote something that upset some internal politics somewhere, you would get in trouble. I could go on, but you get the point.

I also spent two years at sea on a Coast Guard cutter. I was the first lieutentant, which is the deck department officer, in charge of exterior maintenance of the ship and its rigging. It’s a boat, and boats rust, and it’s a white boat, and you can really see the rust on a white boat, so every once in a while the captain would take me around the ship and point out this or that rust spot that had to get fixed. Then I would go to the chief boatswain’s mate, and point out the rust spots. So the next day, all the deckies would set out to fix the rust spots. The day started at 7am, so they’d get there at seven, take an hour to set out all their gear, and wait! Time for a smoke break. That took a half hour, and wait! Gotta get the boombox out. That would take another half hour. Then wait! Time for a coffee break. And so on. They would “work” over the course of a seven hour day and get absolutely nothing accomplished. Then the captain would be on my ass about the rust spots.

Was it a failure of leadership? What consequences could I offer? I could put a nastygram, otherwise known as a “Page 7,” in someone’s file. I could give people crappy performance evaluations. You can’t really court martial people for being lazy. As it happened, the chief and the petty officers all happened to be from Eastern Ohio, in steel country, where there are unions. The nice way of saying it was that there was no sense of urgency.

One egregious example that I can think of from that time—in the Coast Guard, there were something called “fallout funds,” money that units didn’t spend and got returned to the Coast Guard at the end of the year. The Coast Guard would then make the money available to other units for various expenses. We were slated to get $7,000 in fallout funds in 1997. The engineers wanted to spend it on more spare parts for the engineers’ storeroom, which already had $2 million in spare parts in it that they never used. I wanted to use the money to buy law enforcement gear—bulletproof vests and weapons belts, since the ones that we had were decades old, practically useless, and unsafe. I mean, the whole point of the ship is that we were a law enforcement ship, and we did boardings, so we kind of needed good law enforcement gear? For the actual mission? I ended up going to war with the engineers over this, and got my way, and they never forgave me for it. Fallout funds. Money that falls from the sky.

Let’s just say I am a much better fit in the private sector.

DOGE is kind of a Rorschach blot for a lot of people. The right thinks it’s being effective, the left thinks it’s not. The interesting thing is that Trump is putting the left into a position where it’s arguing against something that is common sense—cutting red tape—which is never a good position to be in politics. Let me tell you something that I think Elon Musk has already told you—you could cut government headcount by 70% and it would not affect operations at all. I firmly believe that. You’ve probably noticed that rush hour in D.C. starts at 2:30pm. Elon Musk has demonstrated that he is pretty good at cutting useless people and getting the remaining people to work harder. I am completely in support of this. There might be some cases where cutting government headcount by 70% would severely impact operations. Well, I hope that happens to the IRS. The IRS, for its part, needs to be modernized. The IRS Service Center in Charlotte has piles and piles of paper returns stacked up all over the place.

I think DOGE sunsets in 2026. This is not something that can be accomplished in two years. You could cut for a decade and never get down to tag ends. But you can do a lot. And we haven’t even talked about the fact that a sizable portion of the federal workforce went home during the pandemic and never came back. I know some people in Canadian politics, and I know that Trudeau has massively expanded the bureaucracy. There are people in Ottawa who make $100,000 a year for the government, don’t work, and have a second job. The same thing is going on here.

A lot of attention has been focused on Elon and his social security numbers tweet, about how there are people age 190 who are receiving social security. Maybe this is or isn’t fraud, depending on who you ask. Yes, there is a lot of fraud in the government—just look at the PPP loan program. But really, the types of cuts that I am talking about are in personnel—you simply don’t need that many people to do the job. Not anywhere near that number of people. Now, I have worked with some anti-government types on Wall Street over the years, people who are suspicious of and even hostile to government bureaucracy. Believe me when I tell you that these government workers are not bad people. These are good, well-intentioned people. But they work in a system where practically nothing is expected of them. When you get into the higher levels of government—flag officers in the military, the Senior Executive Service, the cabinet positions—these are people who are actually working very hard, if not harder than people who work in the private sector. But your typical GS-12 bureaucrat? Life is good.

The funny thing about my waste, fraud, and abuse stories is that they came from the 1990s under Clinton when the government was actually lean and mean. I can’t even imagine what it’s like now. I remember when I was at the Coast Guard Academy that some enterprising journalist from the New London Day did an expose on waste at the Academy about our sports gala dinner, where we served steak and shrimp. Steak and shrimp, one night out of the year. That was the extent of the excess back then. As you can see from some of the stuff coming out of DOGE, like the Iraqi Sesame Street program (for $20 million), we have spent, even wasted money on a scale never before seen in our history

It will be painful. This is our Harding/Coolidge moment. But what came out of the Harding/Coolidge days was an economic expansion and technological progress that lasted a decade. But like I said, painful. If you cut a million federal workers, these are not people who are in possession of any marketable skills. If they find jobs, they will have to work ten times as hard, and it will be painful. If they don’t find jobs, it will be painful. But there is no growth without pain. Six months ago, we were talking about our unsustainable debt problem, and then when we try to do something about it, everyone chirps.

Note: this is not a political essay, simply the observations of someone who has worked in both government and finance.