Latest news with #Kamarck
CBS News
20-02-2025
- Business
- CBS News
How Clinton's "reinventing government" compares to DOGE's approach: "We cut fat and they cut muscle"
As President Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency push to slash spending, Republican allies have pointed to a White House program from 30 years ago as akin to DOGE's efforts. Over 30 years ago, Vice President Al Gore was tasked by Democratic President Bill Clinton to cut waste, red tape and streamline the bureaucracy to "create a government that works better and costs less." The "reinventing government" program cut nearly half a million federal jobs and dispensed with a massive number of regulations. But according to the woman who ran the program under the Clinton administration, any similarities between that program and DOGE's end there. "We cut fat and they cut muscle. It's as simple as that," Elaine Kamarck, now a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, told CBS News. "We didn't have any meltdowns of agencies, we didn't have any dysfunction going on, and we obeyed the law. When we thought something was wrong, we sent it to Congress and asked them to change it." The National Partnership for Reinventing Government followed through on Clinton's promise on the campaign trail to make the government more efficient and effective. The project was spearheaded by Gore and officially created in March 1993, kicking off a review of government agencies that would go on to become the longest-running reform effort in the nation's history, wrapping up its work in 1998. Kamarck was hired by Gore to direct the program, and the two put together a team of about 400 civil servants to work across a number of teams. They conducted reviews of Cabinet-level agencies with a partner team within the agency and returned recommendations for review. Six months later, the project had yielded hundreds of recommendations bound in a report titled "Creating a Government that Works Better & Costs Less." The effort, which would ultimately trim the federal workforce by around 426,000 in less than eight years while cutting thousands of pages of regulations, focused on saving the government money. But Kamarck said it also focused on "making the government work better," with attention toward performance and customer service standards that remain today. "Basically, we worked with people in the government to identify where we could make it work better, and where we could make it cost less," Kamarck said. The program went on well beyond the six-month review period to focus on implementation, acting upon around two-thirds of the recommendations, and yielding an estimated $136 billion in savings for taxpayers. Now, more than three decades later, a new cost-cutting effort is underway. Mr. Trump announced in December that Musk, who played a major role in his reelection effort, would lead DOGE in the new administration, and signed an executive order on his first day in office to officially create the Department of Government Efficiency. Its website says it's found $55 billion in savings so far, but a CBS News review of those savings shows some discrepancies. Unlike the Clinton-era program, which took six months to make its recommendations, DOGE, in under a month has worked with Cabinet department and agency heads to shrink the government workforce immediately and pause swaths of government spending. DOGE first turned its focus to excising federal contracts and spending on issues like diversity, equity and inclusion provisions and foreign aid and has moved on to other federal agencies. The Trump administration offered a deferred resignation plan to more than 2 million civilian federal employees and convinced 75,000 to accept it before shutting it down and ordered agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees. DOGE has also gained access to the Treasury Department's payment system. And an IRS employee associated with DOGE requested access to the IRS' data system that includes individual taxpayer information in recent days. The moves have sparked controversy — and lawsuits — over the administration's authority to carry out its dramatic reshaping of the federal government in a compressed period of time. Facing scrutiny, Musk and allies have held up the example of the Clinton administration's government overhaul seemingly as a kind of model for their own. During a hearing held by the House's newly created DOGE subcommittee last week, one Republican lawmaker showed a video featuring Clinton and Gore's announcement after the six-month review to remind Democrats of what their "party believed in." Musk himself has highlighted the comparison between his work and the effort three decades prior in recent days, sharing an AI-generated post on reductions to the federal workforce under the Clinton administration and concurring with a post that called Clinton and Gore "the original Doges." Kamarck, though she has advocated for new government cuts, said the "big difference" between the Clinton administration program and DOGE is that the earlier program sought to understand what was going on in the agency and what was important — using a fine-toothed comb to make cuts. "If they were doing it the same way we did it, they could do a hell of a lot of good for the government," Kamarck said. "But instead, they're just, they're throwing out the baby with the bath water." Still, Clinton's government cutting received its share of criticism, sparking frustrations when the program chose to close many regional offices deemed to be obsolete and incompatible with advancements in electronic communications. Kamarck conceded that they didn't win every fight. Though they succeeded on procurement reform, pioneered electronic filing of tax returns and generally helped usher the federal government into the internet age, they fell short on civil service reform without an advocate in Congress. And although their effort to reduce the size of the government workforce took place over years instead of weeks, there were some who felt that the buyout strategy they used was not as effective as it could have been. "Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we'd have wanted to leave," Donald Kettl, the former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Government Executive in 2013. Kamarck said the process the Clinton administration followed is the "harder way to do it" — and not how DOGE is proceeding. "They are pretending that there is no law governing the bureaucracy," she said.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
U.S. government spending items have always been searchable. Why this time is different.
