Trump and Elon’s Big Idea

Author

Bubba
05 Sep

Trump and Elon’s Big Idea

Donald Trump is aiming to take down a long-standing thorn in the side of conservatives: the massive, tangled web of federal government regulations. (Reuters)

The latest: During a roll-out of a slew of new economic proposals yesterday, Trump said that as president he’d appoint Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency commission.

  • The commission would be “tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” the former president said.

  • Musk pitched the idea of such a commission in a podcast interview with Trump last month.

Musk to Trump in August:

I think we need a government efficiency commission to say like, ‘Hey, where are we spending money that’s sensible? Where is it not sensible?’ We need to live within our means. … I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard-earned money is spent in a good way. I’d be happy to help out on such a commission.

The numbers: According to a Government Accountability Office analysis, the U.S. government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually due to fraud.

  • In 2023, $236 billion in improper payments were made, including $175 billion in overpayments.

  • Implementing the more than 5,200 open recommendations from the Government Accountability Office could save taxpayers between $106 billion and $208 billion.

Chart: Government Accountability Office

Dan Lips head of policy at the Foundation for Innovation:

Setting up an efficiency agenda would be the easy part of the job, and would not guarantee that the federal government actually makes any of the commission’s recommended changes. But simply by calling attention to the need to streamline and modernize government, a commission could focus White House and Cabinet leaders’ attention on these opportunities to save hundreds of billions over time.

Bubba’s Two Cents

The scourge of government waste and bureaucratic bloat are some of our biggest pet peeves here at Bubba News. So why am I not jumping up and down at the thought of a governmental body created to overhaul the current system, which is undeniably broken?

Not to be a negative Ned, but I think Trump and Elon may be underselling just how difficult it would be to reform the mammoth federal bureaucracy. For one thing, we already have the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency responsible for evaluating and auditing the government. If the complaint is that the GAO lacks sufficient teeth, wouldn’t it be better to remedy that problem as a first step? A new government efficiency commission could ironically be seen as a redundant use of taxpayer money and an unneeded expansion of the bureaucracy.

Still, I’ll be rooting for Trump and Elon to solve the problem. Say what you will about those guys, they certainly don’t lack ambition. Hope they prove me wrong.