Government bureaucracies need occasional overhaul and rejuvenation.

Trump’s motivation is more about #punishment and #retribution.

His Cabinet choices point to that.

At the Justice Department, he is prepared to fire the team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith on two indictments of the president-elect.

More broadly, he looks to dismantle what he regards as an unresponsive and oppositional administrative state.

Experts say what Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about
— both in terms of money saved and workforce reductions
— is unrealistic and that they will soon bump into political and economic realities that will leave them far short of what they claim.

That doesn’t mean, however, that at the outset the president-elect should not be taken seriously about how #disruptive he will try to be in his efforts.

Musk has claimed he can cut the budget by roughly $2 trillion,
but analysts say that would require drastic (and unpopular) cuts in entitlements programs, defense or other vital services.

#Elaine #Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, who oversaw Gore’s reinventing government initiative, offered counsel to the incoming administration in a piece on the Brookings website entitled,
“Cut the government with a scalpel, not an axe.”

That was the approach taken during the Clinton administration, which resulted in the elimination of 640,000 pages of internal agency rules
and a reduction in the federal workforce of 426,000 employees.

Kamarck, however, questioned whether the federal bureaucracy is truly bloated,
as Ramaswamy and the Trump team claim.

There are, she noted about 19,000 Border Patrol agents.

How many of those would Trump cut while still making good on his promise to secure the border and deport millions?

There are about 1,800 air traffic controllers, she said. Would Trump’s team cut that workforce significantly, causing potential flight cancellations and disruption?

“It will take about a week and Congress will say, ‘Hey, you can’t do this,’” she said.

And how deeply would he try to cut the workforce at the Social Security Administration,
at the risk of checks not being sent out promptly or other breakdowns in a program that he has otherwise vowed not to touch?

Kamarck offered other examples of where the Trump team could produce only symbolic victories.

Trump has targeted the Department of Education for elimination.

Kamarck said the department could be eliminated but two key programs likely would remain
— the student loan program and Title 1,
which adds to state and local governments for low-achieving students in areas of higher poverty.

The student loan program could be shifted to the Treasury Department
and Title 1 to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said,
which means a portion of its budget would be shifted rather than cut.

Its workforce is the smallest of any Cabinet agency.

Kamarck’s point is that after programs are shifted, the money saved might not be significant and the number of workers eliminated would be tiny.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/24/doge-trump-musk-ramaswamy-budget/