January 23, 2025
By Andy Smarick
In late November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy co-authored a much-discussed op-ed on how DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) would overhaul the federal government. These two tech titans—unelected, brash, and aiming to affect hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars—took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to bemoan the influence of… unelected, brash officials who affect hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Though Musk and Ramaswamy thought they were poking the political left for its fondness for powerful, insulated technocrats, they were also demonstrating that the political right can be equally prone to banking on highly educated, high-energy “experts” who are freed from the shackles of republican governing.
One Genus, Two Species
There are two types of technocrats. The first is the well-known progressive variety: elite-educated, purportedly dispassionate, knowledgeable about the “science” of governing. They are certain that they know what society really needs. They are also certain that they know how to use the tools of public authority to deliver results.
The other type is favored by conservatives. These right-technocrats are generally private-sector stars who’ve made lots of money, talk tough, and have experience running big enterprises. They too believe they know what society really needs, and they are sure that they can whip the government into shape. You’ll see them asked to cut costs and streamline; they’re put in charge of bureaucratic messes and budget offices. They’re sometimes given the title “czar.” We can’t forget that Musk and Ramaswamy are simply the latest models of this make.
What unites the two types of technocrats is a willingness, even an eagerness, to operate outside of the normal practices of republican governing. Seen through their eyes, state action is often inefficient, insufficiently focused on outcomes, and unaware of the true common good. Normal government process doesn’t solve the big problems it should, but it does reliably produce bloat and sclerosis, they believe. What’s needed, therefore, is smart, courageous executive action.
I’ve spent years in and around public education systems, so I’ve seen my fair share of both types. The left generates Ivy-educated consultants who are sure they understand social justice and possess impeccable common sense. They set about adjusting funding formulas, rewriting certification requirements, and crafting new early-learning rules. The right generates business executives who know spreadsheets, love making hard calls, and detest unions and similar roadblocks to action. They set about cutting costs, questioning practitioners, and establishing performance metrics. Both want to make the big decisions centrally. Others can’t be trusted—that’s why we’re in this mess after all.
But this shared mindset is why both typically fail. Travel down the historical road of school reform and you’ll find broken-down technocratic initiatives in the ditches on the left (e.g., novel agencies, programs, mandates) and right (e.g., slashed line items, hulking data systems, and complicated accountability scorecards). And it’s not merely that the initiatives didn’t produce the promised results. They also generated resentment along the way. Those pushing the reform plans thought of themselves as brilliant and confident but were seen by others as haughty, uninformed, incurious, and stubborn.
America is not made up of zeros and ones. Governing is not an exercise in engineering. It’s human. Both species of technocrats are attuned and opposed to the dilatory and the inefficient. But public leadership in a continental, pluralist democratic republic conceived in liberty requires slowing down, listening, negotiating, and compromising. Townhall meetings, public hearings, legislative committees, appropriations processes, separated powers, open-meeting rules, freedom-of-information policies, and notice-and comment-provisions are features not bugs of our system. They allow the people to be in charge and reach mutually acceptable decisions.
When you instead prioritize swift, strong, unilateral action and dispense with these institutions and practices, whether you are on the right or left, you might think you’re being strong, but you’re liable to make big mistakes, undermine self-government, and sow the seeds of public dissension.
Early Warning Signs
Even though DOGE is in its earliest days, many of the anti- (or at least extra-) institutional warning signs are already flashing. I’ll name just a few.
It’s not an actual department despite the name. Creating a real department requires congressional action, including an authorization and appropriations. There’s been none of that, meaning no debate, defined powers, limitations, budget, or tasks. And certainly no congressional oversight.
DOGE aims to drastically reduce federal spending, but it has no power to do anything of the sort. That’s up to congressional appropriators and the formulas in federal law.
It’s not clear who is employing DOGE staff or how they are getting paid. It has been reported that those involved are using encrypted messaging apps (a common tack to avoid public requests for information). All of this runs afoul of normal government practice; indeed, as soon President Trump was sworn in, a transparency-related lawsuit was filed in federal court.
