Chainsaws and Scalpels: How Governments Choose

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Javier Milei in Argentina, Musk and Ramaswamy in the US.. What does DOGE in Canada look like?

Under their new(ish) president Javier Milei, Argentina cut deeply and painfully into their program spending to address a catastrophic economic crisis. And they seem to have enjoyed some early success. With Elon Musk now primed to play a similar role in the coming Trump administration in the U.S., the obvious question is: how might such an approach play out in Canada?

Sure. We’re not suffering from headaches on anything like the scale of Argentina’s – the debt we’ve run up so far isn’t in the same league as the long-term spending going on in South America. But ignoring the problems we do face can’t be an option. Given that the annual interest payments on our existing national debt are $11.7 billion (which equals seven percent of total expenditures), simply balancing the budget won’t be enough.

The underlying assumption powering the question is that we live in a world of constraints. There just isn’t enough money to buy everything we might want, so we need to both prioritize and become more efficient. It’s about figuring out what can no longer be justified – even if it does provide some value – and what’s just plain wasteful.

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Some of this may seem obvious. After all, when there are First Nations reserves without clean water and millions of Canadians without access to primary care physicians, how can we justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding arts projects that virtually no one will ever discover, much less consume?

Apparently not everyone sees things that way. Large governments operate by reacting to political, social, and chaos-driven incentives. Sometimes those incentives lead to rational choices, and sometimes not. But mega-sized organizations tend to lack the self-awareness and capacity to easily change direction.

And some basic problems have no obvious solutions. As I’ve written, there’s a real possibility that all the money in the world won’t buy the doctors, nurses, and integrated systems we need. And “all the money in the world” is obviously not on the table. So the well-meaning bureaucrat might conclude that if you’re not going to completely solve the big problems, you might as well try to manage them while investing in other areas, too.

Still, I think it’s worth imagining how things might look if we could launch a comprehensive whole-of-government program review.

How Emergency Cuts Might Play Out

Imagine the federal government defaulted on its debt servicing payments and lost access to capital markets. That’s not such an unlikely scenario. There would suddenly be a lot less money available to spend, and some programs would have to be shut down. Protecting emergency and core services would require making fast – and smart – decisions.

We would need to take a long, hard look at this important enumeration of government expenditures. There probably wouldn’t be enough time to bridge the gap by looking for dozens of less-critical million-dollar programs. We would need to find some big-ticket items fast.

Our first step might be to pause or restructure larger ongoing payments, like projects funded through the Canada Infrastructure Bank (total annual budget: $3.45 billion). Private investors might pick up some of the slack, or some projects could simply go into hibernation. “Other interest costs” (total annual budget: $4.6 billion) could also be restructured.

Reducing equalization payments (total annual budget: $25.2 billion) and territorial financing (total budget: $5.2 billion) might also be necessary. This would, of course, spark parallel crises at lower levels of government. Similarly, grants to settle First Nations claims (total budget: $6 billion) managed by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada would also be at least temporarily cut.

All that would be deeply painful and trigger long-term negative consequences.

But there’s a far better approach that could be just as effective and a whole lot less painful:

What an All-of-Government Review Might Discover

Planning ahead would allow you the luxury of targeting spending that – in some cases at least – wouldn’t even be missed. Think about programs that were announced five, ten, even thirty years ago, perhaps to satisfy some passing fad or political need. They might even have made sense decades ago when they were created…but that was decades ago when they were created.

Here’s how that’ll work. When you read through the program and transfer spending items on that government expenditures page (and there are around 1,200 of those items), the descriptions all point to goals that seem reasonable enough. But there are some important questions that should be asked about each of them:

When did these programs begin?
What specific activities do they involve?
What have they accomplished over the past 12 months?
Is their effectiveness trending up or down?
Are they employing efficiency best-practices used in the private sector?
Who’s tasked with monitoring changes?
Where are their reports published?

To show you what I mean, here are some specific transfer or program line items and their descriptions:

Department of Employment and Social Development

Workforce Development Agreements ($722 million)
Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Transformation Initiative ($374 million)
Payments to provinces, territories, municipalities, other public bodies, organizations, groups, communities, employers and individuals for the provision of training and/or work experience, the mobilization of community resources, and human resource planning and adjustment measures necessary for the efficient functioning of the Canadian labour market ($856 million)

Department of Industry

Contributions under the Strategic Innovation Fund ($2.4 billion)

Department of Citizenship and Immigration

Settlement Program ($1.13 billion)

Department of Indigenous Services

Contributions to provide income support to on-reserve residents and Status Indians in the Yukon Territory ($1.05 billion). Note that, as of the 2021 Census, there were 9,150 individuals with North American Indigenous origins in Yukon. Assuming the line item is accurately described, that means the income support came to $114,987/person (not per household; per person).

Each one of those (and many, many others like them) could be case studies in operational efficiency and effectiveness. Or not. But there’s no way we could know that without serious research.

