There they go again. That’s what you had to think, seeing Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Maxine Waters clasping hands in protest, chanting “We will win!” outside the offices of USAID, the faceless bureaucratic institution targeted by Elon Musk and his band of no doubt meritorious reformers, one of whom goes by the moniker Big Balls. If ever there was a character destined to fix the federal government, it’s Big Balls, no? After all, dude just graduated high school a couple of years ago.
Anyway, there were the Dems, taking the bait — again. Seriously, you’re going to die on the hill of defending an agency no one’s heard of that delivers foreign humanitarian aid which most people also don’t care about? What is this, The Producers? Do you want to keep losing?
Look, this is no defense of the culture war megalomania of Trump and Musk, but at least the idea of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is something Democrats ought to embrace, no? Remember when reform was the province of the left? Instead, Democrats find themselves defending broken, sclerotic government. It took all of five years to build the Hoover Dam. How can it be that, nearly a century later, $42 billion for rural broadband in Biden’s infrastructure bill — passed four years ago — never got implemented? How is it that after allocating nearly $8 billion for electric charging stations, only seven of a promised 500,000 by 2030 have actually been built?
Rather than reflexively oppose whatever Trump and Musk are for, how about saying: Yes, the government needs reform. Let’s do that as the adults we are and get you some results you can feel in your everyday lives?
Musk and Trump are actually handing Democrats — especially those in cities — a giant opportunity right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Musk is all “move fast and break things.” Well, let’s see how shooting first and ducking questions later works when you’re reshaping giant bureaucracies that, for all their faults, real people actually rely upon.
In six short weeks, DOGE incompetence has been breathtaking. Trump has claimed Musk and the Muskettes have uncovered “tens of billions” in savings already, but a Washington Post fact check puts the number at $2 billion in annual savings out of a $6 trillion budget, mostly from the assault on DEI and climate change programs — not from substantive improvements in governmental efficiency. Even true conservatives — those who believe as a matter of principle in limited government — see DOGE as antithetical to their goal of taming the welfare state.
Moreover, Trump — the biggest spending president in U.S. history — is musing about returning to taxpayers all these supposed savings DOGE is unearthing. That’s brilliant politics — a never-ending stream of stimulus checks over that blocky signature of his — but let’s not pretend it’s reform.
At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has chronicled DOGE as “not only a bonfire of cruelty but a reign of ineptitude.” (DOGE, Thompson explains, laid off hundreds of scientists, engineers and safety officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which safeguards and assembles nuclear weapons; when Musk’s geniuses realized that they were attacking expertise and not waste, they scrambled to try and bring these essential workers back.)
According to NewsGuard’s Reality Check, a wonderful resource for finding your way through today’s fogs of disinformation, Musk has made 28 false claims to the tune of 825 million social media views. Those include debunked posts about USAID funding research that led to the creation of Covid-19 and paying for Ben Stiller and Angelina Jolie to visit Ukraine to boost Zelensky’s popularity. Remember the headlines about $50 million in shipments of condoms to Gaza? Turns out, wrong. Never happened. We’re witnessing reform by anecdote; you tell me when that’s worked to improve everyday lives.
The political opening for Democrats is already plain as day: Give up the knee jerk resistance, stop the Hitler comparisons tempting though they may be, and make the case for competence. The new Democratic slogan should be Make Government Work Again.
Here in Philly, that means forsaking performative progressivism for real reform. Show would-be voters their government in action, getting stuff done for them. If we’ve learned anything from recent voter turnout results, it should be that the electorate needs something to believe in again. What might that look like?
Well, Mayor Parker gave a fine speech before the Chamber of Commerce last week, promising to focus on affordable housing in her second year. And since then, she’s convened all the right stakeholders and made an impressive hire to lead Housing Opportunities Made Easy (H.O.M.E., get it?), her vessel for boldly tackling the affordable housing crisis. While the plan is light on specifics just now, give Parker this: She doesn’t shy from the big challenge. Of course, as we’ve seen, taking on the seemingly intractable — Kensington, housing, public safety or cleanliness — will be characterized by fits and starts, hits and misses. A process, in other words. Maybe auditing and rightsizing local government — aligning expenditures with outcomes — would be a way in the meantime to reignite trust in those we hire to represent our interests?