It’s not clear how this initiative interacts with the official transition (which is a funded and overseen set of prescribed activities), OMB, or other official entities. Those hired mostly appear to have little to no experience in public institutions. According to reports, they are going to rely heavily on advanced technology to make key decisions. Not exactly small-town deliberative democracy.
Chesterton’s Regulation
So what’s the problem? The recent fight over H-1B visas is a good example of what awaits us. To Musk and Ramaswamy, a particular type of pro-immigration policy is the obvious right answer. But that’s not the view of many Americans who are more concerned about solidarity, employment, and acculturation than the economic preferences of affluent, faraway employers who’ve never invested in their communities.
The problem here is not immigration per se but the tone-deafness of technocrats. If you are unaware of or indifferent to the history of an issue, the competing priorities involved, and the uneasy compromises reached over the years, you will reach “obvious” conclusions that are obvious to few others. I have a bit of experience here. More than a decade ago, I was a state’s deputy commissioner of education, and we undertook a massive deregulation project. We combed through mountains of rules looking for areas to cut.
The first lesson I learned was that this would be far harder than expected. Regulations are tied up with a variety of court cases, state statutes, departmental rules, district polices, and local practices. Most of the regulations amounted to fleshing out vague directives in law—related to facilities or content standards or bus driver licenses. Most were unobjectionable. If we did find something that seemed unnecessarily burdensome, we would study the matter further and often learn why the regulation was written and how the system had adjusted to it. If we thought, on balance, it still needed amending, we had to address the concerns of parents, teachers, advocacy groups, district leaders and others who thought otherwise and sometimes had reasonable points. More than once I realized that a proposed regulatory recission might well revivify a long-dormant problem or conflict.
We cared about good governing and were committed to acting prudently, and yet we still stirred up—often inadvertently—more hornets nests than you could imagine. If we suffered the price of technocratic tinkering, just imagine what will happen when the DOGE team—lacking governing experience and content knowledge but chock full of confidence and AI—try to overhaul rules related to special education, zoning, housing, water quality, and workplace safety.
Support, Don’t Replace, Responsible Institutions
None of this is meant to say that DOGE is a mistake. It can accomplish some good if it commits to working through our democratic institutions instead of behaving like philosopher-kings on PEDs.
Two concrete suggestions: First, its greatest potential is in identifying federal rules that extend beyond statutory authorization. Rather than wait for litigants and courts to make use of the major questions doctrine and the end of Chevron, DOGE guidance can spur the president and cabinet secretaries to begin the process of dialing back overextended executive-branch policymaking. Importantly, this would mean not tasking DOGE staff with policy decisions they are unqualified to make. The tech enthusiasts and junior attorneys on the DOGE team won’t understand the consequences of jettisoning a trade-adjustment or submerged-aquatic-vegetation rule. But they can highlight for the administration’s responsible officials where agencies got ahead of their congressional blocking.
A second area relates to efficiency. Although the DOGE team can’t become content experts across the federal government in a matter of months, they will be able to find programs that are duplicative, funding streams that are low-ROI, and offices that could be consolidated. For instance, they won’t know the reasons behind or value of fisheries programs or charter-school facilities grants, but they will be able to note if such activities are spread across multiple departments or haven’t succeeded as expected. Again, this is not presuming to know more or better than Congress or Senate-confirmed departmental leaders. Quite the opposite. It is conducting research and analysis and writing decision memos for those with the knowledge and authority to make governing decisions.
In total, then, DOGE would do well to see itself as assisting our governing institutions; that is, it should not presume to make policy pronouncements or budget decisions but instead help Congress, the President, and his administration to do. Said another way, DOGE will compound our technocratic problems if its leaders and staff aim to do the work of our institutions for them.
Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He writes regularly at his Substack “Governing Right.”