A constitutional winter is upon us, partly enabled by last summer’s spike in the price of eggs. While the Federal Reserve battled egg inflation, angry voters reinstalled Donald Trump in the White House. Among his first acts: appointing two tech billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, as efficiency czars. What their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—more an advisory group, really—proposes to do, however, involves constitutional gambits that would rob James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” of sleep.
Trump rode to victory attacking grocery costs and convincing voters that government was wasteful and that he alone could fix their grievances. His supporters included people fed up with Bidenomics and administrative snafus, everyday bureaucratic mazes that waste time, money and patience.
Incoming presidents have often promised to address such snafus. Most famously, former president Bill Clinton, with his vice president, Al Gore, launched a “reinventing government” initiative that sought solutions from career public servants even as the initiative trumpeted basic business principles.
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In stark contrast, Trump’s first-term agenda of “deconstructing the administrative state” failed in its ultimate goal of making key federal positions at-will hires to somehow deliver better government. Through DOGE, Trump will try again to overhaul the bureaucracy, this time with the help of business people whose ideas about the Constitution presage lengthy court battles.
In November, what appeared as the DOGE plan in the Wall Street Journal revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of public administration. Rather than addressing administrative snafus with a scalpel, DOGE risks creating constitutional ones with its axe.
DOGE’s lip service to eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” thinly veils an agenda aimed at dismantling corporate watchdogs, from the EPA to the FDIC, and politicizing agencies like the DOJ and IRS to pursue presidential ends, without constitutional guardrails. This approach threatens the delicate constitutional balance that has sustained the Republic for over a century, dividing power among the three branches and the nonpartisan bureaucracy in their midst.
To nurture this balance, DOGE could consider mission-driven recommendations from the good government community of public administration scholars and nonpartisan research groups like the National Academy of Public Administration. They routinely investigate the best ways to make government more efficient and effective. Their past research findings can improve hiring, program implementation, cost management and other administrative techniques. These could have real, positive impacts on government efficiency while still allowing Trump to leave a positive legacy on the civil service. Plenty of these initiatives are already moving bureaucracy away from its technocratic, often snafu-riddled proceduralism to a more publicly engaged demonstration of outcomes.
Instead, the DOGE blueprint blatantly ignores Congress—even with GOP control—and champions the “unitary executive” theory of government by presenting normal bureaucratic rulemaking as a supposed scourge of democracy. Overstretching the summer’s Supreme Court rulings in West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the DOGE blueprint assumes that this executive, backed by a sympathetic judiciary, can “drive action” through reorganization, rule nullification and impoundments.
Congress must confront this challenge and assert its status as the “first among equals” (primus inter pares) in the three branches of U.S. government. Congress shaped the administrative state through the Pendleton Act of 1883, creating the merit system for civil servants, and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, requiring participatory rulemaking in creating regulations. DOGE cannot simply rescind or replace current administrative rules without judicial approval.
Even the world’s wealthiest individuals must recognize that a country is not a company. Nobody said efficiency was the reason for democracy. Efficiency is just one core public value that must take its place alongside equity, neutral competence, effectiveness and accountability. In fact, conflict among such values is typical in a democracy, hence the need for expertise, impartiality and experience among those involved in day-to-day governing. A tech bro culture that hopes to put feds “in trauma” harms public safety and businesses that rely on regulatory stability.
Oath-bound civil servants, more than “shrewd operators” and “artful dodgers” helped make America great. In the past, reformers who campaigned against the bureaucracy have often found it necessary to enlist—guess who—competent bureaucrats to advance their priorities. The Trump loyalty tests and DOGE measures will instead drive out such workers and deter the best and the brightest from serving. The incoming administration as well promises to institute the “Schedule F” reclassification of federal workers. This executive order, already attempted in the final months of the first Trump administration, would politicize parts of the federal bureaucracy by transferring many civil service positions structured on merit into this new category focused more on supporting and advocating for policies supported by a president.
If implemented in the first months of the second Trump administration, Schedule F would dismantle a large part of the federal Civil Service and probably degrade more recent efforts at agency rebuilding and merit-based worker protections scrambled together during the Biden administration. It would allow for the arbitrary firing of federal bureaucrats based on perceptions of political support of the president. This could start the transformation of the federal bureaucracy back to a 19th-century style “spoils system” where political leaders reward supporters with bureaucratic jobs regardless of qualifications.
The nation’s founders enshrined the separation of powers precisely to counter monarchical tendencies more than two centuries ago. Yet presidentialism, advancing since Nixon’s era, now invites a constitutional referendum on the intentionally limited powers, in the name of reforming bureaucracy.
Musk and Ramaswamy risk taking us back to the system of patronage, corruption and incompetence that defined government through the 1800s and that past reformers eliminated. President Theodore Roosevelt also appointed a businessman to lead the reforming Keep Commission in 1905, but his progressive ethos and movement is exactly what DOGE wants reversed. Roosevelt confronted capitalism’s excesses amid popular anger. Today we cannot ignore the nation’s alarming income gap between rich and poor. DOGE, however, won’t draw your attention to the combined net worth of its leaders and the incoming Cabinet running in the vicinity of $500 billion, a level rife with conflicts of interest. Despite the irony of two commissioners heading one efficiency body, and their railing against regulatory strangleholds, our economic system seems strangely capable of churning out collective trillionaires. An overhyped overhaul that exacerbates inequality, however, will further alienate Americans from engaging in constitutional debates or defending protections they didn’t realize were lost.
Perhaps disruption, then, is the real point, as DOGE measures drag out in courts, competent public servants exit and presidential powers further rise unchecked. With the free press dying of competition from billionaire-controlled social media, and factionalism rising in its wake, the impulses that scared the framers of the Constitution have never been stronger, as the separation of parties tramples the separation of powers.
“Could it happen here?” has nagged the country for a decade now. Today a waylaid Congress, a partisan judiciary, and an overreaching presidency may deal violence to the Constitution in our lifetime. If that happens, a constitutional snafu will make our current worries about the price of eggs seem quaint.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
