DOGE IS AN ESSENTIAL STRATEGY: GOVERNMENT SPENDING AND EMPLOYMENT ARE FAR OUT OF CONTROL
It Is Now or Never for Any Reforms to Work So Shut Up and Help
David Barnhizer
90% of British Civil Service Workers Have Pointless Jobs
and Could Be Replaced by Robots—REFORM
Tyler Durden, a “composite” journalist representative of several writers on the website ZeroHedge, concentrates on developments in the AI/robotics world. The Durden “Journalist Composite” wrote in “Most Government Workers Could Be Replaced By Robots, New Study Finds”.
A study by a British think tank, Reform, says that 90% of British civil service workers have jobs so pointless, they could easily be replaced by robots, saving the government around $8 billion per year. The study… says that robots are “more efficient” at collecting data, processing paperwork, and doing the routine tasks that now fall to low-level government employees. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-08/most-government-workers-could-be-replaced-robots-new-study-finds. “Most Government Workers Could Be Replaced By Robots, New Study Finds,” Tyler Durden, 2/8/17.
There are “few complex roles” in civil service … that require a human being to handle. “Twenty percent of public-sector workers hold strategic, ‘cognitive’ roles,” Reform’s press release on the study says. “They will use data analytics to identify patterns—improving decision-making and allocating workers most efficiently. … The problem, Reform says, is that public sector employee unions have bloated the civil service ranks, forcing government agencies to keep on older employees, and mandating hiring quotas for new ones. The organizational chart looks like a circuit board—and there’s no incentive to streamline anything. “Most Government Workers Could Be Replaced By Robots, New Study Finds,” Tyler Durden, 2/8/17. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-08/most-government-workers-could-be-replaced-robots-new-study-finds.
Whether the AI/Robotics transformation can be slowed, controlled, shaped or muted, however, is open to question at this point. Based on based on separate studies by Oxford University and Deloitte, the Reform report remarks that:
Oxford University and financial services provider Deloitte, both of whom commissioned their own studies concur with Reform‘s conclusions. The Oxford University study said that more than 850,000 public sector jobs could fall to robots over the course of the next decade. Reform suggests that government employees should probably look into opportunities presented by the “sharing economy,” like driving for Uber – at least until robots replace those, too. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-08/most-government-workers-could-be-replaced-robots-new-study-finds. “Most Government Workers Could Be Replaced By Robots, New Study Finds,” Tyler Durden, 2/8/17.
Those criticisms are potentially valid, not only in the UK but in the US and Western Europe. It does not mean that work is not being done, but reflects that with the ongoing improvements in AI/Robotics capabilities much of what they do could be done by alternative methods. There is no question that government actions involve a very large amount of financial waste. Large scale job cuts must be made but they need to be surgical rather than clumsily numerical. But wholesale “gutting” of the government workforce is not an intelligent option.
The efficiency and cost advantages offered by AI systems in many office and record keeping and management tasks are undeniable, and AI capabilities are improving rapidly and dramatically. But AI/Robotics is a very sharp “Sword of Damocles” hanging over us. If it is not blunted, the cuts will be very deep. Changes must be made, and they must be initiated quickly. But they need to be intelligent ones that improve what exists rather than end up destroying the ability to serve critical social purposes beyond the often inhuman mantra of economic efficiency.
Cutting the “Metastasized” Public Sector to a Manageable and Efficient Size
An already bankrupt US government is projected to experience annual deficits above $1 trillion for at least the next ten years. The US national debt is officially admitted to be over $36 trillion and climbing, but is actually far higher according to a 2015 warning by former US Comptroller-General David Walker who testified that the $18.5 Trillion debt at that point was closer to $65 Trillion when all the promised but still unfunded commitments required to be paid out in future decades are taken into account.
It gets even worse. Boston University Economist Laurence Kotlikoff testified to Congress about what he described as the “infinite-horizon fiscal gap” in challenging the Congressional Budget Office’s far lower estimate. In 2013 Kotlikoff stated he projected that “gap” to be $210 Trillion. The comparative “gap” is due, as the Brookings Institute states, to the CBO’s estimate that fails to take into account the full range of financial obligations to which the federal government is legally committed. See, “Closing America’s Enormous Fiscal Gap: Who Will Pay?” Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Adam N. Michel, June 2015, MERCATUS WORKING PAPER, George Mason University. https://forschungsnetzwerk.ams.at/dam/jcr:52153c8a-ff40-4361-bba7-371352abedf9/Kotlikoff-Closing-Fiscal-Gap.pdf.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model has estimated the “infinite horizon fiscal imbalance” (the difference between projected future revenues and expenditures) to be $162.7 trillion, or 6.6% of the present value of all future GDP, as of January 27, 2025. This calculation projects tax and spending commitments to cover all current and future generations.
