Updated February 26, 2025 at 16:41 PM ET
President Trump came into office promising big changes to the way government functions.
Already, a month into the second Trump administration, those changes are happening: some 75,000 federal government employees have agreed to quit under a "deferred resignation" program. And tens of thousands have been fired.
The Department of Government Efficiency, the entity behind this cost-cutting initiative, has also directed agencies to cancel contracts and make other spending cuts. But lawsuits have challenged many of these efforts, and experts dispute the total amount of savings that DOGE, which is overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, has claimed.
The administration has defended its actions as lawful, as it seeks to slash what it calls waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy.
This is not the first attempt to shrink the federal workforce. In the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore administration launched the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, a task force to reform and streamline the federal government that led to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The leader of that initiative, Elaine Kamarck, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it was far less contentious and uncertain compared to the reforms happening today under DOGE.
"We were not sued because we stayed well within the law," Kamarck told NPR Morning Edition Host Leila Fadel. "So we did not have nearly the blowback that's going on now."
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Leila Fadel: I want to start with these cuts that DOGE is making. There's a lot of support for making cuts to spending in the federal government from voters. What is different or the same about what you did in the 1990s?
Elaine Kamarck: Well, what's the same is that we did set out to make government more efficient and we set out to cut costs. And we did cut costs. We did cut personnel. We cut 426,000 positions from the government. But it happened over a period of seven years, and it happened after a look at every single cabinet department and then at the independent and regulatory agencies where we had teams of people discussing with the agencies what could be cut and what should not be cut. So we had a goal, and the goal was to not just make the government cost less, but make it work better.
Fadel: Was there as much blowback as we're seeing now to what you were doing?
Kamarck: No, not at all. In fact, someone asked me the other day. Were you sued back in the '90s? I said, "No. We didn't have one lawsuit against us." If there was a statute that was a problem, we went to the Congress and said, "Look, this statute is getting in the way of efficiency." And we asked Congress to change it. And most of the time they did. If it was a federal regulation, we started the process for removing the federal regulation and got it out of the way of impending government efficiency.
Fadel: Is there anything, though, about the current approach DOGE is taking that you think is working?
Kamarck: Not much. It's sowing chaos. It's setting the government back on important jobs that it has to do. Let me give you an example. We're in tax season; 69% of Americans get tax refunds. Big ones, the average is like $800. And guess what? With cutbacks at the IRS, I'm not sure people are going to get their refunds on time. Why would you be cutting tax collectors at the IRS in the middle of tax season? So this is really being done in such a chaotic way and without regard for things that the government has to do.
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