It took more than eight years for former Clinton administration adviser Elaine Kamarck to cut approximately 426,000 jobs, 16,000 pages and $136 billion — in 1990s dollars — from the federal government. So Kamarck, who ran the first phase of President Bill Clinton's Reforming Government ('REGO') effort, understands the impulse to scrutinize the extent of Washington's spending excesses — and that it can be addressed. Yet Kamarck, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told NBC News that while the 'slash and burn' approach currently being taken by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency can work in Silicon Valley, it can cost actual lives when used to implement changes in government outlays. 'If you apply that same slash and burn to air traffic control, or slash and burn to CDC investigating food poisonings, guess what: People die,' Kamarck said. 'It's a big f-----g deal. It's a completely different level of risk.' Over the past week or so, Musk and his DOGE team have ignited a firestorm by highlighting — sometimes in false, misleading, or erroneous ways — government spending that may have come as a surprise to the American public. Reforming federal spending remains a perennial topic of Washington discourse, and a galaxy of agencies, think tanks and NGOs are dedicated to rooting out perceived bureaucratic excesses in the government's $7 trillion annual budget. Notably, the information DOGE has surfaced was already available to the public. For more than a decade, a digital tool, has been accessible to anyone who wants to learn, in surprisingly granular detail, most of what the U.S. government was spending money on, and in what amounts. Yet the political environment is such that the Musk-led DOGE team now feels emboldened to push through radical changes, arguing that the end justifies the means. 'Although it is a humorous name, ironically I think DOGE will have a very serious and significant impact on government waste and fraud and abuse — which is really astonishing,' Musk said in a recent audio-only event on X, his social media platform. In addition to showing federal agencies' payments for news sites subscriptions — information that DOGE has caused to go viral with deceptive context — the site shows the largest individual government expenditures over the past 12 months. These include approximately $50 billion to health care group Humana, which helps run the military's TRICARE health program; roughly $50 billion to Lockheed Martin; about $38 billion to a group that manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory; approximately $36 billion to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and the group that manages Los Alamos National Laboratory. The laboratories alone focus much of their research on energy and national security solutions. Few would call the necessity of those programs into question. Indeed, Musk and DOGE have set their initial sights instead on USAID, a relatively obscure agency that provides critical funding for programs abroad and whose budget accounts for approximately 1% of all government expenditures. As Musk brings to light examples of spending at USAID that may not have relevance to most Americans' daily lives, the effort, so far, seems to belie his goal of finding trillions of dollars in federal savings — though he has indicated the DOGE mission is only just getting started. Kamarck said it is clear the DOGE team has started off looking for 'quick wins' — not least because Trump has just four years left in office. But, he said, using databases to find specific funding elements to cut may not ultimately yield much. Kamarck said a better target would be Medicare and Medicaid spending, which has historically been riddled with fraud, she said. (DOGE employees have reportedly become embedded in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.) Most federal agencies, including USAID, have employed an inspector general tasked with rooting out waste and malfeasance. There are other checks, too: Since its establishment in 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services' Medicare Fraud Strike Force has clawed back more than $4 billion in payments while filing nearly 3,500 criminal indictments. Yet Trump appears to have viewed many inspectors general as ineffective at best, having fired 18 of them within days of taking office, including at the Health and Human Services Department. DOGE's methods may also be breaking laws. Courts have begun imposing injunctions on some of the DOGE efforts. The White House asserts Musk has abided by 'all applicable laws' while exercising a maximalist view of the powers of the executive branch. 'Let me just start by saying that DOGE was a promise that President Trump campaigned on,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week. 'He campaigned alongside Elon Musk and was very vocal about the fact that he would be appointing Elon — or tasking Elon — with this very important role of putting together the Department of Government Efficiency.' DOGE has drawn the ire of Democrats. Late Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., gave a floor speech applauding any effort to examine spending profligacy while decrying the DOGE approach. He pointed out that his DATA Act, passed in 2014, established the first-ever way to track every dollar of U.S. government spending online via 'If there's ways to save spending, count me in,' Warner said. But he said he opposed giving DOGE employees access to sensitive personal information, as well as the ability to potentially alter previously apportioned payments themselves. 'Why would you give someone — a coder — the potential keys to the kingdom of the United States Treasury?' he asked. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, says she has some sympathy for what the DOGE team is trying to do. 'You just sometimes want to shake the federal branch and say, 'You've got to do some disrupting here,'' she said. But when it comes to disrupting systems in ways that could impact people's lives, MacGuineas said the DOGE team needs 'very different delivery systems.' She said that what they are doing now is taking 'a private-sector approach to public goods.' 'That's absolutely the wrong approach.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
07-02-2025
- Business
- NBC News
U.S. government spending items have always been searchable. Why this time is different.
