- Elon Musk has channeled former Democratic President Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative in defending DOGE’s cost-slashing efforts. But a top aide during the Clinton administration says DOGE is going about it completely wrong—and has a warning for the cost-cutter-in-chief.
Elon Musk’s efforts to remove government agencies by the roots is the latest in a long line of similar efforts. Every president since Ronald Regan has tried to make government smaller, better, more efficient. Just one was successful, as Andrew Cockburn recently wrote in an essay for Harper’s: Bill Clinton, the only president since the 1950s to preside over a shrinking federal workforce.
As part of the Democrat’s much-touted “Reinventing Government” effort, which attempted to make civil service cooler, faster, and more efficient, hundreds of thousands of federal employees left their jobs during Clinton’s eight years in office. But experts still disagree on whether the move saved money or just shifted the costs elsewhere in the federal budget.
Like Trump, Clinton had campaigned on a promise to streamline government. “While Democrats were the party of government, we didn’t agree that there should be government without limits,” Elaine Kamarck, who was senior policy advisor to then-Vice President Al Gore, told Fortune. “We thought government was too big and thought it needed to be more efficient.”
Working with Gore, she created a committee, pulled from various federal agencies, whose job was to systematically review and slim down the government; at one point, it counted more than 400 members. Agencies were told to submit proposals for cutting rules, regulations, and paperwork and improve performance; proposals were then assigned to a “champion” within each agency to make sure they were carried out. The Clinton administration did a full-blown media tour, even giving out “hammer awards" to particularly good ideas.
Added Kamarck, “I was Elon Musk 31 years ago, without the bank account.”
Indeed, Musk called out the Clinton reform efforts on X last week, writing, “What DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s. The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!”
However, unlike DOGE, whose cut-first-ask-questions-later approach has ruffled many feathers and forced the group to reverse some cuts, “we took the time to understand the mission of the agency, and understand if it was important or not important,” Kamarck said. Rather than doing away with government altogether, the group’s mantra was “creating a government that works better and costs less.”
Among their many upgrades, the task force resulted in moving vast amounts of government information to a then-nascent internet; opening some government services, like passport offices, on Saturdays; and giving performance metrics to some government agencies for the first time. About 420,000 federal workers left the government, Kamarck said. Congress approved $25,000 buyouts for departing workers, the Associated Press reported, while others left through attrition and a small number of layoffs. “These people basically had no trouble finding jobs,” Kamarck said.
Clinton also asked Congress for permission to cut costs, and they agreed to $3.6 billion in reductions, per the AP. The Trump administration’s cost-slashing effort has so far bypassed Congress, making it the target of multiple lawsuits from affected workers and state attorneys general.
DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
Off the balance sheet and into the private sector
Just like Trump today, Clinton talked up bringing private-sector efficiency to the public purse. But there's a key caveat, said Kamarck. In government, “the stakes are higher,” she said. “People die. You fire air traffic controllers, and airplanes crash.”
“If you go into Twitter, cut 80% of the staff and twitter goes dark for a week, who gives a shit? The world goes on without X,” she continued. “You take down Medicare, people go without drugs. You take down social security and 69% of seniors have nothing else to live on.”
“If these 25-year-olds that nobody knows and nobody has voted on start making changes to the Social Security database, the IRS database, all hell is going to break loose,” she added. “If this goes on long enough, at some point the reverberations are going to be politically deadly.”
The Clinton effort did succeed in slimming down the government, saving about $146 billion, by Kamarck’s estimate. But critics charge it didn’t save costs in the long term, because the government had to turn around and hire private contractors to do the jobs of federal workers who had left, something the AP noted might happen again under Trump. Many employees with special skills that would have been useful in running an efficient ship left during restructuring, Government Executive reported, while many less-efficient workers ended up staying.
And costs once again started to rise; by 1999, the watchdog Project on Government Oversight had documented instances of the Department of Defense vastly overpaying for parts, including paying $76 for 57-cent screws and paying $716 for an electric bell worth $47 on the private market.
Contractors cost between two and three times as much as federal employees to do the same work, POGO found.
“The real deep state is the contractor state,” wrote John DiIulio, professor of politics, religion, and civil society at the University of Pennsylvania, shortly after Trump’s election. He noted, “federal government reform isn’t rocket science; it’s way harder.”
Beware blowback
But the contractor class isn’t going to be the only, or even the first, constituency to voice its displeasure. That belongs to voters receiving government services, Kamarck predicted in a piece warning Musk of “major backlash.” Indeed, DOGE’s approval numbers are already underwater in several polls, and many angry constituents made their minds known at GOP town halls over the weekend, as media reports have documented.
Indeed, Americans’ belief that government should be smaller — “It’s in our DNA to have smaller government”—reliably dies in the confrontation with specific government services, Kamarck noted.
“The federal government is distant and people don’t know what it does,” she said. “People love the things they know and use,” she said—the military, Social Security, Medicare. Americans may not love the IRS, where 6,000 workers were just cut, but they love getting a tax refund every year.
“When people don’t get their refunds on time, who do you think they’ll get mad at?” Kamarck said. “Trump and the Treasury Secretary.”
