Right-of-center fiscal experts hope that, if former President Donald Trump wins the election, his proposed government efficiency commission will improve federal data collection practices and cut wasteful spending, but worry that doing so could spur resistance in Congress and the administrative state.

Trump announced in September that he would establish an agency to evaluate government efficiency and tap billionaire supporter Elon Musk to head it. Musk later dubbed the proposed commission the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Experts who spoke with the DCNF were largely optimistic about DOGE, highlighting the large sums of improper payments disbursed by federal agencies and general bureaucratic redundancies.

“At the end of the day, I truly think the thing that’s been missing for decades is that really granular data,” Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “You see what [Musk] did with Twitter, right? It’s not really that he went to Twitter and got rid of functionality. It’s that he literally sent people around and figured out that they could reduce the workforce by 85 percent, restructure the workforce and produce, actually, more product.”

Despite slashing the vast majority of the social media platform’s workforce, X under Musk has seen its average number of daily active users grow slightly and introduced an array of new features ranging from job postings to revenue sharing with users.

According to Stern, a possible second Trump administration could use data collected on agencies to similarly purge low-performing government employees or programs with minimal impact on the services currently provided to Americans.

“There’s almost certainly an enormous amount of wasted resources, office supplies, labor hours, workers, but my point is no one actually has that data,” he said. “No one has actually gone around and been in a position to really get that kind of fine grained data on exactly how much kind of lack of productivity there is, how much complete waste there is of mostly workers and labor hours or other resources.”

The federal government employs over 2 million civilian personnel, costing taxpayers about $271 billion during the 2022 fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Stern pointed out conservatives have long worked to get information like this from the bureaucracy.

“There have been attempts in Congress for many years to get a firm accounting of the number of federal programs and the real details about the programs, how many workers there actually are for a program, what they do with their time, what kind of work they’re engaged in, where grants go, all that stuff,” he continued. “What has actually happened every single time is the bills never get passed because at the end of the day, the bureaucrats come out and say, we quite literally couldn’t comply with this.”

He went on to speculate that Trump could circumvent Congress and demand this data from federal agencies unilaterally.

Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute, diverged from Stern by arguing that Trump’s commission should not focus on increasing the efficiency of government programs, but rather on eliminating them.

“The main problem with the federal government is that it tries to do too much — too many things that are properly state, local, and private responsibilities,” Edwards told the DCNF. “Federal programs are hugely inefficient — but that’s because the government is so massive that members of Congress don’t have time to do real oversight on programs and prune the worst ones. So program elimination needs to come first, then we can make remaining programs more efficient.”

Edwards said the primary target of this reduction effort should be programs that provide federal aid to state programs, citing a 2019 study he authored which found that such programs suffer from high levels of waste, fraud and abuse. The study also argued that federal aid programs make it difficult for new, more efficient, policies to arise at the state level because federal dollars often come with conditions that force states to adopt certain standards, such as federally mandated speed limits on nationally funded highways.

Stern pointed out that cutting programs would require congressional support.

Federal assistance programs like these also contribute to the deficit, according to Edwards. In June the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan government analyst, projected that the United States would run a $1.9 trillion deficit during the 2024 fiscal year, up $400 billion from the previous estimate. The national debt surpassed $35 trillion for the first time in July.

“Improper payments are another obvious area to find solutions,” Christopher Neefus, communications director of the spending watchdog group Open The Books, told the DCNF.

The Biden-Harris administration is on track to have approved over $1 trillion in improper payments, which federal guidelines define as any disbursement “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount or for the wrong reason.” Erroneous payments from the Medicaid and Medicare systems, as well as fraud in COVID-19 relief programs, have been major avenues for such waste.

In a similar vein to improper payments, Capital Research Center spokesperson Sarah Lee told the DCNF that the proposed agency should clamp down on “mission creep in the service of political goals within federal agencies,” pointing to things like federal spending on get-out-the-vote efforts. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of the Interior weighed using taxpayer funds to boost voter turnout among Native American voters, a historically Democratic demographic. The Biden-Harris State Department has also disbursed dozens of grants aimed at pushing LGBT ideology on developing nations. One such grant sought to foment “queer-feminist discourse” in Albania on the taxpayer dime.

Neefus pointed toward government payments to entities in Russia and China as well as pricey diversity initiatives that are hamstringing many government projects as potential targets of the DOGE. Similarly to Stern, he pointed toward Congress as a possible obstacle in Trump’s quest for administrative reform.

‘The [congressional] committee process always incentivizes more special spending for favored parties,” he told the DCNF. “Plenty of the Government Accountability Office’s cuts are sitting on a to-do list undone — either by Congress or by the relevant agency. How motivated will they be to make legislative and allocation decisions based on the findings? That’s really where the public comes in and needs to apply pressure.”

Trump’s effort to reign in administrative waste wouldn’t be the first such initiative in American history. President Ronald Reagan launched an effort led by private sector leaders in 1982 to review the federal government and recommend cuts to bring down waste and government inefficiency, Government Executive reported. The effort was dubbed the Grace Commission taking the name of its chairman, J. Peter Grace.

The commission ultimately made 2,500 recommendations aimed at making the government more efficient but the vast majority were never implemented, particularly those requiring action from Congress, according to Government Executive. It did succeed, however, in pushing to close unnecessary military bases and transferring the administration of airports near D.C. from federal control to a metropolitan agency.

After his work with the Reagan administration was complete, Grace went on to found Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW). Tom Schatz, current president of CAGW, told the DCNF that the federal government could save trillions by curtailing improper payments, reducing contributions to the United Nations, eliminating federal support of some state programs, reshuffling the government’s real estate portfolio, eliminating some federal subsidies, cutting back on earmarks, curbing some forms of corporate welfare and closing down the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NEH and NEA have paid for programs that instruct teachers on how to integrate “queer” content into their classrooms and bankrolled media aimed at promoting feminism, transgenderism and left-of-center racial discourse, among other themes. The NEA funded a film festival in June where gay pornography was screened.

Schatz pointed out that, beyond simple cuts, pushing for the adoption of uniform technology between agencies could go a long way to improving efficiency.

“You know, when you leave the military, of course, you become a veteran,” he said. “Your health records should transfer easily from [the Department of Defense to the Department of Veterans Affairs], but it doesn’t.”

Updates like these can be difficult to implement given the sheer volume of federal regulations. There are hundreds of thousands of pages worth of such rules, according to the General Services Administration.

“If something like this happens, it’s imperative that the White House follows up, puts the recommendations into their budgets and talks about it as much as possible,” Schatz continued after having warned that the DOGE could face steep resistance from entrenched bureaucrats.

Trump struck a blow against the permanent bureaucracy after Supreme Court justices he appointed made the deciding votes to overturn Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a long-standing precedent that required courts to defer to agency interpretations of the law when the legal language was ambiguous