What Happens When Government Bureaucracies Are Reformed?

The answer to the question “What happens when government bureaucracies are reformed?” is what is happening now as the Trump administration is boldly and daringly attempting to keep what was a very popular campaign promise in 2024.

Government bureaucracies in the modern sense have existed globally for about two centuries as developing capitalist democratic nations became industrialized and more urban, transforming much of their rural peasantry into a growing middle class.

To accommodate the social needs of the increasingly affluent population, leaders who held office either by election or royal appointment delegated the rapidly expanding “details” of governance to those who could actually implement the official economic, legal, social, educational, medical, and electoral minutiae of modern public life.

Technically, bureaucracies are answerable to the elected officials they work for and (in an ideal world) thus in turn answerable to the general populations which elect those officials.

But bureaucracies, almost from the beginning, grew large and unaccountable, often self-serving and idiosyncratic, ultimately independently determining policies and practices sometimes in conflict with the principles on which they were created. It was not uncommon as well that corruption became widespread in many bureaucracies.

Nor was the phenomenon of bureaucracies limited to organizations of public life. Corporate, philanthropic, labor union, and even religious organizations all developed their own bureaucratic structures.

Bureaucracies, of course, are necessary to any large contemporary organization, and many of those who work in them perform their jobs effectively and honestly. In the private sector especially, bureaucracies must produce positive results, or they will be replaced or eliminated. It is worth noting that in most cases when a large corporation which is in economic difficulty eliminates significant numbers of jobs, the stock price of the corporation goes up, reflecting the anticipation of investors that the company’s bottom line will improve.

In the U.S. today, as well as many other nations, however, public bureaucracies have grown immensely in size and the salaries they require. There are not only large and costly federal bureaucracies, but state and local ones, too. Each of these over time almost always increase in size, and it should be no surprise that many public jobs are duplicative, unnecessary, or overpaid.

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created to make the federal bureaucracy much more transparent, and to eliminate public jobs which are not necessary or effective. These jobs in the past have often been invisible, and the public funds they disburse largely unknown to the general taxpayer.

But unlike the firing of several hundred or even a few thousand corporate or other private sector workers (which is designed to produce immediate economic benefit), the aim of DOGE, under its leader Elon Musk, is to eliminate tens of thousands of well-paid jobs in virtually every part of the executive branch, including the entire Department of Education, a cabinet-level department.

Not only is DOGE attempting to reform government employment, it is also determined to eliminate wasteful and unnecessary public spending administered by the public bureaucracy — not just a few million or even a few billion dollars in spending, but many billions of dollars which serve no justifiable public purpose.

Doing this in a short period of time is obviously a major disruption of the public system and the economic lives of a great many public workers who are stakeholders in the current system. It is unimaginable to think there would not be widespread resistance and protest.

There should be no surprise that, when combined with a policy of placing worldwide U.S. tariffs for the purpose of creating a fair economic playing field for U.S. goods and exports, that international opposition and outcries would immediately occur, and that the stock market, always sensitive to uncertainty, would fall sharply and quickly.

The establishment media, already permanently hostile to President Trump, his administration, and DOGE, is using every opportunity to sow doubt in government reform. A classic case of this occurred when it was revealed that DOGE was looking into the Medicare and Medicaid programs for waste and fraud. The media and some Democrats promptly accused the Trump administration of intending to reduce Medicare and Medicaid benefits. In fact, any DOGE success in rooting out waste and fraud in these programs will make them more secure and even likely to provide more benefits.

If and when DOGE produces the potential huge government and taxpayer savings as it reduces waste, fraud, and federal employment — and if the Trump administration reduces federal taxes and regulations — the result, as it always has been in the past, will be increased economic prosperity, increased business and personal income (and therefore increased government revenues) and a sharply rising stock market.

This will not happen overnight. Its timing furthermore can be constrained by other factors such as natural disasters, foreign wars, inflationary pressures, and the burden of chronically unbalanced budgets.

The economics of the public sector are thus complicated and subject to the world’s timeless uncertainties. But whatever they are, fixing their wasteful and inefficient delivery systems can only reduce the complication and uncertainty.

That is what is happening now.

Barry Casselman is a writer for AMAC Newsline.