Elon Musk, meet Dr. Cleveland.
In 1910, William Howard Taft appointed the “President’s Commission on Economy and Efficiency” to boost the cost-effectiveness of the national government. Dr. Frederick Cleveland, an economist and author, served as the Commission’s chairman.
“PCEE” may not sound as catchy as “DOGE,” but the Department of Government Efficiency would certainly recognize its objectives: “Efficiency and economy (thrift) in the Government service have been demanded with increasing insistence for a generation,” the 27th president declared.
Taft meticulously outlined the Commission’s cost-saving recommendations in a series of messages to Congress. The government’s electric bill, the unnecessarily high cost of distributing mail, even “cleaning and toilet supplies” all fell under Taft’s careful eye of scrutiny. Where the government relied on six auditors, the Commission proposed bringing it down to one. Where “two persons are paid for doing work that could easily be done by one,” Taft wanted to elevate more “experienced” personnel.
In 1913, Dr. Cleveland and his colleagues compiled their findings into a single groundbreaking document: “The Need for a National Budget.” At the time, Congress did not depend on a single national budget as we do today. However, as the report noted, Washington had become “highly complex and technical,” necessitating a comprehensive financial blueprint to maintain effective control over government spending.
Although Congress disregarded the proposal (nine years later, the Bureau of the Budget was established within the Department of the Treasury), Taft and Dr. Cleveland perceived a growing dilemma: the more the government expanded, the harder it would become to maintain government efficiency.
“The Need for a National Budget” spanned a daunting 568 pages, while Taft’s messages to Congress ran up to 88,000 words. If there was that much of a need for cutting waste back in the early 1900s, one can only imagine what the situation looks like today. The Commission’s best efforts notwithstanding, the federal government has continued to grow — largely unabated — for more than a century since then.
Taft, however, was far from the last commander in chief to emphasize the need for increased government efficiency.
“Be bold,” Ronald Reagan instructed members of the Grace Commission (named after its chairman, J. Peter Grace), which, like DOGE, was run by the private sector. “We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency.”
Reagan was one of many presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Bill Clinton, whose attempts to streamline the federal government did little to slow its rapid descent into incompetence, ineffectiveness, and fiscal irresponsibility.
“President Reagan has made the elimination of waste, fraud and abuse from the Federal government a high national priority,” the Commission acknowledged. They responded by offering 2,160 specific recommendations for slashing expenditures, which the president took to heart. But when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and General Accounting Office (GAO) reviewed “the potential deficit reductions” and dismissed them as “much smaller than … projected by the Grace Commission,” the project quickly stalled out. Not even Reagan, the patron saint of limited government, could stop the runaway train.
Today, history is repeating itself before our very eyes. After less than six months, Elon Musk’s DOGE, whose mission was to end “tyranny of the bureaucracy,” already appears to have hit a brick wall — not because it isn’t uncovering wasteful spending, but because Congress refuses to put itself on a diet. What good does it do, after all, to wage war against deficit spending if the legislature or a future administration can simply eliminate all gains with a single spending bill or stroke of the pen?
It begs the question: Are all federal efficiency efforts doomed to end in defeat? They certainly don’t boast an impressive history.
As seen in his painstaking messages to Congress, Taft was obsessive about cutting costs. Reagan, in his 1981 inaugural address, vowed to “act today” to deal with the national debt. And yet, neither man succeeded in enacting long-term change. The debt, around $2-3 billion (roughly $70 billion, adjusted for inflation) in Taft’s day and less than $1 trillion at the time of Reagan’s speech, has skyrocketed to $36 trillion (or $36,000 billion) today. Clearly, despite well-meaning efforts from multiple administrations, these efficiency crusades have never succeeded at anything more than just chipping away at the mountain. They may have come equipped with chainsaws, but the forest still stretches as far as the eye can see.
But what if that’s because the original “DOGE” was meant to be you and me — the American people? The Founding Fathers designed a system in which “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” While this is true of the three branches of the federal government, it’s also true of the relationship between the federal government and the states.
History proves that internal reform efforts can only go so far: Frederick Cleveland, J. Peter Grace, and Elon Musk may have made shocking discoveries about federal waste, but implementing the necessary changes actually required Congress to sign on, which, of course, it refused to do.
But what if there was a way to forcibly reform Congress? That is, what if Congress, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 85, had “no option upon the subject”?
Hamilton was referring to the Article V convention clause, which empowers the American people, acting through their state legislatures, to rein in an out-of-control national government. This was one of the ways in which the Founders intended for the states to check the growth of the federal government. “The words of this article are peremptory,” Hamilton said. “Nothing in this particular is left to the discretion of [Congress]. And of consequence all the declamation about their disinclination to a change, vanishes in air.”
We don’t have to fret about whether Congress will sign on to DOGE’s proposals; with an Article V convention, we can make them. If you want to join the original DOGE, now’s your chance. Sign the Convention of States petition below to participate in the growing grassroots movement and support the call for an Article V convention to propose amendments limiting federal spending, power, and terms of office!
