New Delhi: US President Donald Trump has in his second term, made reforms in federal governance a key component of his MAGA drive. He has established a new department- the Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE)- under his closest confidant Elon Musk and given him a free hand in downsising the various wings of the federal government.
The President is validating decisions of Musk by issuing Executive Orders on a running basis. DOGE has evidently discovered systemic corruption on a large scale and found legitimate grounds for enforcing cost-effectiveness.
Efficiency, by definition, is a measure of output per unit of resource- money and manpower in this case- and it is enhanced if the number of employees doing a job is reduced to the optimal minimum and likewise, if procedures are pruned to ensure that a task was completed in the minimal number of operational steps.
India has had a history of Administrative Reforms Commissions (ARCs) producing voluminous reports that only added to the size of bureaucracy and left behind no lasting impressions. It is interesting to note that Prime Minister Modi’s call for ‘minimum government maximum governance’ for India is what seemingly was being implemented by DOGE in America.
However, it is the large-scale lay-offs ordered at one go and the quick-fix style of working of the new department under Elon Musk, that has created a stir leading to many orders being challenged in the District Courts. The Trump Administration was not deterred by any of this- it seemed to be confident about pushing the judicial process through the Court of Appeals and even the Supreme Court.
Education and Health are the two basic concerns of the national government in a democratic dispensation for they laid the foundation for producing the right kind of electorate – apart from meeting the obligation of ‘welfarism’ that had to be discharged by a democratic state.
These two wings of the government are interestingly, the first among the segments targeted by DOGE for downsising through lay-offs.
Trump signed an executive order dismantling the Department of Education on March 20 but even before that on March 12 nearly 50 per cent of the department’s workforce had been laid off.
Trump said he wanted to ‘return education back to the states’, derided the department as ‘wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology’ and in a strong comment declared that ‘the experiment of controlling American education through federal programmes and dollars has failed our children, our teachers and our families’.
Federal actions have already been initiated against Ivy League schools, Columbia and Harvard, over alleged harassment of Jewish students. The Trump Administration has suspended several dozen federally funded research grants to Princeton University as part of its investigation into campus anti-Semitic activity.
Unsurprisingly, Civil Rights groups saw all of this as a policy going against principles of equality and equability and warned of the return of civil rights violations in schools. Established in 1979 the Department of Education oversees funding for public schools, monitors student loans and runs programmes that help low-income group students.
Trump has accused the department of ‘indoctrinating young people with racial and political material’. He thought it was not the business of Education to handle loans and assigned this function to the Treasury. Trump has also curtailed USAID funding because of his basic aversion to civil society groups promoting left-liberalism in the name of human rights.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, Secretary Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced major changes at HHS bringing down the divisions from 28 to 15 through internal mergers, indicating that mass layoffs were in the offing to reduce the full-time HHS workforce of 82,000 by about 25 per cent -saving 1.8 billion a year -and contended that the department ‘will do more with less’. Kennedy went on record to say that in one instance ‘defiant bureaucrats’ impeded his office’s effort to access the closely guarded database that might reveal the ‘dangers of certain drugs’.
It is clear that one reform the Trump Administration is pressing for is to break the stranglehold of bureaucracy that tended to become an ‘autonomous power centre’ itself in a democratic dispensation by invoking rules and procedures. This can be regarded as a valid reform if the efficient delivery of public services was being aimed at a striking example of this was the discovery by DOGE that 3.2 million individuals aged 120 years were still on social security record.
One new division called the ‘Administration of a Healthy America’ has been created to replace five former divisions including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Administration for Community Living that dealt with older people and people with disabilities- these were redistributed to other divisions.
It seems for the first time Secretaries of various departments have been tasked directly by DOGE to carry out an in-depth examination of the ways and means of making federal governance cost-effective and consequently more efficient.
National media is another area of the scan by the Trump Administration- a major decision taken by it is to dismantle the Voice of America (VOA)- the government-funded international news service whose 1200 employees were put on paid leave.
