Watching the transition to President-elect Trump’s second term is shaping up to be my favorite spectator sport. Trump was elected on the promise to clean up the federal government and, true to form, is appointing cabinet members who promise to disrupt the agencies they will head. In addition, the new administration has launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to significantly reduce government spending.
Watching the reaction of the opposition party and media pundits to the coming disruption is amusing. They seem particularly alarmed at the notion that government employees can be fired, or that government programs can be dismantled. That’s understandable because government initiatives never die and federal employees are almost never fired.
This time may be different. Heightened voter support for change, along with the disruptors Trump is appointing and their allies in Congress, makes it likely that we will see some major shakeups.
Welcome to the real world. The government may resist change, but disruption is the rule in private business. Most large companies go through cycles of reorganization, downsizing and renewal. Successful companies disrupt themselves to adapt to changing business conditions. During my corporate career with Illinois Bell and Western Electric I saw a long series of reorganizations and downsizing moves, culminating with the court-ordered breakup of AT&T and my own eventual departure in a voluntary buyout.
Reorganization often makes sense. When Illinois Bell was doing a lot of hiring and retraining, the company upgraded and expanded its training operation to a stand-alone department. A few years later the department was reduced and downgraded as training needs diminished. Most other departments reorganized every few years. It’s not unusual for a company to create new organizations and disband old ones.
It’s also healthy for organizations to downsize periodically to counter the natural tendency of managers to build empires. When I was a manager, I pestered my bosses with proposals for all the wonderful things I could accomplish if they gave me a bigger budget and more people.
During my 22 years with Illinois Bell the company’s workforce gradually dwindled from 40,000 to 24,000. The company had grown rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s and had an aging management force by the 1980s. This made it easier for the company to significantly thin its management ranks by offering a pension bump to incent people to retire a few years early. Some companies also offer buyouts to executives when a new CEO wants to bring in a new management team.
Wonder if this would work for government? How about offering a buyout to Environmental Protection Agency executives who oppose Trump’s environmental policies?
The disadvantage of downsizing gradually, as Illinois Bell did, is the temptation to believe that you can keep doing everything you’re doing and just work a little harder. This never works. Sometimes a drastic cut is more effective.
When I worked for Western Electric, the Hawthorne Works reduced its workforce from 16,000 employees to 11,000 over three years The public relations department where I worked was cut in half in a matter of months. Doing everything we had been doing was not an option: We had to make tough choices and shut down some activities. After several months, we were pleasantly surprised to find that nobody missed the programs we had discontinued. Our slender staff was operating more efficiently and even was able to start some new initiatives.
We can’t expect the government to downsize the way a private business can, of course. Every federal program has a constituency, and Congress has blocked every attempt to reform the administrative agencies.
What’s changed is that nearly two-thirds of today’s Americans do not trust the federal government. Many of them voted for Trump. His promise to shake up the federal government has unprecedented support from the voters. The disruptors Trump has nominated for his cabinet indicate that he intends to keep his promise. The non-governmental DOGE initiative by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will work with a Congressional subcommittee and Trump’s cabinet members on reforms that are likely to be popular with voters.
One indication of this effort’s potential for success is the virulence of the opposition. The traditional Democratic effort to discredit Republican nominees promises to reach a new level of slander. The news media campaign already is in full spin. Happily, the recent election confirmed that the traditional media are irrelevant.
This will be fun to watch. Can government agencies trim their ranks by forcing employees to show up at the office? Will some agencies move their offices out of Washington? Can displaced bureaucrats find honest work?
I’m not expecting miracles but hope we will see a few positive changes. If we’re lucky, perhaps Elon Musk can teach the Navy how to build ships again.