The Case for a "Department of Government Efficiency"

There ought to be a federal department exclusively focused on making government work better, that is, government efficiency.

It makes sense. After all, there are many ways that government could be more efficient. For example:

• Government-funded scientists say that they spend 44% of their research time on paperwork and bureaucratic requirements. That’s just an average. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from scientists who spend up to 70% of their time on bureaucracy. We should drastically reduce the administrative burden on scientists.

• The Paperwork Reduction Act paradoxically results in endless paperwork for government employees, and it’s not clear that anyone else benefits at all. We should repeal its information collection requirements, or at least raise the threshold for review and approval (i.e., current law requires bureaucratic review for any action that affects 10 people or more, which is an insanely low threshold for a country of well over 300 million people).

• The National Environment Policy Act (NEPA) creates an enormous and unnecessary paperwork burden for new infrastructure, and ironically has been used to block clean energy.

• Federal procurement is broken, with far too many inefficient rules that waste time and money, and that result in the government buying over-engineered products that don’t even work. We need extensive reform of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).

Many such cases.

We should have an official effort to address these issues (and much more). We could even call it a “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE. Such a cross-government agency could have a high impact on government efficiency, by providing a way to break out of the usual bureaucratic chains of command.

How should this new DOGE do its work?

First, they should spend a great deal of time developing an in-depth understanding of how each government agency works, how its data systems are structured, what regulations affect its work, and more.

Here’s an example of why it’s important to take your time. I was on the board of the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) for many years—a collaboration between Rice University scholars and the Houston school district (one of the largest in the country). For more than a year, HERC had to figure out how to process the Houston data. It was frustrating. I repeatedly heard stories like this:

“There was this data field titled something like XP518VC, and we would ask what that data field was tracking, what it meant, etc. We’d get