Trump has been against VOA for its alleged bias against conservative Americans and has not taken kindly to VOA praising China’s effort to control the COVID-19 virus. A district judge, meanwhile, in response to a suit filed on March 21, restrained the US Agency for Global Media(USAGM) which oversees VOA from shutting down its broadcast.
The judge took the view that USAGM cannot usurp Congress’s power of the purse and its legislative supremacy. Notices of termination were meanwhile sent by the Trump Administration also to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty whose President Stephen Capus said that this decision is ‘a massive gift to America’s enemies’.
President Trump’s executive order for significant pruning of government agencies covered the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness.
Significantly these measures are projected as steps for ‘reducing bureaucracy’ and government expenditure and the heads of the named agencies have been asked to report to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget what part of the expenditure was statutorily required to be granted.
All this suggests that a comprehensively thought-out plan of reducing the size of the federal government was in play in which ideological intolerance of the advocacy of ‘liberalism’ considered not in alignment with America First, was discernible.
The consequences of some of the precipitating moves of President Trump like declaring a ‘national emergency’ for turning out all illegal immigrants from the US that allowed the use of the Army to block the southern border and induction of Homeland Security for hounding out such individuals, the large scale lay-offs ordered by DOGE to make the governance cost-effective and aggressive adoption of ‘America First’ in foreign policy, trade and tariff as also in the matter of preference to Americans in jobs, are showing up.
H1B visas that attracted bright students to America have become uncertain, denial of citizenship by birth has impeded the prospect of long-term settlement in the US of individuals who were willing to give their best there and the perceived discrimination in the policy towards outsiders, have all produced a certain degree of uncertainty and unpredictability in that country.
Sweeping changes in the federal research policy and funding have reportedly led to many US-based scientists contemplating shifting to Europe or Canada.
Post-doctoral and PhD students are also likely to decline in number for the same reason. It can be said, however, that unbridled freedom to run down a democratic regime through ‘narrative building’ or to take to the path of narcotics trade or human trafficking as a freedom of avocation, had to be put under a centralised check.
Trump’s domestic and international policies have been implemented simultaneously, but it is important to consider whether, if given time to develop, they would restore stability for legitimate immigrants.
In great enthusiasm for implementing coordinated decisions quickly, the team of top Trump advisors apparently slipped up on the security front while using the encrypted Signal platform for a group chat relating to the plans of missile and drone launches against Houthis of Yemen.
Houthis had been attacking the ships carrying Western aid for Israel through the Red Sea.
The Editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is virulently opposed to Trump got access to the chat in advance of the discussion on the plans to attack Houthis.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz owned responsibility for the leak -said to have been caused by a technical glitch -and President Trump responded by saying that a lesson had been learnt and that the Administration would move away from the messaging platform.
‘War plans with timelines’ can not be discussed online- nothing is more important than this to warrant top advisors finding time to meet across the table in a confidential environment and comply with the ‘need to know’ principle. Speedy decision-making may require sacrifice of convenience but it can never be at the cost of security.
No policy maker is above briefing for security orientation and the norms of this would ideally be set by the Director of National Intelligence in the US context.
India has done well to approach the Trump Administration with an understanding of the latter’s security and economic concerns and work for maintaining strategic friendship between the two democracies.
Trump has a certain potential for handling the world’s trouble spots in a manner that checks escalation and gives a push towards resolution. In opposing ‘Islamic terrorism’ and countering an aggressive China, India and the US remain on the same side of the fence regarding and trade & tariffs as well as immigration, India’s response of reason might help to sort out the issues and keep Indo-US relations smooth.
In the final analysis India as a major power having a say in the global issues of peace and economic development has the locus standi to sustain bilateral relationship with the Trump Presidency in a spirit of upholding the national interests of both the countries.
(The writer is a former Director Intelligence Bureau)
–IANS
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