Donald Trump won the election wanting to cut taxes and deregulate but also impose tariffs and ignore the drivers of the national debt. What’s a free marketeer to do? There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the end of limited-government conservatism, but the president-elect has also entrusted Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a nongovernmental advisory group on slashing bureaucracy.

This harks back to the Grace Commission, an outside group of businessmen who worked as volunteers under President Reagan, issuing a massive list of recommendations on how to cut waste and improve government services. The problem then was not that the recommendations were bad but that they were largely ignored. Whether the DOGE will be able to avoid a similar fate hinges on whether it can learn from ongoing successful deregulatory efforts.

First, we head south, way south, to Buenos Aires, where President Javier Milei created the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, led by economist and former central-bank president Federico Sturzenegger. He had previously served in the Argentine legislature and knows the government inside and out — he’s not an outsider businessman. As of December 7, roughly a year after Milei took office, there have been 672 regulatory reforms, according to a tally from the Cato Institute.

Ian Vásquez, writing for Cato, noted that when he and some colleagues visited the ministry, they “were struck by their sense of urgency, professionalism, and commitment to the task. . . . When reviewing regulations, their first question is not about how to increase efficiency but rather about whether the government should be involved in a particular regulation at all.”

Milei is the kind of guy who performs in rock concerts as president and wields a chain saw at rallies, but that’s not why he’s an effective deregulator. He campaigned forthrightly on using that chain saw against the state, won the election, and assembled a team of experienced people who know the Argentine state well enough to get it done.

Milei is also an economist himself, author of many books and academic papers, with a crystal-clear political philosophy of classical liberalism to guide him. He is laser-focused on what he calls the “job description” Argentina’s voters gave him: “I was asked to lower inflation and end insecurity,” he told The Economist. “Nobody can be surprised by what I am doing, because I promised it in my campaign and I am doing it.”

Trump’s campaign promises were not as clear, to put it lightly. The DOGE-led fight against the administrative state is going to have to compete with unnecessarily difficult cabinet nomination battles, threats of lawfare against political opponents, potential pardons for January 6 rioters, the launch of a global trade war, and all of Trump’s personal rivalries in the media and elsewhere — all of which Trump appears to care more about than modernizing government IT systems and correcting improper payments. And unlike Milei’s deregulation ministry, the DOGE is not part of the government.

Government agencies already issue thorough reports on government spending and waste: the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and inspectors general throughout the federal government. This is evident in much of the DOGE’s early social media activity, which in many cases consists of posting about reports from those entities. There is upwards of $200 billion worth of savings sitting on the shelf right now in ignored GAO recommendations, for example. Fixing government waste is not an information problem. It’s a political-will problem.

The House of Representatives will have a new oversight subcommittee focused on DOGE, chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Again, Milei’s deregulation minister is a former central-bank president and MIT economist.) Some GOP lawmakers told Politico that it seems her elevation to that role is part of coalition management by Speaker Mike Johnson. He has a very small majority to manage and an extremely difficult task in holding it together, but using the DOGE subcommittee to appease Greene would be a bad sign for how seriously the GOP is planning on taking its mission.

The DOGE doesn’t have to look all the way to Argentina for examples of successful deregulation. Before Milei was shouting ¡afuera! as he eliminated half of Argentina’s cabinet departments, Iowa governor Kim Reynolds nonchalantly signed a bill in April 2023 that reduced her state’s number of cabinet-level agencies from 37 to 16. Reynolds has also been a conservative leader on taxes, phasing in a flat income tax of 3.8 percent set to take effect on January 1, and on school choice, enacting universal education savings accounts in 2023.

Her bureaucratic reorganization shifted 2,600 state employees to different departments and eliminated 620 open positions. In May 2024, she followed up by signing another bill that eliminated 83 state boards and commissions. Note that these reorganizations were from bills passed by the Iowa legislature, they were opposed by Democrats, and they were not unanimously supported by Republicans, whose majority in Iowa is large enough to allow for some defections. Also, Reynolds did not justify them primarily for cost savings, which have been relatively small, but for improvement in public services and the elimination of redundant or outdated agencies and positions.

