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Key Alabama Republicans have come out in support of the Department of Government Efficiency proposed by President-elect Donald Trump.
In the agency’s announcement post on Truth Social, Trump described the office’s goal as to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies.” Trump wrote that the agency will be headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The initial plan published on DOGE’s X account, called for, “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” Musk has also called for the 400-plus federal agencies to be cut to 99 or fewer.
DOGE has, so far, pledged to cut at least $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal government. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., called DOGE “the best thing” Trump has done in politics so far. Tuberville has also taken to X to call for DOGE to end daylight saving time. “The outdated practice of changing our clocks twice a year is ridiculous and needs to end,” Tuberville wrote in response to a post announcing DOGE was considering ending the practice.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., said of DOGE, “The American people heard what Donald Trump wanted to do. They know he wants to cut waste. They know he wants to get things back to where they should be. This is what we need. This is what the American people want. They want us to shake up business as usual, and they want us to get it back to our core principles,” Britt said.
Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Hoover, expressed support for the department during a Dec. 20 appearance on conservative talk radio show “Rightside Radio.” Palmer, however, admitted that DOGE is not the first government efficiency initiative to hit D.C. during the last 30 years.
Palmer said of a meeting which included Ramaswamy and Vice President-elect JD Vance, “They weren’t aware that we’ve already gone through an efficiency type effort, and it was led by Al Gore, of all people.”
“So, we’ve done this before, that’s what people need to understand and is what I was trying to get across to them and it was led by a Democrat so they can’t come out and start crying that we’re taking away people’s jobs,” Palmer said, continuing, “This is not new. We can do it. We just gotta have the leadership willing to do it and I think that’s what you got in Trump and that’s why he put Musk and Ramaswamy in charge of it.”
In 1993, Bill Clinton called for the establishment of the National Performance Review. It, along with its 1998 predecessor the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, provided efficiency recommendations that slashed federal employment. A Congressional Research Service report found that the effort alone cut 351,000 federal positions.
CRS also wrote the programs revoked “640,000 pages of internal agency rules and about 16,000 pages of federal regulations, with another 31,000 pages being rewritten in plain language.”
While these programs cut immediate costs and slashed federal employment, critics of the initiatives argued that, by loosening management structure or basing management on corporate models, they may have, in fact, made the government less efficient.
Administration expert James D. Carroll wrote in his analysis of the rhetoric of NPR and its political effects, “In treating government as a Wal-Mart, the NPR ignores the fact that many operational assumptions based on customer service have implications for broader systems of values such as the rule of law, representative government, separated and shared powers, and individual liberty.”
Donald F. Kettle wrote in his appraisal of the program that NPR “reduced the number of supervisors without transforming federal management practice.”
“Its top officials preached the virtues of reducing middle management just as the private sector was rediscovering the importance of middle managers as ‘high-impact players,” Kettle wrote.
Before NPR, the Reagan Administration’s privately funded and staffed President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control or known as the “Grace Commission” similarly took aim at government efficiency, while itself employing nearly 2,000 business executives across 36 task forces. Critics of the commission again, questioned the efficacy of applying the applying corporate organizational principles to government.
In Alabama, the 2013 consolidation of state 12 state agencies into the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency has similarly drawn criticism for failing to curb government inefficacy.
Rep. Phillip Pettus, R-Killen, who sponsored legislation in 2019 to abolish ALEA said, “They said ALEA would save about $35 million a year. It hasn’t saved anything.”
In 2019 ALEA received $204,403,572 in receipts, a yearly expenditure rate which has since risen to $209,463,587.
While it is yet to be seen how DOGE seeks to trim $2 trillion from the budget, posts on the department’s X account have called for cutbacks in foreign aid—despite the fact that foreign aid only makes up around 1 percent of federal spending. The account also has posts taking aim at healthcare costs and government diversity initiatives.
Trump has said he will not cut spending for Medicare and Social Security which takes up roughly a third of the federal budget. Trump also has promised to “strengthen and modernize” the military in his second term which could boost defense spending which already takes up 13 percent of budget.
