EFFICIENCY MUST START WITH CONGRESS
Let’s start from scratch. Say you are concerned the federal government is prone to waste, fraud and abuse and needs to be kept under close watch. You assume that because it’s the government and not a private company with a profit motive there’s less efficiency. What do you do?
Your primary constraint, the one that supersedes all others with no exceptions, is the US Constitution, which gives the power of the purse to Congress. Congress creates every federal agency, mandates their tasks and approves their funding. If you want efficiency, it must start with Congress.
And a president can’t decide on a whim not to spend money Congress has allocated. We’ve been here before. After Richard Nixon withheld funds allocated by lawmakers, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 enshrining the legal authority of Congress, not the president, to allocate spending.
As president, Trump was found to be in violation of the Act when he withheld aid to Ukraine, a move that led to the first of his two impeachments.
Although keeping a careful eye on spending is the purview of Congress, it’s a lot to put on members or its committees, as both are constantly churning through elections and majority status. Better to create a congressional agency instead. Unlike executive agencies, which report to the president, these agencies report to Congress, just like the Congressional Budget Office.
This new agency would have the power to audit every other government agency and its recommendations would ideally have the power of Congress, unlike the flimsiness of DOGE, which has no legal authority (even to exist, since it’s not being created by Congress!).
