Does Australia need a DOGE?

It's no secret that Australia has been in a productivity slump over the past two decades, due at least in part to "creeping inefficiency". That's a big deal because, in the long run, productivity is almost everything.

So what can the government do about it? One possibility, as strongly alluded to by opposition leader Peter Dutton—who has already appointed Jacinta Price as "spokeswoman for government efficiency"—is to create our own version of US President Trump's DOGE.

Much aDOGE about nothing

If you haven't heard of DOGE by now, it stands for the 'Department of Government Efficiency' that Trump set up to be run informally by Elon Musk. Armed with a crackpot team of kids, Musk has been scouring government tax and payment data looking for waste to cut, from US Aid to... cancer treatment trials.

Needless to say, it has been controversial. And while it's still early days, the signs aren't all that promising, with the savings so far looking more like a rounding error than anything transformational.

Here's how it looks compared to entire years, rather than year-to-date.

Prediction markets aren't optimistic of any meaningful cuts, either.

But perhaps that was always the intention. Left of centre pundits have started to suggest that DOGE was set up to enforce "an ideological purge of wokeness", rather than cut spending. Economist Betsy Stevenson, a former member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said DOGE was "performance art... [designed] to dazzle us and have us look away from trillions of dollar in tax cuts to the uber-wealthy".

From the non-MAGA right of centre, George Mason University's Veronique de Rugy agreed, while also warning about the disconcerting possibility of longer-term consequences:

"First, for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington. It feels that it is less about smaller government than it is about political transformation. While the two intersect, this strategy could fall short.

That's in part—and this is my second point—because for those of us who care about permanently downsizing government and keeping it bound by constitutional rules to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, DOGE is mixed. While there is a small probability the approach will succeed in reining in spending or the administrative state, it will be at the heavy cost of reinforcing the power of the executive branch and opening the door to the same abuse when the left is in power."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Unfortunately—and this also applies to Australia—there's not all that much a DOGE can do to improve government efficiency, at least not in a way that will show up in the productivity statistics.

Cutting spending is one thing, but improving efficiency requires opening a whole other can of worms.