According to the most recent Harvard/Harris poll, a whopping 83% of voters support cutting government spending to reduce the deficit, with 70% believing that government spending is “rife” with waste to the point that $1 trillion in wasteful spending could be cut. Yet despite this support, CBS News found that only 51% support President Donald Trump’s efforts to cut staff at government agencies. There seems to be a disconnect between what voters want and what Trump is delivering. The president prudently addressed that disconnect this week in the Oval Office.
“It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people,” Trump said. “As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say use the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”
This is good advice, and as the agency department heads continue their consultations with the Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk, it should be heeded. Not every government employee makes the federal government more inefficient.
Take the Food and Drug Administration, which is charged with, among other things, testing and approving drugs for commercial use. For years, doctors, patients, and drug companies all complained that FDA approval of new medicines took far too long and that the approval process could be improved by hiring more staff. Congress balked at allocating more funds for FDA. But it did pass the Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992, which imposed fees on drug companies that were then directly used to hire more FDA staff. The result was a noticeable decrease in drug approval times. In this case, more staff did make the agency more efficient.
While it is highly unlikely that every employee at the FDA helps make drug approval times faster, the data indicates that most do, which is why it was disconcerting when, at DOGE’s advice, the FDA fired 200 of its 20,000 employees not based on their merit, but based on when they were hired. That is using a hatchet not a scalpel.
Or take the Department of Education, which has spent trillions of dollars since its creation in 1970 without managing to raise student test scores or basic literacy at all. It may be tempting for conservatives to hope Trump will snap his fingers and make the Education Department disappear like he did to USAID. But would that really help improve local schools?
According to the Government Accountability Office, while just 7% of K-12 education funding comes from the federal government (the rest coming from state and local governments), 41% of the paperwork done by schools is due to compliance with federal regulation.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires teachers to write an Individualized Education Program for every student identified as qualifying for IDEA services, is a prime example of inefficiency in education. These IEPs require a detailed assessment of each student’s current abilities, specific measurable objectives for the following year, a list of supports for each student and how they will be delivered, and plans for tracking student progress. These plans must be rewritten every year, which takes 5-20 hours per student; teachers must meet with parents every year, which takes an hour. These meetings must be prepared for, which takes another hour. And then there are often quarterly meetings on top of that. Many special education teachers report they spend more than half their time on paperwork. And the population of students receiving IDEA services has exploded over the past ten years, growing more than 15%.
Could all this paperwork be cut without harming students and probably even helping them as teachers had more time to deliver services and spent less time on paperwork? Yes. Private and parochial schools over similar services with far less administrative waste.
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But eliminating the Education Department wouldn’t relieve these schools of the federal paperwork burden. The regulations mandating those administrative burdens would still be in effect. What is needed are employees at the Education Department in Washington to write new regulations that ease the paperwork burdens on local schools. Firing random people won’t make that happen.
Voters know there is waste in Washington that can and should be cut. But there are some agencies, like the FDA, that do perform essential tasks and need to be staffed with the best people. For other departments, like Education, it is entirely possible that their functions would be best performed by other agencies or state governments. But that doesn’t mean firing everyone would help anyone get a better education. Unwinding such agencies would take time and planning. Fortunately, Trump seems to be learning these lessons.