My most recent post “Haste Controls Waste!” sought to reconcile my misgivings about the speed of current government reforms with decades of staunch and thoroughgoing resistance. Now let’s talk about DOGE-y reforms that could be applied to democratic processes.
When Elon Musk spoke about democracy in the Oval Office some weeks ago, many people focused on the antics of his son. Musk articulated well that democracy fails when unelected bureaucrats have the power and elected officials do not. It was something that a childhood watcher of Schoolhouse Rock! would vibe to. The electorate seems to know that, on the state of actual American democracy, they’re often being lied to.
The idea of representative government that Musk briefly articulated needs a gloss for current realities. To make our vastly oversized democracy work again, it is important not only to reduce the size and power of the bureaucracy but to increase the capacity of the people to oversee their elected representatives.
Many people worked on this during the Obama administration, which came in on promises of transparency-oriented reforms. Indeed, transparency was the subject of President Obama’s first broken promise! But much of the work done then could be picked up and implemented by DOGE today.
What a fascinating coincidence. I’m speaking of my work done then!
In 2011 and 2012, I wrote two complementary papers on digital government transparency. Publication Practices for Transparent Government was a (sort-of) accessible primer on how to publish data for maximal utility. Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices aimed to assess how well Congress and the administration published key items of information.
The grades were pretty bad. One reason is that there was no consistent account of the entities that make up the government. There was—and still is, so far as I know—no federal government organization chart.
When they budget, appropriate, and spend, the legislative and executive branches work with different lists of the entities that make up the federal government. There may even be different versions of the federal government’s organization chart in the executive branch at Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). You and I don’t have access to any of them.
For my grading project, I selected a version of the government that falls into an orderly hierarchy: agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects. I believe this is congruent with how OMB sees the world through its “MAX” database, the tool that it uses to produce the administration’s annual budget.
I never saw it, so I couldn’t copy its model. And Congress doesn’t budget or appropriate using the same model of the federal government. So when it says that funds need to go to some purpose, funds go to some purpose nearby, but nobody can say definitively, at scale, that the administration is doing what Congress said to do.
All this might be easier illustrated using the counterfactual:
When Congress creates budget authorities—legal power to spend money—that authority is clearly assigned to a specific entity in the government. When Congress then appropriates money, those appropriations, too, are clearly designated to the government entities earlier given power to spend.
When agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects do things, their legal authorities are evident in contract documents and spending orders. The data trail leading back to congressional legislation means that the public, through data journalists or directly, can see that a given vote in Congress built a certain highway or paid for a certain bombing campaign. That vote in Congress produced that meal served to a student in Appalachia. That vote in Congress paid for that ambassador to represent us in Copenhagen. The stories available in the data are rich and enriching to our democratic processes.
Alas, nothing in the last two paragraphs is true.
But it could be true, if the administration and Congress were to harmonize on a single organization chart for the federal government. Then they would use unique identifiers for governmental entities to create budget authorities and appropriations. The administration would attach legal authorities in data to contracts and outlays.
There is more to making all this happen than a single blog post can cover, but my instinct is that the outlines are enough for DOGE people to grok. A major step forward, rich in both symbolism and meaning, would be for the Trump administration to make the MAX database publicly accessible.
While the winds of reform still blow strong, the government should harmonize on one version of what entities exist in the government—an organization chart—and then use it. That will begin to empower citizens to oversee their elected officials in a manner consistent with democratic theory.
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