Get your swagger back, local government, and you can be a model for national Dems. After all, what are the chances that Mayor Parker’s $6.4 billion government is running at peak efficiency? That’s 68 percent more than Mayor Nutter’s last budget in 2015 — what kind of return have you seen on that added investment? And while we’re at it: Has anybody asked why we need roughly the same number of city workers as when JFK was president and the city population was nearly double what it is now?
Others have done this — even on a large scale
You know what would kill — and would be smart politics to boot? A local DOGE, smartly done. Audit the government. Find efficiencies. Improve inter-agency cooperation. Work with our regional neighbors on growing jobs. Deliver for the taxpayer. There’s a blueprint for it: Taming City Hall: Rightsizing for Results, a 1995 book by Gerald Seals, the city manager in Corvallis, Oregon. Beginning in 1988, each of Seals’ budgets were less than the one preceding them, and yet taxes and crime went down, while economic productivity and city worker salaries went up.
More recently, we could look even closer to home. Back in 2011, then-Montgomery County Commissioner Josh Shapiro instituted a novel accounting practice: Zero-based budgeting. He tasked each department with writing a mission statement and then budgeting from zero — rather than its current budget — solely to meet the mission. It exposed all the wasteful political claims that had found their way into the county’s way of doing business for decades.
The result? Within a year, a $10 million budget hole and a $49 million structural deficit turned into a $1.6 million surplus, a 10 percent decrease in spending, and, yet, increased investments in human services, education and public safety. Suddenly, Montco believed again. It was so successful that then-candidate for Mayor of Philadelphia Jim Kenney pledged to institute the practice here — a promise unfulfilled.
But, wait. There’s an even better model, one that really makes Musk and his prepubescent minions look like the unqualified little men they are. Back in the early 90s, we had a vice president who took it upon himself to literally reinvent the federal government. Al Gore was charged by then-President Clinton to do just that and the result was the smallest, most efficient federal workforce since the days of JFK. How’d he do it?
First, as Charles Clark lays out in Government Executive, Gore started with an intentional theory of change — unlike what we’re seeing from the Musketeers. It was based on a serious policy tome, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler.
But he didn’t just read one book and act. He oversaw some 250 employees embark upon a six-month canvassing of agencies, which produced a National Performance Review that “proposed 1,200 changes to ‘serve customers better,’ relieve businesses of unneeded regulations, exploit technology to widen access to federal services and information, encourage plain English documents, improve coordination with state and local governments, cement community relationships, build new labor-management partnerships and empower front-line workers. The last included eliminating such ‘silly’ things as employee time sheets.”
The VA was reformed, as was the IRS, where the percentage of electronic tax filing skyrocketed. Gore was invested in this effort to update and streamline government for all eight years of his vice presidency; even after the reforms were adopted, he saw to it that “champions” of reform were embedded in federal agencies to follow through on actual implementation.
Gore got virtually no credit for his governmental makeover, perhaps because he was so un-Musk-like about it. But could his actions have been related to the great — and progressive — Clinton economic record? The record 4 percent GDP growth, the most new jobs ever created in a single administration, the precipitous decline in poverty and income inequality — all while balancing the federal budget?
Turns out, all three of our examples — from Corvallis, Oregon to Montco to the White House — bear out the link, when done right, between governmental reform and shared prosperity. Surely, there’s an opportunity for Mayor Parker to pivot and take advantage of this moment.
That’s precisely what a previous, legendary mayor did. When Ed Rendell was elected in 1991, he was an establishment candidate, not a reformer. But Gore’s reinventing ways got to him, so much so that, as Drexel professor politics and author Richardson Dilworth explains in his book Reforming Philadelphia, 1682–2022, the Vice President would dub Rendell “America’s Mayor” — singling him out for prioritizing efficiency and accountability, through acts like the establishment of an Office of Management and Productivity and the creation of a “volunteer task force of 300 executives to introduce the types of efficiency standards that were the byline in the private sector.”
Soon, Mayor Parker will announce and presumably adopt the recommendations of the Tax Reform Commission, which I hear will include innovative investments in local workforce development. That would be a promising start. But who will be the Mayor’s Al Gore, someone empowered to — in an un-Musk way — turn City Hall upside down and shake it loose of all the impediments to best serve you?
That kind of laser-like approach just might position Philly as a national model for how to smartly answer the worst slash and burn tactics of Trump and his mini-me.
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