I was charged with identifying and eliminating unnecessary regulatory overlap for a local government about thirty years ago. That makes me unusually qualified to give my old friends Elon and Vivek some unsolicited advice about dealing with “waste” at the federal level.
There are two kinds of “waste.” The first–and this is you find the real money–is in expensive federal programs that CLs think are unnecessary. The problem here is that the decision to get the federal government involved in these fields was made decades ago, has been ratified by Congress many times over, and typically was intended to address a legitimate market failure. In short, these are political, not technical, issues that should be addressed by Congress rather than the DOGE. The best Elon and Vivek can do is to make a clear case for getting rid of the programs and turn the issues over to the politicians.
But there are also issues relating to process that should be addressed. In some cases, money is actually wasted because the government’s ability to use technology to find facts is inadequate; in others, there may be problems with overstaffing or overlapping org charts that don’t really make sense. Elon and Vivek will be doing the public a service if they can address these problems. They will need help, however, from insiders who are actually familiar with the issues. Outsiders with a limited understanding of the way government works will just be thrashing around without results if they go it alone.
One other thing: to the extent that obsolete technology is the problem, it will have to be addressed by spending more money up front. Eliminating waste in the long run may well not provide immediate gratification for fiscal hawks.