To tame Washington, we need a DOGE 2.0 — but done right this time
Yet there's still hope — and the need has never been more urgent.
The Senate parliamentarian gutted major cost savings at the heart of the Republican reconciliation bill that President Donald Trump signed Friday, so he must resume DOGE efforts immediately.
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In Silicon Valley terms, DOGE had product-market fit; it just didn't have the right tech stack. This time, the White House must get the architecture right.
Step 1 is understanding what went wrong. DOGE's failures stemmed from three fundamental flaws that doomed the effort from the start.
The first was structural. Don Devine, who ran the Office of Personnel Management for President Ronald Reagan, warned that creating a new agency to shrink government never works — it only causes confusion, diffusion of responsibility and more bureaucracy.
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It also ignores that in Washington, the coin of the realm is power.
DOGE was a new agency made up out of thin air with zero inherent legal authority — and Cabinet secretaries naturally bristled at an outside third party meddling in their agencies.
They wanted to control the change, and they possessed the legal authority to do so. Indeed, as secretaries were confirmed, they moved quickly to throw off DOGE's yoke.
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By late February, Musk faced a revolt as top officials countermanded DOGE's 'five weekly accomplishments' order. An 'explosive' Cabinet meeting in early March ended with Trump telling Musk to make changes with a scalpel, not a hatchet.
Musk's second problem was a legal one. Private-sector experience can't prepare anyone for the labyrinth of administrative law that liberal activists use to stymie progress.
DOGE lacked a dedicated legal team within the Justice Department focused solely on its policy reforms and preventing unforced errors.
For example, DOGE lowered NIH's cap on allowable research overhead from 69% to 15%, explaining that private foundations allow for zero such funding — but it made the cap retroactive, jeopardizing the reform in court.
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The third sin was flash. Even as DOGE's publicity invited legal challenges, it increased the pressure to meet publicly proclaimed, wildly optimistic targets. DOGE's $1 trillion in promised cuts will strain to hit $150 billion.
We had a saying in the White House during Trump's first term, and it proved true here: Whales that surface get harpooned.
Musk acknowledged as much on X last week, admitting that his attention-getting antics 'lacked empathy.'
Fortunately, the source code exists to reengineer the DOGE mission with bold, swift, high-impact moves.
The White House must implement three critical components to make DOGE 2.0 work.
First, empower Cabinet control: The White House should give Cabinet secretaries direction, then let them make reforms themselves.
Trump must give each Cabinet member mandatory workforce reduction goals, the same way tech sales teams have strict quotas. Faced with a requirement, for example, to trim 25% within six months, agency heads will snap into action — and will feel personal responsibility for performance.
The federal government works best when it functions as designed, with the president — not a third party — telling his Cabinet what to do.
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Second, the White House must assemble a dedicated legal defense team within the Justice Department focused solely on reform policies, and get each agency's general counsel on board with the effort.
These lawyers will catch pitfalls early — and will go the extra mile to defend policies they helped write.
For example, these lawyers must aggressively demand injunction bonds to rein in activists' district-court lawfare.
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When the Supreme Court ended universal injunctions last week, it left activist judges a 'significant loophole' in the class-action realm. DOJ lawyers should head this off by demanding that plaintiffs pay injunction bonds — upfront money to cover costs should they lose.
Finally, DOGE 2.0 must execute in Stealth Mode.
Follow the example of the Obama administration, which initially pursued amnesty for undocumented aliens by relaxing enforcement via phone calls, without making a public announcement.
This made it much harder for Congress to learn what was happening — or to attack it in court.
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The same quiet execution model applies here: Trump must pursue smart, quiet rollouts, not splashy launches.
This was the model my former boss John McEntee used to reform personnel in Trump's first term.
He used the authorities inherent in the White House to hold the Cabinet accountable, placed dedicated lawyers in key positions of authority and operated off-the-record. It was a successful model and should be deployed again.
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Watching Musk leave Washington in frustration brings to mind the Roman historian Livy. As the Republic collapsed, he lamented: 'We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.'
America need not repeat Rome's fate — but only if we abandon failed approaches and embrace methods that actually work. The clock is ticking.
Daniel Huff is a former White House lawyer in the Office of Presidential Personnel, and was a senior advisor to Project 2025.
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