Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Before Elon Musk and his chainsaw, there was Mitch Daniels \u201cthe Blade<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The former Indiana governor and Office of Management and Budget director under President George W. Bush, Daniels established a reputation in the early 2000s as a knife to government. As governor, he shrunk the size of his state’s workforce by 18 percent<\/a> and turned a $700 million deficit into a $2 billion surplus.<\/p>\n Daniels even doled out refund checks to Hoosier taxpayers on the backs of the cuts.<\/p>\n Now, he and a crop of like-minded former GOP governors are looking at Musk and President Donald Trump\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency with a bit of nostalgia, uncertainty and \u2014 in Daniels\u2019 case \u2014 caution.<\/p>\n \u201cI certainly would have cautioned against throwing out a number that\u2019s just preposterous,\u201d Daniels told POLITICO of the $2 trillion Musk has set as a benchmark for DOGE savings. \u201cThere\u2019s a real value in an effort like this because they illuminate the fact that the government does a lot of very silly or unnecessary or even counterproductive things, but I would have urged that they go achieve some real success first and then talk. Talk less, do more.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Daniels. Former governors of Illinois and New Jersey attempted similar, albeit less aggressive, moves to cut government, sometimes stymied by the same bureaucracy they tried to eliminate.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has suggested it\u2019s not doing anything new, invoking President Bill Clinton\u2019s \u201cReinventing Government\u201d initiative headed by Vice President Al Gore as an example. Musk even gave a hat tip to the Clinton White House, recently posting<\/a> \u201cWhat @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton\/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s.\u201d<\/p>\n Who can forget the time Gore promoted the effort on David Letterman\u2019s late-night TV show by taking a hammer to a government ashtray.<\/p>\n In interviews, the former GOP governors outlined successes and pitfalls of their respective approaches. Former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner said it was \u201cvery, very, very tough to shrink\u201d the government in his state, while former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie acknowledged making some cuts to human services he quickly regretted \u2014 forcing him to backpedal.<\/p>\n \u201cI did a bunch of line-item vetoing and by definition that’s done more quickly because a bunch comes, and you have a certain period of time to do it. There were cuts to human services that wound up affecting kids in ways that I didn’t anticipate they would, and so I went back and changed it,\u201d recalled Christie, a longtime Trump critic and former presidential candidate. \u201cI took some abuse for it when it happened and I deserved it. I made a mistake, so I think when that happens, you just have to go \u2018OK. I made the mistake, now fix it.\u2019 It\u2019s not like the mistakes are never going to be made.\u201d<\/p>\n Daniels once even put pennies on the tires of state-owned vehicles to see if they were used. When he came back a month later and the pennies were still there, Daniels himself served as auctioneer and sold the fleet of 1,000 of them. He even cut the state\u2019s force of planes and helicopters from 22 to 6.<\/p>\n But none of those efforts were anywhere near as chaotic as Musk\u2019s DOGE<\/a>, which has come with multiple instances of employees being fired and then re-hired, most notably nuclear weapons program workers and workers responding to the spread of bird flu<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cPersonnel costs are such a small part of the money federal government spends and wastes,\u201d Daniels said. \u201cI think they don’t want to over emphasize that, because it hands the friends of the status quo a club: You know, you’re hurting these innocent people.\u201d<\/p>\n Daniels, like Trump, had a Republican legislature to back him up. Rauner and Christie weren\u2019t so lucky, facing resistance to their efforts to reduce government from Democratic-led state legislatures. And then there are outside pressures, similar to the legal challenges facing Trump.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are all kinds of restrictions and union rules and regulatory rules for what you can do as an executive versus what needs legislative or other approvals, including union approvals and employee approvals,\u201d Rauner said in an interview.<\/p>\n Rauner was a Daniels acolyte who \u201cstudied what he did\u201d and even tried to poach some of the Indiana governor\u2019s staff. One top lieutenant made the move. But if Rauner\u2019s Turnaround Agenda was designed to overhaul state government, his proposals left him butting heads with the Democratic-led Illinois General Assembly, and resulted in a more than two-year budget impasse that saw social service programs drastically cut or eliminated.<\/p>\n He said Republicans believe the Trump administration \u201cdeserves credit for trying [to reduce government] because nobody else, literally nobody, has been willing to do it at the federal level in anything like this scale and speed.\u201d<\/p>\n And he compared Trump\u2019s sledge-hammer approach to how the corporate world operates \u2014 \u201cmove fast and break things that are broken. And most Republicans regard the federal bureaucracy as broken. So I think they\u2019re trying to do what a lot of people would support.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s except for one thing. Rauner acknowledged he wouldn\u2019t cut education. \u201cIt\u2019s the most important thing we do collectively as a community and as a society,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Like Rauner and Daniels, Christie, a former two-term governor of New Jersey, has been watching closely at how Trump\u2019s team is trying to recreate government.<\/p>\n Christie argued a lack of transparency is the biggest problem with the current reinvention of government.<\/p>\n He pointed to the recent flub in which DOGE \u201caccidentally canceled\u201d efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola. Musk said the initiative was restored, but those kinds of mistakes don\u2019t sit well with the public.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s why I think you should be going through a process where people know what you\u2019re doing and that you\u2019re doing it in a transparent way by examining it before you cut it,\u201d said Christie. \u201cHere, I think it\u2019s the opposite process.\u201d<\/p>\n