In terms of the severe consequences that intolerable and unmeetable levels of debt on virtually every parameter represent to America and Americans, even this catastrophic situation is not the complete story. It gets worse and there is a need for a DOGE-like mechanism on numerous fronts with state and local governments leading the way. This is because of the enormous unfunded obligations of state, local, and corporate actors, particularly in education and grossly underfunded private and state and local government pension plans. As it turns out—as it will in too many instances—that these institutions are unable to meet their promised financial obligations enormous pressure will be placed on the national government and it will not be able to carry the load for people who had relied on the promises.
We Are Experiencing an “A-Historical” Economic and Social Transformation
What is evolving is not simple business-as-usual economics in which the “experts” actually know what they are talking about. We are caught up in a complex and in many ways unknowable technological and societal transformation. Economists and academic experts can say whatever they desire based on the historical and highly specialized models used in their predictive machinations. But the reality is that we are attempting to understand and cope with what is truly an “a-historical” reality for which many predictions based on a radically different economic and political context simply are not applicable and in many instances will be misleading. That evolving a-historical transformational reality has sped ahead of our highly specialized knowledge base to the point that we all can talk about what is happening but, as yet, we lack both the analytic models and the experience to have certainty about the “end game” that is emerging.
One very real situation that seems likely to emerge, however, is that as AI/Robotics eliminates jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues from ordinary income taxes based on human labor will plummet. This will take place even while needs will increase dramatically, and the various national, state, local and private sector debt obligations and revenue requirements also dramatically increase while revenues decline. This poses a crisis of limited and declining resources on all levels—including underfunded or non-existent pensions, as federal, state and local pension plans and other support needs fall far short of expectations.
The “Debt Challenge” is not only one of shortfalls in public revenues. Corporate plans have long been “iffy” in terms of being fully funded. Many will fail due to inadequate revenues and private savings accounts (Roth IRAs etc.) will also suffer as individual needs escalate. As this occurs, health problems and medical costs will explode, people’s already limited savings are used up, and rapid job destruction continues. As we are already experiencing, this ongoing deterioration will drive many more millions into homelessness and this will produce a dramatic rise in violence due to crime, mental illness and rage.
Some Data on Federal, State and Local Governmental Employment
To gain a fuller sense of the employment dynamics and contributions of the US government and the relationship between the public and private sectors as of 2015, some useful jobs “trivia” include the following data.
Federal, state and local governments combined employed 21,995,000 workers as of August 2014. 12,329,000 workers were employed in the manufacturing sector.
In November 2024 there were 20.5 million state and local government employees. Three-fourths were local government and the other one-quarter were state workers. In 2023, 15.2 million were full time workers and 4.4 million were part time. Since February 2020 the state and local employment increased by 473,000 jobs. In March 2023 the BLS indicated there were 19.6 state and local government employees. In 2024 there are an estimated 8.1 million teachers and administrators in America’s K-12 schools. In May 2020 the figure was 7.3 million.
Between 1989 and 2014 government employment increased by 4,006,000 workers and manufacturing employment declined by 5,635,000 workers.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), seasonally adjusted manufacturing employment in the United States was highest in June 1979 at 19,553,000 workers while seasonally adjusted government employment was at its highest level in May 2010 with 22,996,000 workers.
In August 1941 the 12,532,000 people employed in manufacturing equaled 1 manufacturing worker for each 10.6 person in the overall population. The 12,329,000 employed in manufacturing in August 2015 equaled only 1 manufacturing worker for each 26.1 people in the overall population, a 250% difference.
Of the 21,995,000 employed by government in August 2014, 2,738,000 worked for the federal government. This included 596,500 who worked for the Postal Service. Another 5,092,000 people worked for state governments and 14,165,000 worked for local governments.
