The Case for DOGE

The real purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency is to spearhead the beginning of a return to constitutional order. Success would be monumental. The effort to stop it will be commensurate.

President-elect Donald Trump’s choices to head his proposed new federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have already done a good deal of thinking about how to get the government off the backs of the American people. Writing in  The Wall Street Journal,  business leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy start with a sophisticated and accurate analysis of how the U.S. Constitution not only justifies their proposed efforts but in fact requires them:

We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

In  West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency  (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In  Loper Bright v. Raimondo  (2024), the court overturned the  Chevron  doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

The DOGE leaders propose to roll back unconstitutional regulations, of which there has been an enormous accumulation over the decades. It is the president’s duty to enforce federal laws, and that duty means enforcing them, not adding to them or reinterpreting them to fit the whims of the president and the permanent bureaucracy.

This gives the DOGE scope for an amazing amount of potential reforms that would dramatically reduce the size of government and the damage it does to the American people and the U.S. economy.

Musk and Ramaswamy say the DOGE will identify these rules and send them to Trump with the recommendation that he suspend their enforcement:

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

This is not government overreach but the very opposite, Musk and Ramaswamy say:

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be  correcting  the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

Musk and Ramaswamy also outline how this regulatory reform effort “provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” and they discuss the expected complaints and opposition toward the plan. They “expect to prevail,” they write.

“Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026,” in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, the proposed department leaders state. “There is no better birthday gift to our nation … than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.”

That is true. In addition to being constitutionally mandated and recently endorsed by the Supreme Court, this effort is long overdue.