It took more than eight years for former Clinton administration adviser Elaine Kamarck to cut approximately 426,000 jobs, 16,000 pages and $136 billion — in 1990s dollars — from the federal government. So Kamarck, who ran the first phase of President Bill Clinton's Reforming Government (' REGO ') effort, understands the impulse to scrutinize the extent of Washington's spending excesses — and that it can be addressed. Yet Kamarck, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told NBC News that while the 'slash and burn' approach currently being taken by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency can work in Silicon Valley, it can cost actual lives when used to implement changes in government outlays. 'If you apply that same slash and burn to air traffic control, or slash and burn to CDC investigating food poisonings, guess what: People die,' Kamarck said. 'It's a big f-----g deal. It's a completely different level of risk.' Over the past week or so, Musk and his DOGE team have ignited a firestorm by highlighting — sometimes in false, misleading, or erroneous ways — government spending that may have come as a surprise to the American public. Reforming federal spending remains a perennial topic of Washington discourse, and a galaxy of agencies, think tanks and NGOs are dedicated to rooting out perceived bureaucratic excesses in the government's $7 trillion annual budget. Notably, the information DOGE has surfaced was already available to the public. For more than a decade, a digital tool, has been accessible to anyone who wants to learn, in surprisingly granular detail, most of what the U.S. government was spending money on, and in what amounts. Yet the political environment is such that the Musk-led DOGE team now feels emboldened to push through radical changes, arguing that the end justifies the means. 'Although it is a humorous name, ironically I think DOGE will have a very serious and significant impact on government waste and fraud and abuse — which is really astonishing,' Musk said in a recent audio-only event on X, his social media platform. In addition to showing federal agencies' payments for news sites subscriptions — information that DOGE has caused to go viral with deceptive context — the site shows the largest individual government expenditures over the past 12 months. These include approximately $50 billion to health care group Humana, which helps run the military's TRICARE health program; roughly $50 billion to Lockheed Martin; about $38 billion to a group that manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory; approximately $36 billion to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and the group that manages Los Alamos National Laboratory. The laboratories alone focus much of their research on energy and national security solutions. Few would call the necessity of those programs into question. Indeed, Musk and DOGE have set their initial sights instead on USAID, a relatively obscure agency that provides critical funding for programs abroad and whose budget accounts for approximately 1% of all government expenditures. As Musk brings to light examples of spending at USAID that may not have relevance to most Americans' daily lives, the effort, so far, seems to belie his goal of finding trillions of dollars in federal savings — though he has indicated the DOGE mission is only just getting started. Kamarck said it is clear the DOGE team has started off looking for 'quick wins' — not least because Trump has just four years left in office. But, he said, using databases to find specific funding elements to cut may not ultimately yield much. Kamarck said a better target would be Medicare and Medicaid spending, which has historically been riddled with fraud, she said. (DOGE employees have reportedly become embedded in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.) Most federal agencies, including USAID, have employed an inspector general tasked with rooting out waste and malfeasance. There are other checks, too: Since its establishment in 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services' Medicare Fraud Strike Force has clawed back more than $4 billion in payments while filing nearly 3,500 criminal indictments. Yet Trump appears to have viewed many inspectors general as ineffective at best, having fired 18 of them within days of taking office, including at the Health and Human Services Department. DOGE's methods may also be breaking laws. Courts have begun imposing injunctions on some of the DOGE efforts. The White House asserts Musk has abided by 'all applicable laws' while exercising a maximalist view of the powers of the executive branch. 'Let me just start by saying that DOGE was a promise that President Trump campaigned on,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week. 'He campaigned alongside Elon Musk and was very vocal about the fact that he would be appointing Elon — or tasking Elon — with this very important role of putting together the Department of Government Efficiency.' DOGE has drawn the ire of Democrats. Late Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., gave a floor speech applauding any effort to examine spending profligacy while decrying the DOGE approach. He pointed out that his DATA Act, passed in 2014, established the first-ever way to track every dollar of U.S. government spending online via 'If there's ways to save spending, count me in,' Warner said. But he said he opposed giving DOGE employees access to sensitive personal information, as well as the ability to potentially alter previously apportioned payments themselves. 'Why would you give someone — a coder — the potential keys to the kingdom of the United States Treasury?' he asked. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, says she has some sympathy for what the DOGE team is trying to do. 'You just sometimes want to shake the federal branch and say, 'You've got to do some disrupting here,'' she said. But when it comes to disrupting systems in ways that could impact people's lives, MacGuineas said the DOGE team needs 'very different delivery systems.' She said that what they are doing now is taking 'a private-sector approach to public goods.' 'That's absolutely the wrong approach.'