Governmental subsidization of education represents a critical “driver” of employment and social mobility. More than 50% of state and local government employees are employed in educational positions. The BLS reports: “Of the 5,092,000 who worked for state governments in August 2014, 2,446,300 (or 48 percent) worked in education. Of the 14,165,000 who worked for local governments, 7,852,500 (or 55.4 percent) worked in education.” Terence P. Jeffrey, “21,995,000 to 12,329,000: Government Employees Outnumber Manufacturing Employees 1.8 to 1”, September 8, 2015. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/21955000-12329000-government-employees-outnumber-manufacturing. This means that 10,298,800 people were working in public educational activities supported by state and local governments.
The federal government employs 2,711,000 people (excluding non-civilian military). Among the economy’s largest job sectors, it was the only one to shrink in 2015.
Local government employment has grown from 4 million employees in the 1950s to over 14 million today. State governments employ nearly twice as many people as the federal government, and state and local governments combined have close to a 7:1 edge over the federal government in numbers of employees.
15.7% of all American workers are employed by federal, state or local governments.
Another reason government spending as a share of GDP remains high, even though the official federal government workforce has shrunk slightly, “is that government contractors — who may work primarily or entirely on projects for the federal government — are not counted as federal employees.” http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/11/07/the-federal-government-now-employs-the-fewest-people-since-1966/. Ironically, they also cost significantly more to do the same work that often could have been done by government employees.
Two Analyses From the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker: “In Defense of the Spoils System” and “It’s Extremely Hard to Cut Government”
Jeffrey Tucker ranks at the top of my list of impressive political philosophers and intellectuals I have read. I consider the depth, scope and quality of what he offers to be amazingly insightful and important at a time when clear and honest messages are vital. What follows are two recent pieces he published in the Epoch Times. They contribute with clarity to the nature of political bureaucracy and the continual political game-playing used to defend that power base. The two essays show quite clearly why there is a need for a strategic instrumentality such as DOGE if there is ever going to be any honest effort to control the size of government and pressure its components in ways that produce efficiencies in what is inevitably an inefficient, slow, and self interested system.
As is made clear by what is now going on in the form of a “resistance” movement against the efforts to preserve the American Republic, there should be no doubt about the importance of having people with great political and personal courage challenging the inefficient, rigid and corrupt systems such as those DOGE is facing. The irrational, savage, violent and criminal resistance that is occurring against efforts to regenerate the base of the American economy and political community during this terrible period in our history is a tragic contradiction of the spirit of the nation and the shame of a group that repeatedly projects their own rabid behavior onto those seeking only to serve their country.
“In Defense of the Spoils System”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, 4/2/25. https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/in-defense-of-the-spoils-system-5835496
“To the victor go the spoils,” said William L. Marcy, a U.S. senator from New York, in 1832. He was defending the practice of the hiring of campaign cronies in the event of a successful election win. That practice was then dubbed the “spoils system,” as if someone had put it in place to work that way.
The denunciations against that slogan commenced and lasted for half a century. Then came “civil service reform” in 1883. It was supposed to make government employees objective and feed a system that was intelligent and not packed with cronies. It was designed to make government—particularly in the executive department—permanent.
At the time, this perhaps made sense. The corruption of the old system was well known. The fight for government jobs was ferocious following every election. That is still the case today, so it is not as if ending the spoils system actually ended the system of spoils. That is still with us more than ever.
What the new system actually did was build gigantic bureaucracies. It started with the Great War and the income tax. It grew and grew and exploded in size during the New Deal and World War II. The Cold War and Great Society added ever more. At some uncertain point, maybe very early or maybe more recently, the administrative state became more powerful and decisive in the lives of average Americans than the elected state.
This “state within a state” rose up largely without constitutional challenge or much juridical and legislative challenge at all. It just kept growing, as the people instinctively felt in each generation ever less in control of the systems of government. They would vote for new leaders and “throw the bums out,” but the new leaders could not gain a foothold over the system they sought to reform. The “bums” had permanent jobs.
The trouble with the new system that started in 1883 is that it eliminated the most important aspect of the “spoils system.” It’s not just about who you hire. It is about the capacity to send the personnel from the previous administration packing. Otherwise, they simply persist with the same policies, hide the correspondence and data, and deploy their better knowledge of the administrative bureaucracy to subvert the incoming administration.
That turns out to be the real purpose of “civil service reform.” It was to build a growing and eventually massive system of permanent employment that subverts democracy from within. If the new administration whom the people elect have no effective control over the agencies and the bureaucrats within them, the people who voted have their power taken away. Democracy becomes a sham.