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DOGE seeks ‘super high-IQ’ people willing to work 80 hours a week for free

Published on November 17, 2024

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From The Center Square

By Brett Rowland

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” people to work more than 80 hours a week for free.

DOGE co-leader Elon Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and is one of the richest people in the world, is working with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to find top talent to cut wasteful spending, overburdensome regulations and re-structure federal agencies. Neither Musk or Ramaswamy will be paid for their work.

“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE,” the new advisery group said in a social media post. “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

Candidates can send their resumes to the DOGE account on X.

“Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” according to the post.

In a separate post, Musk said the work will be challenging and won’t be paid.

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote.

The department’s acronym, DOGE, is a nod to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin. Trump said the new group will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Trump laid out lofty goals for DOGE in his announcement this week.

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhatten Project,’ of our time,” Trump’s announcement said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the group welcomes DOGE to the challenge.

“Given our cumbersome bureaucracy and large fiscal imbalances, the effort is long overdue,” she said. “Regardless of political views, we should all want the federal government to spend scarce dollars wisely.”

MacGuineas said the outside group’s work could help restore trust in the government.

“An aggressive effort to reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies could save billions or even trillions of dollars over a decade and could help improve the public’s faith in government,” she said.

MacGuineas urged DOGE to look at the full budget.

“Such an effort should look at all parts of the budget, especially in the areas of health care, national defense, and spending through the tax code, and it should look beyond just cutting fraud and reducing bureaucracy to also identify places where the taxpayer is not getting the best value for their dollar,” she said. “Federal health care spending, in particular, is rife with overpayments and inefficiencies that offer the opportunity to substantially lower costs without meaningfully reducing quality or access to care.”

Social Security and federal health care programs, specifically Medicare, deserve special attention, MacGuineas said.

Since fiscal year 2003, improper payment estimates by executive branch agencies have totaled about $2.7 trillion, including $236 billion for fiscal year 2023. Improper payments have declined in recent years, but remain a stubborn challenge for many federal agencies. Improper payments are payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in the wrong amount.

Most of the improper payments come from five federal programs: Medicare, comprising three programs ($51 billion); Medicaid ($50 billion); the Department of Labor’s Unemployment Insurance – Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance ($44 billion); the Department of the Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit ($22 billion); the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program Loan Forgiveness ($19 billion).

MacGuineas said DOGE should take a bipartisan outlook.

“Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas,” she said. “The recommendations will need Congressional buy-in, further emphasizing the need for this to be an effort reaching across the aisle and leaving all options on the table to address our fiscal imbalances.”

Congress has run a deficit every year since 2001. In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001.

DOGE also plans to go after fraud at the federal level. The Government Accountability Office, which serves as the research arm of Congress, estimated fraud losses cost taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, in a report in April. The fraud estimate’s range represents 3% to 7% of average federal obligations.

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Five Government Programs That Musk’s Government Efficiency Agency Could Put On The Chopping Block

Published on November 17, 2024

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Robert Schmad

Federally-funded progressive pet projects and wasteful spending alike could be on the way out if Elon Musk succeeds in his quest to improve the administrative state’s efficiency.

Right-of-center policy experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that they hope Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will improve federal data collection practices and cut wasteful expenditures. Musk took to X on Thursday to express his openness to reeling in federal spending on transgender research and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.

In July, the United States of America’s debt surpassed $35 trillion for the first time in history, with the balance expected to exceed $36 trillion in the near future.

Over the past year, the DCNF has collected dozens of examples of wasteful or otherwise strange programs the Biden-Harris administration has pumped public funds into, feeding the deficit. Here are five examples of what could come under scrutiny from Musk’s efficiency agency.

1. Improper Payments

The Biden-Harris administration is on track to have paid out over $1 trillion in improper payments by the time President-elect Donald Trump takes office and the Department of Government Efficiency gets to work in January 2025. Federal guidelines define an improper payment as any disbursement “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount or for the wrong reason.”

Common examples of improper payments include erroneous payments made through the Medicaid and Medicare systems, misallocated COVID-19 aid, benefits paid to dead people and taxpayer funds lost to fraud. Large sums of improper payments are not a problem unique to the Biden-Harris administration. During Trump’s first administration, the government disclosed $814 billion in inflation-adjusted improper payments.

Not all improper payments are totally lost after being sent out. The Biden-Harris administration managed to recover about $51 billion of the $235.7 billion it erroneously disbursed in 2023.

Both parties have expressed concern about the magnitude of improper payments put out by the federal government, with a bipartisan group of legislators in the House pushing the Improper Payments Transparency Act, a bill introduced in May that would require the president’s budget request to identify common payment errors and formulate ways to address them.

2. Tax Dollars Funding LGBT Activism Abroad

Spokespeople for the State Department have previously told the DCNF that promoting LGBT inclusion in other countries is a “foreign policy priority” of the Biden-Harris administration, a statement supported by materials the agency publishes.

