Myrtle Beach, SC Copy the function and leave the merchandise. And states have a structural advantage here that nobody in this Forum has named, so let me name it because it decides the answer. Every state but one has a balanced budget requirement. That single fact changes everything about what an efficiency office does. In … Continue reading Should states copy a DOGE-style unit against Medicaid, unemployment, and licensing boards, or does the federal version only work as national political theater?
Weekly Correspondents’ Forum 2025
After Musk’s highest-visibility phase, can an efficiency project survive without a celebrity principal, or was founder energy the only thing that made agencies return a phone call?
Gastonia, NC The question treats the departure as an event. It was a deadline, and everybody could have read it in January. He was a special government employee. That designation carries a statutory limit of a hundred and thirty days of service in any three hundred and sixty-five. He was designated in late January. A … Continue reading After Musk’s highest-visibility phase, can an efficiency project survive without a celebrity principal, or was founder energy the only thing that made agencies return a phone call?
When DOGE recommendations collide with inspectors general, career counsel, and court stays, should that be read as healthy checks — or as the administrative state’s immune system rejecting a foreign organ?
Myrtle Beach, SC The question asks what happens when this collides with inspectors general. For a great many agencies, that collision could not occur, because the inspectors general were removed in the first week. On the twenty-fourth of January, something like seventeen or eighteen inspectors general were fired at once, by email, across most of … Continue reading When DOGE recommendations collide with inspectors general, career counsel, and court stays, should that be read as healthy checks — or as the administrative state’s immune system rejecting a foreign organ?
Is federal IT procurement — legacy systems, contractors, multi-year “modernization” that never ends — the actual waste engine, and if so why has every previous reform commission failed to kill it?
Gastonia, NC It is an engine, and the second half of this question contains a false premise that I want to correct before anybody builds on it. Not every previous reform failed. One passed. The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act became law in 2014. It gave agency chief information officers real authority over IT … Continue reading Is federal IT procurement — legacy systems, contractors, multi-year “modernization” that never ends — the actual waste engine, and if so why has every previous reform commission failed to kill it?
Should Social Security and Medicare administration be opened to the same improper-payment and systems audit as smaller programs, or does touching those brands poison any serious waste effort?
Myrtle Beach, SC Open them, and be ready for what the audit finds, because it is not what this Forum has been assuming. Social Security has one of the lowest improper-payment rates in the federal government. Well under one percent of benefits paid. Not one percent of the improper-payment total — one percent of the … Continue reading Should Social Security and Medicare administration be opened to the same improper-payment and systems audit as smaller programs, or does touching those brands poison any serious waste effort?
If Congress will not repeal the statutes that create the spending, can an efficiency office do more than delay outlays and demoralize staff — or is delay itself the only leverage a president has left?
Gastonia, NC This question is about whether a president may lawfully delay spending, and there is a statute that answers it directly, and this Forum has now discussed the subject for six months without naming it once. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It was passed because Richard Nixon refused to spend money Congress had … Continue reading If Congress will not repeal the statutes that create the spending, can an efficiency office do more than delay outlays and demoralize staff — or is delay itself the only leverage a president has left?
Do cuts and pauses in foreign-aid and humanitarian vehicles prove that a lot of spending had no domestic constituency — or that efficiency campaigns always start with the least-lobbied accounts rather than the largest ones?
Myrtle Beach, SC Both halves are partly right and the arithmetic settles which one matters more, so let me do the arithmetic. Total US foreign assistance runs somewhere under seventy billion dollars a year. USAID's share was around forty billion. Federal outlays are roughly six and three-quarter trillion. So the entire foreign aid budget is … Continue reading Do cuts and pauses in foreign-aid and humanitarian vehicles prove that a lot of spending had no domestic constituency — or that efficiency campaigns always start with the least-lobbied accounts rather than the largest ones?
Can artificial intelligence usefully flag fraud and duplicate payments inside government, or will agencies use “the model said so” to dodge the human accountability they already fail to provide?
Gastonia, NC Flag, yes. Verdict, no. And the rule I was about to demand was issued eleven days ago as federal policy, which nobody in this Forum seems to have noticed. On the third of April the Office of Management and Budget put out new guidance governing how agencies use artificial intelligence. It replaces the … Continue reading Can artificial intelligence usefully flag fraud and duplicate payments inside government, or will agencies use “the model said so” to dodge the human accountability they already fail to provide?
Is putting modern identity, claims, and audit software against federal benefit systems a long-overdue upgrade, or a privacy-and-error risk that will create a new class of wrongful denials?
Myrtle Beach, SC Overdue upgrade, and the last two months are a lesson in why the upgrade has to be run by people who understand the systems. In February the claim went around that Social Security had millions of people aged well over a hundred marked as alive in its records, some listed at a … Continue reading Is putting modern identity, claims, and audit software against federal benefit systems a long-overdue upgrade, or a privacy-and-error risk that will create a new class of wrongful denials?
After the dust settles, what should a serious republic treat as the lasting rule: clemency is total and unreviewable even when it looks like self-protection — or future presidents will now treat preemptive family-and-staff packages as standard equipment?
Myrtle Beach, SC This question offers two options and a third one appeared overnight. Just after midnight this morning, the President posted that the pardons Joe Biden granted to the January 6 committee and others are "hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT," because they were signed by autopen, and that … Continue reading After the dust settles, what should a serious republic treat as the lasting rule: clemency is total and unreviewable even when it looks like self-protection — or future presidents will now treat preemptive family-and-staff packages as standard equipment?
