Elon Musk has repeatedly achieved the impossible, but not even he and his Department of Government Efficiency could tame Washington, DC, and its massive federal bureaucracy.
Yet there’s still hope — and the need has never been more urgent.
The Senate parliamentarian gutted major cost savings at the heart of the Republican reconciliation bill that President Donald Trump signed Friday, so he must resume DOGE efforts immediately.
In Silicon Valley terms, DOGE had product-market fit; it just didn’t have the right tech stack. This time, the White House must get the architecture right.
Step 1 is understanding what went wrong. DOGE’s failures stemmed from three fundamental flaws that doomed the effort from the start.
The first was structural. Don Devine, who ran the Office of Personnel Management for President Ronald Reagan, warned that creating a new agency to shrink government never works — it only causes confusion, diffusion of responsibility and