I’m sorry to report that this seems to have been the fate of most Western democracies over these past 100 years. That sounds like an extreme claim. But it is the truth. These “states within the state” have become the ruling class, often operating on a global level, and yet are barely noticed at all by the people and the media. Indeed, these deeper states work very well with legacy media to feed stories and effectively stop any fundamental reform. It’s been going on for many decades.
I’ve searched through the scholarly literature to find information on this remarkable revelation, and I’m stunned at the dearth of understanding that is out there. Murray Rothbard as a historian is one of the rare examples. His 1995 paper “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States” is one of the last pieces of serious research he published. Quite clearly, it is the finest piece of historical scholarship yet written.
Sadly, the piece ends in the 1890s with expressions of despair by the reformers, all of whom said that they had failed. They wanted the experts to run things in a way that disabled the democratic longings of the populist rabble. Instead, they entrenched all the policies they hated the most and ended up with a system that was even worse.
Despite their protests, the system lasted because, of course, no one knew how to restore the old spoils system, which, as bad as it was, at least was built in a mechanism that allowed the system to correct. When one administration would mess up royally, the next government would show up and purge the ranks of the bureaucracy. That allowed democracy to self-correct.
But with the new system, there was no mechanism in place to uproot the problems. Instead, they piled on top of each other, government by government, getting worse year by year. That is essentially the summary of every government from Theodore Roosevelt to the present. No one had yet found a solution to the problem.
Now comes the Trump administration in its second term. Defeated by the civil service the first time around, they had four years to plot a return. A main feature of this was an absolute determination to restore democracy against the “state within the state.” In other words, the second Trump term consists of the first elected government in more than 100 years that is seriously determined to be the government.
What has happened since being elected is the largest and surely the most clever attempt in the history of industrialized democracy to purge the permanent civil service. The Trump administration did this by offering buyouts, accepted by perhaps 5 percent of workers. It then turned to eliminating collective bargaining, freeing workers of the legal obligation to pay dues to their exploiters. Then it started eliminating whole divisions and agencies.
I’m writing on the day in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has fired 20,000 or more workers from the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health. It’s a start but a magnificent one. These terminations will, of course, be challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court will have to decide whether and to what extent the president and his appointees truly have power over executive agencies and their personnel.
It might seem like a silly question: Does the president really run the executive branch? Incredibly, the Supreme Court has given no clear answer. This is largely because the “state within the state” has risen up and grown up in plain sight but without a single major political figure being in a position to challenge it with any kind of serious action.
Finally, the day has come. What the Trump administration has achieved here could, in fact, be for the ages. Let us hope they have just begun the process. The “spoils systems” must come back, not because it is perfect but because it provides a mechanism for democracy to self-correct. The process of reform has begun at last and the error of nearly 150 years can at last be fixed. As Murray Rothbard demonstrated in his magisterial article, the original reformers would likely cheer the results.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
“It’s Extremely Hard to Cut Government”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, 4/3/2025. https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/its-extremely-hard-to-cut-government-5836186?ea_src=frontpage&ea_cnt=a&ea_med=opinion-5.
A remarkable event happened this week, something I’ve dreamed about most of my professional life but has only now taken place. A panoply of government agencies actually experienced dramatic cuts in personnel. The Department of Health and Human Services has cut at least 10,000 and maybe as many as 20,000 jobs—the precise number is unclear—all in one fell swoop.
The employees lined up to go to work only to find their keycards did not work. They were locked out of email and other portals. They were physically presented with packets explaining the restructuring and their options. In other words, they were treated like countless others in private-sector employment in the past: they were fired. This they could not believe because this is the rarest thing imaginable in government, which is one reason government employment is so notorious.
Some employees who could not be fired for reasons of contract were reassigned to Indian Health Services in far-flung places. Yes, this really happened.
This took place under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with the permission of and encouraged by President Donald Trump. The background for this stunning move—the deepest one-day cuts to a single agency in U.S. history—is of course the incredibly botched response to the virus of 2020 and following, during which times the public-health agencies panicked and took away most of the liberties that Americans had taken for granted.
We are still working through precisely what happened in those COVID days and why they continued for so long, even for years, with zero evidence that anything like this was necessary. So many people suffered, including doctors who were denied professional autonomy to treat their patients according to their own lights and training.