Under President Joe Biden, the State Department and The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have spent millions working to fund transgender surgeries, bankroll LGBT activists and engage pro-transgender in social engineering abroad.

USAID, for instance, gave $2 million to Asociacion Lambda, a Guatemala-based organization, to both engage in pro-LGBT activism and to provide people with “gender-affirming care,” federal records show. Asociacion Lambda attempts to influence elections in Guatemala and meets with government officials to engage in advocacy.

The State Department, meanwhile, funded the production of a play in North Macedonia where God is portrayed as a bisexual that has constant sex with hermaphroditic angels and communists are painted in a positive light.

“Americans are far from agreeing on how to deal with race, sex, and ‘gender’ in schools and workplaces,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Simon Hankinson wrote in a 2022 report. “Even when U.S. national consensus is there, restraint is always necessary in attempting to convince other nations that one’s own values should be theirs. The U.S. must balance the likelihood of convincing potential allies with the likelihood of hostile reactions to perceived interference or ‘cultural colonialism.’”

Other programs the Biden-Harris administration approved to push homosexuality and transsexuality abroad included bankrolling the creation of 2,500 “LGBTQI+ allies” in India, using tax dollars to “foster a united and equal queer-feminist discourse in Albanian society,” staging a film festival in Portugal featuring incestual and pedophilic themes, funding gay pride events across the globe and deploying public funds to support the work of “queer” Muslim writers living in India.

3. ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Grants

In November 2022, the Biden-Harris administration released a memo defining indigenous knowledge as “a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment” that “is applied to phenomena across biological, physical, social, cultural and spiritual systems.”

From 2021 to 2023, the Biden-Harris administration approved more than $831.8 million in grants that encouraged the use of indigenous knowledge in service of achieving the Biden administration’s goals.

The Department of Commerce, for instance, earmarked $575 million in June 2023, asking third parties to utilize indigenous knowledge to help mitigate the impact of weather events caused by climate change. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meanwhile, made an estimated $18.75 million available in August 2023 for grantees to apply “Indigenous knowledge methods,” alongside other approaches, as part of a program intended to test experimental methods of reducing drug overdose.

The 2022 Biden-Harris administration memo ordered agencies to “recognize and, as appropriate, apply Indigenous Knowledge in decision making, research, and [their] policies.” Agencies were also instructed to consult with Indian spiritual leaders and not to assume that indigenous knowledge is incorrect when “Western” science contradicts it, with the memo calling science a tool of oppression.

“When I start hearing things about how there’s this other dimension where, you know, the animals interact with humans at a different level of reality, that’s just not a thing,” City University professor and biologist Massimo Pigliucci told the Washington Free Beacon, in reference to their reporting on the subject. “You can believe that and you have the right to believe it but it’s not empirical evidence.”

4. DEI at the VA and Beyond

As hundreds of thousands of veterans were stuck on benefit waitlists, Biden’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took at least a dozen actions aimed at expanding DEI within the agency.

The VA had 378,000 claims from veterans that had been pending for at least 125 days at the end of 2023, according to the agency. In September 2021, shortly after Biden took office, the VA had just 210,854 claims that had been backlogged for the same length of time.

While the number of disabled veterans waiting on support grew, the Biden-Harris VA was focused on doing things like establishing an Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access Council, working on making its contractors more racially diverse and engaging in marketing campaigns aimed at reaching out to the “LGBTQ+” community and female veterans.

The VA is far from the only federal department that leaned into DEI in recent years as the various branches of the federal government collectively spend millions per year on diversity trainings. The Department of Health and Human Services alone spends tens of million per year on DEI programs and staff. Roughly a third of the funds disbursed by the National Science Foundation promoted DEI, according to a recent Senate Commerce Committee report.

5. Inventing Gay Landmarks

America’s national parks faced an estimated $23.3 billion maintenance backlog at the end of the 2023 fiscal year, according to a July report from the Congressional Research Service. While public parks languished, the National Park Service (NPS) diverted public funds to its “Underrepresented Communities Grant Program,” which is designed to diversify America’s historical landmarks to better include racial and sexual minorities.

During Biden’s tenure in office, NPS paid an array of government agencies and nonprofits to seek out “historic” LGBT locations to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. When NPS approves a landmark to be added to the National Register of Historic Places, its owner becomes entitled to special tax breaks, with many state and local governments offering special grant programs for such locations.

NPS, for example, paid out $75,000 to Washington State’s Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation for it to identify an “outstanding representation of queer history” and nominate it to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The service has spent $7.5 million on its Underrepresented Communities Grant Program since 2014, with Congress apportioning $1.25 million for the 2024 iteration of the program.

America’s national parks are billions of dollars behind on maintenance related to roads, buildings, water systems and campgrounds, according to the congressional report.