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Spin Control: DOGE, the new cost-cutting initiative, has echoes of Reagan effort

“If you sit by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” – Sun Tzu.

Having not sat for long periods by a river – and largely avoided making the kind of enemies that merit a face-down float – I’ve never been sure if the old Chinese proverb is correct.

But I can confirm that reporters who sit by their computer screens long enough will see the ideas of past political leaders come back around for another try.

That was my initial reaction last week to reports of Capitol Hill visits by a couple of high-powered business executives intent on making good on a presidential campaign promise to cut government waste.

This time, it was Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the once and future President Donald Trump’s joint leaders of a group dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency. But it sounded a bit like a pumped-up-on-steroids version of the Grace Commission, a group of business executives appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1982.

Like many candidates before him, Reagan had campaigned on cutting government waste, fraud and abuse. In truth, there has probably been no candidate in history who campaigned on the spoken premise that the federal government is too small and so well run that we should make it bigger.

But after the 1980 election produced the first Republican Senate in 26 years and a significantly larger GOP minority in the House, Reagan was intent on making good on his campaign promise. He appointed Peter Grace, the chief executive officer of a company that had grown from a chemical producer to a large multi-faceted industrial operation, to head more than 1,000 business executives recruited for the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.

The acronym didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it was generally called the Grace Commission.

They set up 36 task forces and set about living up to Reagan’s command to “leave no stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency.” Two years later, they produced a 47-volume report totaling more than 22,000 pages that suggested ways to save $424 billion over three years. Note that this was a time when people were impressed with savings in billions rather than trillions.

The Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office looked at the report and disagreed with the commission and each other on how much the proposals would save. But the two government agencies noted that only about a fourth of it could be done through presidential action. The rest would require congressional approval.

And that’s where many of the commission’s big-ticket items hit a bipartisan wall.

The Grace Commission recommendation that Northwest residents of a certain age might remember was a suggestion to sell the Bonneville Power Administration to a private entity, which could then charge higher “market-rate” electricity in line with much of the rest of the country.

Reagan suggested such a move in 1986, but the region’s congressional delegation, which was much more balanced between Rs and Ds then, locked arms in opposition, as did businesses and homeowners across the Northwest, even though all the states gave Reagan their Electoral votes.

A year later, Congress passed a law that prohibited even studying that sale.

A recommendation to close some unneeded military bases survived, but only by establishing a new group, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission or BRAC, to study which ones were truly unneeded.

That, of course, set off a new round of congressional fights in the districts with bases potentially on the chopping block, although the final decisions weren’t made until 1995.

In Spokane, people worried that Fairchild Air Force Base would be shuttered, and for years, one could spook executives at the Spokane Area Chamber of Commerce or Greater Spokane Inc. by sneaking up behind them and whispering “BRAC.”

Of the suggested $424 billion in savings over three years, actions by Reagan saved about $100 billion over that period. Citizens Against Government Waste, an organization set up by Grace after the commission turned in its report, estimates that has grown to a total of $2.4 trillion in the years since.

The question now is whether recommendations from the new cost-cutting organization that require congressional approval will do better or worse than the Grace Commission. Even though the 1980s might seem as remote as the Stone Age to them, Musk and Ramaswamy might want to take a look back to discover what worked and what didn’t.

DOGE at least has a pronounceable acronym. It has two high-powered executives rather than one at its head. They received a generally positive reception from Republicans during their visit to Capitol Hill last week, perhaps because Musk, unlike Grace, showed up with one of his kids riding on his shoulders.

But like Grace and most members of his commission, neither Musk nor Ramaswamy have any experience in government even though they have experience dealing with government. That can create an opinion that government should be run more like a business. That often fails, because government isn’t a business that measures its success in profit or loss.

Republicans control both houses of Congress, which is something Reagan never had. But the Republican margin in the Senate is smaller than Reagan’s, and the margin in the House is a mere five votes. Presumably, any suggestion to sell the BPA would crash and burn because there are more than five Republicans whose constituents get their power through that agency.

Those margins mean that any proposals to convince Congress to cut programs that benefit a significant number of their constituents will be challenging, even if DOGE tries to paint them as “pork barrel” spending.

That’s when another saying, not nearly as old as the Chinese proverb, might take precedence. As former House Speaker Tom Foley liked to point out, “One person’s pork barrel spending is another person’s wise investment in the local infrastructure.”

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