Before the inauguration, many (myself included) hoped that DOGE could bring a certain kind of positive disruption, something that would challenge what increasingly felt like an untenable status quo and create room for something new. That hope was mistaken, but it sprang from a place of real need, a need that has not remotely been met.
The need that drove people toward DOGE hasn’t been met. But the answer isn’t simply more staff and more complexity either. Those can’t be our only choices: unmanageable bloat, or arbitrary cuts.
Lambert here: This is a long post mostly about the successes of the Louisiana Department of Education (!!), and the congruence of that effort with proposals made in a paper written in parallel by Pahlka. While the Louisiana effort is a fine example of “reinventing government” I’m not sure it works at the Federal level (more precisely, in a Federal system). Worth a read, though!
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