To understand the hows and whys of this period of our lives requires a very deep dive into every field of science, philosophy, psychology, and probably religion too.
In the end, the whole puzzle is mystifying but this much became clear: these bureaucracies needed cleaning up. Clearly.
Kennedy was the leading dissident, writing fully two books on the subject, and speaking the world over, and was then tapped to lead the health agencies that he had opposed. Joining him in this effort were others who opposed what was happening, including the new NIH head Jay Bhattacharya, who was first denounced and then censored by the previous agency heads.
The rise, fall, and rise of these people—from prestigious positions to dissidents to censored to becoming in charge of the agencies that censored them—is itself a remarkable story worthy of great literature and film. Now they are in a position to act on their experience and knowledge.
Now comes the turnabout. The restructuring is here, and justice is being done, which is oddly not something we’ve come to expect in the world of government. In the reporting on the upheaval in the agencies, however, the legacy media did not mention the lockdowns and shot mandates of the previous period, strangely pretending as if they were not the essential prequel to the current drama.
This is because the entirety of the period from 2020 to 2023 has entered into the category of taboo because nearly the entirety of the media and corporate establishment went along with this entire episode.
The response is in place but I can entirely understand why the man on the street would be mystified about the goings-on. They might at first seem to be “inside baseball” but actually the implications are profound for civil liberties, human rights, and constitutional government. The COVID response disregarded all those things but now we have in place a group of people who are seeking to right the wrongs.
There is something impenetrable and implacable about bureaucratic structures. They tend never to shrink but only grow, even when there is no basis for it. They aspire to grow ever more with ever more employees. This is how they define success. If you don’t believe me, just speak to anyone who has ever worked in one. They will tell you.
Years ago and for reasons I cannot entirely remember, I found myself at a meeting of the deep bureaucracies of some city bureaucracy within the local government of Washington, D.C., one that specialized in child and family issues. The top agency bureaucrat was speaking to a group of graduating students looking for jobs. Her entire pitch was about how they were hiring, their job benefits, the job security, the growth of the agency, the money pouring in from taxpayers, and the future of how the agency can only get bigger.
The missing part was anything to do with the function and mission of the agency itself. It’s as if the whole enterprise has become a giant jobs program and grift for those lucky enough to be hired. This much was obvious to me. And I found it startling. All my professional experience thus far had been in private-sector jobs where you did the work and brought value or else faced termination. This was something I took for granted.
Bureaucracies do not work like this. They have no profitability statements. It is just money in and money out, regardless of whether and to what extent they actually achieve their aims. They are all this way. You can say they are necessary, which is fine, but they all face the same problem if they are funded by tax dollars. The institutional incentive to achieve the goal, control costs, and improve efficiency is simply not there.
How can public-sector bureaucracies be controlled? Only through political management. And herein lies the problem. Most political authorities have no real incentive to do anything about them. For this reason, the number of agencies in Washington and in all states tends only to grow in budget, personnel, and power, year after year, and decade after decade. The institutional ethos of these places is to presume that this will always be the case.
The typical government agency embeds an expectation that all threats from newly elected politicians can be ignored. Politicians are transitory whereas the agency is permanent. This has been the prevailing attitude for decades, even dating back one hundred years.
This is why the Trump administration has been such a shock to the system, and why they have faced more than one hundred legal challenges to their actions. To put a fine point on it, the Trump administration is the first in our lifetimes, even dating back to our parents’ parents, to believe that the voters should get their way over the administrative state.
The people who now head the health bureaucracies of HHS, CDC, NIH, and FDA, have a special obligation to enact dramatic reform. They worked on this for many weeks prior to the big day. They did this not for money or fame or professional advancement but simply because they believe in doing what is right. As a result, they have turned away 10-20 thousand employees, a move without precedent in the modern history of government.
This should be inspiring to all of us. But, as we’ve learned, doing the right thing is a thankless task. I’ve seen little or no praise for the people who put all this in motion and carried out the great task. They deserve our every congratulation and every prayer for their well-being because they are now facing the challenge of their lives, as the legacy media calls them every name and as they face down some of the most powerful interest groups in the world.
Keep these heroes in your thoughts. These are hard times for them. Cutting government and granting liberty to the people is apparently a thankless task. But they are doing the Lord’s work and need every support we can give.