Maybe it will be different this time.
For the sake of our country, let's hope so.
But, there are reasons, this time, to be optimistic about the Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy campaign to cut government waste and inefficiency.
Those of us who remember previous such efforts, however, can be excused for expressing some wet-blanket skepticism when it comes to getting control of government spending.
I was an editor at the Casper Star-Tribune in 1984 when Ronald Reagan's Grace Commission Report came out. They sent us three copies of the huge summary report, each big as a metropolitan telephone book. You could have used them for door stops.
My boss at the time, Editor Dick High, thought a great way for government to be more efficient would be to send us just one copy of the report on government efficiency, instead of three. Dick was a rare newsroom Republican, but he always said that despite the promises, Reagan never got around to cutting spending. In fact the annual deficit tripled under Reagan.
There were juicy revelations back then that the Department of Defense paid $461 for a claw hammer, and $511 for a 60-cent light bulb. But the recommendations were nevertheless voluminous and comprehensive.
The Grace Commission cost $76 million, funded by private sector donations, with 160 corporate CEOs participating, forming 36 task forces, with the help of another 2,000 business execs. The final report filled up 47 volumes, and 23,000 pages.
Institute all that, and it was estimated that $424 billion could be saved in three years. But the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accounting Office claimed only about a third of that could be saved, if Congress went along, which it didn't. Most of the Grace Commission recommendations were never implemented.
Then in 1993 President Bill Clinton put Vice President Al Gore in charge of the “Reinventing Government,” because even some Democrats admitted that the country was “choking on red tape,” and could “work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about.”
To make the point, Gore appeared on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” bringing along two government-approved glass ashtrays (or, in government speak, “ash receiver, tobacco, desk type”) and two hammers. Gore read the complicated federal regulations for ash trays, and cited the bureaucrats involved in writing regulations, and testing ashtrays for compliance.
There were even regulations on how a government ashtray must break when dropped. Gore and Letterman then smashed the two ashtrays with hammers.
Gore's effort aimed to cut $100 billion in waste, but you can come to your own conclusions as to their success, in light of today's $36 trillion national debt.
Then in 2010, our own Senator Al (no relation) Simpson teamed up with Clinton's former Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles to form the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which recommended six steps to cut spending by $3.9 trillion by 2020.
The steps included capping spending increases at half the rate of inflation, reducing mandatory spending, reducing federal health care spending, making Social Security sustainable, and ending tax loopholes. All good stuff.
But, the Simpson-Bowles final recommendations never even made it to Congress, because they couldn't get enough members of their own commission to approve issuing the report. They needed 14 votes to submit the report, but only got 11.
So these efforts have ended up like that old saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.” In the past, lawmakers have been a lot more interested in getting re-elected than in cutting waste and inefficiency.
This time, however, may be different. It will be more difficult to ignore recommendations when Elon Musk runs X, with more reach to the American people than all the major newspapers and all the major TV networks of the 1980s and 1990s, combined. A podcast is planned to let everyone know what they discover, each step of the way.
So unlike previous efforts, Musk and Ramaswamy have the power to go right to the American public with where the inefficiencies exist, and how many billions, maybe trillions, are being wasted.
Maybe this time, Elon Musk can lead the horse to water.
AND make it drink.
Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
