CRFB Statement on Department of Government Efficiency

This week, President-elect Trump announced that he would be establishing a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) which would be tasked with working outside the government to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Although many details remain unclear – including whether the DOGE task force would be government- or privately-funded and what its mandate would be – President-elect Trump has announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would run the DOGE and would report recommendations no later than July 4 of 2026.

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

We welcome the creation of a new entity to get under the hood of the federal government and look for ways to reduce inefficiencies and generate fiscal savings. Given our cumbersome bureaucracy and large fiscal imbalances, the effort is long overdue.

Regardless of political views, we should all want the federal government to spend scarce dollars wisely. An aggressive effort to reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies could save billions or even trillions of dollars over a decade and could help improve the public’s faith in government.

Such an effort should look at all parts of the budget, especially in the areas of health care, national defense, and spending through the tax code, and it should look beyond just cutting fraud and reducing bureaucracy to also identify places where the taxpayer is not getting the best value for their dollar. Federal health care spending, in particular, is rife with overpayments and inefficiencies that offer the opportunity to substantially lower costs without meaningfully reducing quality or access to care. The drivers of the growth in primary spending are Social Security and federal health care programs – namely Medicare.

Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas. The recommendations will need Congressional buy-in, further emphasizing the need for this to be an effort reaching across the aisle and leaving all options on the table to address our fiscal imbalances.

It will take an all-hands-on-deck approach to fix our fiscal situation, and this effort could make a tremendous contribution. But it does not excuse the need to fully offset ALL new borrowing – whether for tax cuts or other policies – and begin to reduce deficits. Focusing on government efficiency is an important first step, and we look forward to the DOGE’s recommendations to do so.

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.