History shows big changes in ‘big government’ are hard to achieve

WASHINGTON — When the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Revolution swept the GOP into power in the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years and Republicans also won the Senate, the newly invigorated party set out to revolutionize Washington, shrink the bureaucracy and reduce the federal footprint.

To show they were serious about belt-tightening, lawmakers targeted some of their own office space, proposing to get rid of a nondescript House office annex not far from the Capitol.

“This proposed sale is part of the strategy to downsize the government,” Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrist, R-Md., who chaired the Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, said at a hearing in October 1995. “While this building is not large, it represents one of a series of actions undertaken by the legislative branch to reduce its size and scope.”

Three decades later, that building is still controlled by Congress, sitting dark and empty as a monument to how hard it can be to impose significant change on the sprawling federal government. In the hallways of Washington, grand plans like the ones President-elect Donald Trump and allies including billionaire Elon Musk are espousing about abolishing federal agencies and drastically cutting spending have a way of encountering political reality.

“They are fighting with the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy always wins,” said Ray LaHood, who served as a Republican House member from Illinois during the Gingrich era and later became secretary of transportation under President Barack Obama. “They develop to a fare-thee-well every technique possible to stall, delay and make sure things don’t happen.”

Today, Republicans, still basking in their victory in November and coming into full control of Congress and the White House, are promising an ambitious effort to turn the capital upside down in a bold shake-up of the way Washington works, eyeing the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs and entire departments.

“The power of the unelected Federal bureaucracy has grown to become an unconstitutional ‘FOURTH BRANCH’ of government!” Musk declared in a pinned post on X, the social media platform he owns, adding that the bureaucracy “has become the most powerful branch of government.”

Musk, tapped by Trump to join with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on a campaign to scale back government, has been enthusiastically embraced by many Republicans in the House.

They plan to form a special panel to work with what Musk has called the Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing firebrand from Georgia.

In the Senate, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who was first elected on a promise to curtail government waste, has created a caucus to work with the efficiency initiative and has emphasized her own push to force federal workers back into the office postpandemic and sell off surplus buildings.

This is hardly the first time new leadership has swept into power with such zeal. It is not even the first time a prominent businessperson has been put in charge of rooting out waste.

After Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he named industrialist J. Peter Grace to oversee a private-sector panel to identify waste and apply business principles to the federal government. It was built upon a similar initiative undertaken while Reagan was governor of California.

“Be bold,” Reagan said in encouraging what became known as the Grace Commission. “We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency.”

Two years later, the commission came back with findings of profligacy at the Pentagon and 2,500 recommendations to rein in spending on touchy areas including Medicare and government pensions. But many of the ideas required action by Congress, which ignored most of them.

By the time Reagan left office, the federal debt had soared and the workforce had expanded.

The Republican Contract with America, written by Gingrich as a campaign document, carried a host of recommendations on how to reshape government. The GOP scored some modest successes at reining in the expenditures of Congress, including cutting back spending on informal caucuses and making symbolic moves such as ending daily ice deliveries to Capitol offices.

Republicans also eliminated funding for the Office of Technology Assessment, a 140-person congressional agency that advised lawmakers on complex science and technology issues. GOP lawmakers said it was redundant, despite criticism that lawmakers were cutting off a way of evaluating emerging technologies.

Many other ideas, such as imposing term limits, never went anywhere and some of the bigger policy plans fell victim to disputes between the House and Senate — a problem likely to resurface for Republicans in the coming year.

Plus, members of the Appropriations Committees in both the House and Senate are unlikely to want to cede much of their authority to the new entity run by Musk and Ramaswamy, no matter how popular the effort is with Trump and their colleagues.

In the end, lawmakers typically find that every federal program has a protective constituency and that there is only so much “waste, fraud and abuse” they are able to recoup. The real savings have to come from changes in federal benefit and health programs, far more politically charged topics than cutting out congressional ice runs.

Despite the struggles of the past, some Republicans believe the coming Congress can be successful given the unity behind the ideas of slimming down government. Plus, Reagan never had his party in control of the House and the Gingrich-era Republicans faced a Democrat, Bill Clinton, in the White House for six years.

“I think it is far more possible than it was in ‘94 just because Trump and congressional Republicans are theoretically on the same team,” said John Feehery, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on Capitol Hill during the Contract with America days.

“It’s all about priorities. Is the top priority of congressional Republicans to get rid of vast parts of the bureaucracy or is it to get the economy growing?”

The anti-spending push carries real political risks. In trying to win votes last week for legislation to avoid a government shutdown and to lay the groundwork for suspending the debt ceiling next year, House Republican leaders pledged to explore ways to cut $2.5 trillion from mandatory spending programs. Talk of such cuts immediately brought a smile to beleaguered Democrats thrilled at the prospect of future campaign commercials about Republicans gutting popular social safety net programs for the most vulnerable citizens.

As for the office building that was not sold, it later served as a dormitory for House pages until that program was shut down. It was also discussed as the site of a residence hall for House members who could not afford a second home in Washington, but those plans never bore fruit. And security concerns hampered efforts to offload the building.

“If you don’t have the career professionals signing on and saluting, you get nothing done,” LaHood said. “Nothing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company