Double Milei

I read (or heard) that Donald Trump was talking about getting input from Elon Musk on streamlining or pruning the federal government.  Now why Elon Musk would be a qualified individual for such an endeavor is far from clear to me.  It is true that he reduced the headcount at Twitter by something like 70-80% after he bought it but since the social media platform is mostly an automated business, he probably just asked his direct reports to terminate everyone who couldn’t code.  End of story.

But all of this brings up a good point.  Why does the federal government employ millions of people to do clerical work?  Just as banks and insurance companies shed millions of paper-pushing positions when they eliminated the paper, shouldn’t the various departments, bureaus and agencies do the same?  And how about the fact that it seems there are multiple agencies working on the same “problems.”  For instance:

The Administration for Native Americans (ANA)

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

Or how about:

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)

And finally:

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The Office of Environmental Management (no acronym!)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC)

How much you want to bet that you have to get all these agencies placated before you can get anything done that they have staked out as their turf?

I think Donald Trump is absolutely correct that streamlining the federal government (or more felicitously expressed, “taking a chainsaw to it”) is one of the greatest public services that any president could perform for this country.  He has my whole-hearted support in such an endeavor.  But will he be able to do it?  Didn’t the Obama administration distribute tanks and automatic weapons to everybody from the IRS to the post office?  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some IRS guys would go postal after being fired.  But the real trick will be performing surgery on the FBI and the other intelligence agencies.  Those guys are vicious.  And that’s not mentioning the CIA.  After all most people think they actually did kill Kennedy and all he did was abort the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Imagine what they’ll do if you try to take the food out of their mouths.  They’d probably break out a suitcase nuke.

But almost as much fun as firing everyone, would be to impose an across the board 25% reduction in pay for the whole federal bureaucracy (except the armed forces).  For the armed forces the trick would be a reduction in the number of generals by a factor of five.  That should keep them out of trouble.

Trump is definitely onto something.  And the idea of enlisting actual businessmen to help identify the dead wood in the federal government is a good idea.  Bloated bureaucracy has been the cause of over taxation and inefficiency since the Han dynasty ruled China.  I would guess that reducing the size of the federal government by 10% would balance the budget immediately.

Now granted these fired individuals would be mostly permanently unemployed.  They would initially cause a burden on our economy.  Basically, they would have no usable skills and no work ethic.  But this would eventually come off the books as they quickly starved to death.  And after all these government departments were neutered the rest of the American workforce would surge forward in productivity, no longer hampered by the stupidity and malevolence of the vast government bureaucracy.

On second thought, Trump should consult with Javier Milei.  If it worked in Argentina, it should work twice as well here.  Just double whatever he did.