DOGE Can’t Just Trim Waste. It Has to Cut Government — A Lot.

Trump has said that he wants DOGE to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, are among those who have urged DOGE to target waste and fraud at the Department of Defense. On the right, a number of lawmakers have embraced DOGE, including Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who has called for fixing “bureaucratic blunders.”

But here’s the problem: If DOGE only targets obvious waste and fraud, it will miss the real roots of government dysfunction. Many parts of government can’t be run more efficiently; they simply shouldn’t exist at all.

DOGE can’t make the government more efficient by making all existing programs work better. The truth is that a lot of the federal government’s objectives and programs are directly contradictory to each other. Without scrapping some of them, waste and inefficiency is guaranteed.

We believe DOGE needs a broader and more fundamental mission: to question the very purpose of government programs and objectives. DOGE should force us as a society to reconsider if the government should be responsible for as much as it does today. Only by shrinking the number and scope of government programs will we get an efficient and effective state. Without reexamining the very purpose of government, we’d just be making an overloaded freight train run faster in the wrong direction.

In that spirit, in a new report for the Cato Institute, we have written a memo to the future leaders of DOGE, proposing $2 trillion in immediate spending cuts, tens of trillions more over the coming decades and rollbacks of regulations on every sector of the economy, from agriculture to zero-emissions vehicles. People on the left and right will hate some of our suggestions, but they will also find things to like.

We propose some areas for small savings, such as privatizing the U.S. Postal Service and culling certain subsidies to universities. But we also call for more fundamental reforms, including returning many federal government functions to states, slashing almost all industrial subsidies and reforming entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Today’s federal government is a gargantuan bureaucracy with countless objectives ostensibly delivered through thousands of programs and regulations. The result is that different parts of the government inevitably end up working at cross-purposes.

This means if DOGE tries to tackle surface-level inefficiencies, it will miss deeper problems that can only be eradicated by limiting the government’s role to its essential functions.

Consider federal subsidies. The government funds drug and vaccine research to improve public health, but also erects regulatory barriers that delay or discourage these treatments from reaching the market, creating “invisible graveyards” of drugs that could work but don’t have formal approval. The federal government likewise subsidizes solar panels and electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions, but imposes tariffs on the same products, which deter decarbonization. Working at cross-purposes means goals aren’t achieved and consumers pay higher costs.

Infrastructure projects highlight similar contradictions. The federal government wants highways, bridges and public transit built quickly and cheaply. Yet federal environmental rules delay projects, while sweetheart provisions for trade unions and tariffs on construction materials such as steel make delivery more expensive. Affordable housing programs aim to increase the housing supply, but laws like the Endangered Species Act and wetland protection measures restrict where development can occur.

These conflicting functions often have negative fiscal consequences. Disaster relief programs offer aid (often to relatively wealthy households) after hurricanes or floods, but federally subsidized flood insurance encourages risky construction in high-danger zones to begin with. This increases costs to all taxpayers by making the need for aid more likely.

Subsidies also induce overproduction of crops like corn and soy — key ingredients in unhealthy foods. At the same time, the government pays other farmers to grow less, taxes Americans to protect politically favored produce and then spends billions on nutrition programs to promote healthier eating. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently criticized high-fructose corn syrup in American soft drinks But it is used because tariffs make cane sugar prohibitively expensive for U.S. manufacturers.

You can’t eradicate inefficiencies caused by counter-programming through better management, AI or even regulatory simplification. The only solution is for the government to pursue a few clear, constitutionally enumerated objectives – and drop everything else.

Musk should understand this lesson instinctively. In a 2023 biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson describes how the tech entrepreneur instructs design teams at Tesla and SpaceX to question every requirement of the manufacturing process – and then delete any part of the process that’s not absolutely necessary. (Musk says you’re only cutting enough when you need to add at least 10% back, and only then does he tell his teams to simplify and optimize the remaining tasks.) This method prevents wasting time by eliminating tasks that shouldn’t happen in the first place.

Trump has likened DOGE to a modern-day Manhattan Project, the World War II era government program that developed the first atomic weapons. But if reforming the federal government were as straightforward as channeling the theoretical insights of nuclear physics into an atomic device, it would have been done already.

DOGE faces a high hurdle that no amount of bipartisan support should obscure – the government itself, which creates bureaucratic and electoral incentives that bloat it. For DOGE to achieve real efficiency, lawmakers and the Trump administration will need to question every government activity and radically pare back the size and scope of the state.

Otherwise, it will fail by optimizing unnecessary and destructive things.