Elon Musk's DOGE Is a Great Idea. Trump Should Make It Permanent | Opinion (2024)

The etymology of "doge" is kind of amazing. It started as a meme depicting a skeptical-looking Shiba Inu dog. Then came Dogecoin—a cryptocurrency. Now it's the...Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)?

Nevertheless, the DOGE represents a harbinger of deregulation for an incoming Trump administration, especially with Dogecoin enthusiast Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the helm. Musk minced no words when describing the government as a "strangulation by overregulation." And with the federal government issuing close to 4,500 new regulations each year, he ain't wrong.

Environmental, historic preservation, and permitting rules in particular have become untethered from their stated aims. Their processes have become arduous and contorted, delaying everything from broadband deployment to space launches.

Regulations even gum up the government's own programs. In 2021, Congress allocated $42 billion to the Department of Commerce to expand high-speed broadband to rural Americans. The results of this massive investment? Not one single deployment in more than three years. Worse, the earliest the program's builds can take place is 2026. Why? According to Federal Communications Commission member Brendan Carr, a host of "regulations" and inconsistent agency processes have contributed to "a chaotic implementation environment" marked by "dysfunction" and "delays."

So, a call for a more efficient government is not only a welcome sentiment, but a necessary one. In fairness, calling for government efficiency has long been a bipartisan priority. Indeed, Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both slashed income taxes, and President Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines. In more modern contexts, both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations deregulated the internet access market. President Donald Trump's first term, too, cut its fair share of red tape.

But the DOGE is one of the most aggressive plans to speed up the wheels of government we've ever seen.

Even though the form the DOGE will take is still getting worked out, its mission is clear: trim the regulatory fat to cut unnecessary executive mandates, duplicative regulations, and find cost-saving measures for the government. Another thing we know for sure is that the DOGE isn't permanent. Indeed, the Trump administration has set a firm deadline of "no later than July 4, 2026" to accomplish its goals to cut government waste.

However, government waste will continue to be an issue long after the DOGE is set to terminate. So how do we institutionalize it?

One option is to have the DOGE reinvigorate and advise the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the objectives of which line up fairly well with the DOGE's. Established in 1980, OIRA sits within the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and is comprised of five subject matter branches. It even has its own administrator, who is appointed by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate.

But what is it tasked to do? In part, review federal regulations from executive agencies "to avoid inconsistent, incompatible, or duplicative policies." OIRA is also tasked with ensuring "that agencies' rules reflect the president's policies and priorities." In other words, if deregulation is an aspect of its efficiency metric, then OIRA seems like the most straightforward vessel for the DOGE to use.

The DOGE will have precedent with which to work. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have used OIRA to pare back unnecessary regulations. To limit government waste, President Reagan issued his Executive Order 12291, which required agencies to only take regulatory action if they could demonstrate that "the potential benefit to society for the regulation outweighed the costs to society." President George H.W. Bush used OIRA to establish his "Council on Competitiveness" to review regulations issued by agencies the administration believed would have a significant impact on the economy or particular industries.

Thanks to the Obama administration, OIRA facilitates agencies' "retrospective reviews" on already promulgated regulations to rid out "outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them." President Trump himself used OIRA to "achieved a 12-to-1 ratio of deregulatory-to-regulatory actions in fiscal year 2018, for a net savings of $23 billion (equivalent to about $1.6 billion in annual savings)."

The DOGE's work can continue under OIRA long after the July 4, 2026 deadline. It can serve as a powerful mechanism to accomplish the Trump administration's goals. Every federal agency that isn't an independent agency is under its purview. There's a lot an OIRA administrator can do to continue the work of the DOGE.

Joel Thayer is president of the Digital Progress Institute and an attorney based in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.