How Congress Can Ensure DOGE Isn’t Another Failed Promise

The Base Realignment and Closure process is a potential model for Elon Musk’s cost-saving commission.

Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of our era. He delights in accomplishing what is said to be impossible: mass-producing electric cars, sending private rockets into space, and restoring free speech on the world’s most influential social media platform. He is also a ruthlessly efficient manager, having slashed production costs at his hardware companies, Telsa and SpaceX, and cut 80 percent of the workforce at Twitter, while simultaneously improving the product.

His next challenge may prove even more formidable. As part of the Trump administration’s plan to slash the bureaucracy, Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy hope to cut government spending by up to $2 trillion per year through the newly established DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency.

On the surface, this seems impossible. While conservatives have promised to reduce the size of government for more than a century, federal outlays have grown with each passing decade. Some congressional insiders, meantime, have already signaled skepticism of DOGE, arguing that Musk and Ramaswamy “know nothing about how the government works” and are destined to fail.

I would like to see Elon’s initiative succeed. America’s budget is unsustainable, and it too often directs resources to captured ideological bureaucracies rather than to the public good. But without proper design, DOGE could become another of Washington’s failed promises. To avoid that fate, the incoming Republican Congress must tailor DOGE’s structure to ensure its success.

One potential model is the BRAC Commission. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan formalized a procedure that, with later amendments and support from a bipartisan group of presidents and lawmakers, closed inefficient military bases and redirected spending to more fruitful ends. The so-called Base Realignment and Closure process, or BRAC, had several rounds, and concluded in 2011. All told, it resulted in the closure of 121 major military bases and saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

The commission was deliberately designed to circumvent the gridlock, bureaucracy, parochialism, and risk aversion that have always plagued Congress, presenting a potential blueprint for DOGE’s structure.

The BRAC process was designed to limit Congress’s involvement in base-closure decisions. Lawmakers appointed an outside committee to draft the list of potential closures, which was then sent to the Secretary of Defense, who, in turn, presented a final list to Congress. The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 and its later amendments required Congress to make an up-or-down decision on the entire package of cuts, and would automatically enact the commission’s recommendations, unless both houses of Congress issued a joint statement of disapproval within 45 days. This established what the Congressional Research Service dubbed a “fast track” legislative process.

This method had several advantages. First, it ensured that the commission’s list would get a fair hearing in Congress and not die in committee or be perpetually delayed. Second, forcing lawmakers to consider the recommendations as an all-or-nothing proposition avoided parochial fights and the inevitable line-item objections from local congressmen. Finally, the approval-by-default provision changed congressmen’s risk calculus: assent became the status quo, and the risk was shifted from approval to disapproval.

Today’s lawmakers could similarly delegate the responsibility for proposing cost-cutting recommendations to DOGE, which, given Musk’s power, reputation, and resources, could be a popular political force. And, like BRAC process, DOGE can also enable Republican lawmakers to use Musk as a foil when the media and organized interest groups inevitably complain about particular cuts. The congressmen can claim that their hands were tied and point to the tech magnate’s proposal when confronted with controversial cuts.

While the BRAC process was effective, we should be realistic about its impact. By generous estimates, the base-closure initiative saved around $40 billion. That figure constitutes less than 5 percent of military outlays last year alone. Even as bases shuttered, government spending as a whole, including on defense, continued to climb.

Elon Musk’s ambitions are much greater. He wants to reduce government spending by $2 trillion, which would require a dramatic reappraisal of virtually all programs. This will not happen—the president has firmly refused to cut entitlement spending—but it is possible to identify potential cuts totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. Musk has the fame to absorb the inevitable controversy and the resources to threaten primary campaigns against congressional Republicans who remain recalcitrant.

I suspect that we will know within 90 days of Donald Trump’s inauguration whether DOGE will succeed. If the department remains a blue-ribbon committee with vague promises of “efficiency,” it will fail. But if Musk and Ramaswamy can persuade legislators to grant them gain fast-track authority and to set up a commission with real power, their initiative has at least the possibility of winning the day.

This article was originally published in City Journal.