Iowa has also implemented successful bureaucratic process improvements by imitating business. In a paper for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, James Broughel and Patricia Patnode looked at the results of process-improvement strategies by the state’s Department of Natural Resources and found that wait times declined from 62 days to six days for some permits and from 38 months to three months for others.

Another “I” state has been perhaps the greatest deregulatory success story: Not content to merely repeal regulations or abolish offices, Idaho, under Governor Brad Little, has redone the way it regulates from the ground up. Alex Adams, the former administrator of the Idaho Division of Financial Management, explains in a paper for the Manhattan Institute how the state did it.

The first step was to shut off any new regulations by executive order. Next, the state issued one sunset date for all existing regulations. Rather than going through the rulemaking process to repeal a regulation, as is usually the case, agencies had to re-promulgate the regulations they wanted to keep. If they chose not to, the regulation would expire on the sunset date. That inversion of the normal process is called “zero-based regulation,” borrowed from zero-based budgeting, where the baseline is no regulation and bureaucratic inertia isn’t allowed to build.

There was plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick. “Agencies let scores of regulations expire, including a dress code for deputy state veterinarians from the 1960s, regulations for a type of ‘non-native phytophagous’ snail that is not found in the state, rules for a lottery television game show that never aired, and hyper-specific requirements for female kickboxing uniforms,” Adams wrote.

Then, Idaho gave agencies a regulatory budget, which is a cap on how many regulations they were allowed to issue in a given period, forcing them to prioritize which ones were most important. Idaho measured the cap by word count, encouraging agencies to issue straightforward regulations with fewer words.

Finally, Idaho created a review process whereby all regulations sunset after five years and must be re-promulgated to be kept. Agencies must use a standardized impact analysis that forces them to consider Idaho statutes, clearly state the problem the regulation is trying to solve, compare the rule with similar ones in other states, and quantify the costs.

It’s hard to argue with the results. Idaho’s Administrative Code went from over 8,500 pages before the reforms to about 5,800 by 2023. According to the Mercatus Center, it is now the least-regulated state in the country. Governor Little says the state has cut or simplified 95 percent of its regulations since 2019.

Adams notes in his paper that other states have pursued various parts of Idaho’s strategy. Rhode Island did a one-time sunset date for regulations. Florida requires a five-year sunset date for all new regulations and tasked professional licensing boards with identifying regulations to cut immediately. Ohio passed a law enacting regulatory budgets for agencies.

Brad Little was in the Idaho senate for over seven years and was lieutenant governor for ten years before becoming governor in 2019. Kim Reynolds was a four-term county treasurer, served in Iowa’s senate for two years, and was lieutenant governor for six years before becoming governor in 2017. The reforms in these two states, like the Argentine ones, were not led by political outsiders.

State-level efforts also weren’t centered on firing bureaucrats; that’s because bureaucrats were needed to execute the reforms. As Nicholas Bagley wrote for The Atlantic, Musk and Ramaswamy seem focused on firing bureaucrats, but the bigger problem with the administrative state is that “agencies have clear legal authority to adopt most of the rules they’ve adopted.” This has been a long-running conservative criticism: Congress passes laws that delegate too much power to unelected bureaucrats. The source of that problem is Congress, not the bureaucrats.

The number of federal employees is not a very useful metric for the size of government. The federal government workforce in January 1970 was 2.9 million. The federal government workforce in January 2023 was . . . 2.9 million. Essentially all the growth in government employment in the U.S. since 1970 — and it has nearly doubled, from 12.5 million to 23.5 million — has been at the state and local levels. Even so, as a percentage of total employment, government employment at all levels peaked in 1975 at 19 percent and today sits at 15 percent.

So far, the DOGE’s efforts have been scattershot, hitting relatively trivial issues, such as foreign aid and goofy National Institutes of Health studies, along with more serious ones such as spending without congressional authorization and improper payments (along the way, referencing a piece of mine on National Review Online). In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Musk and Ramaswamy put forward a strategy based mostly on litigation that relied on untested legal theories rather than on studying successful state-level efforts or redoing the regulatory process from top to bottom with a new law.

The litigation efforts to deregulate during the first Trump term were not very successful. “Whereas prior administrations generally prevailed in over two-thirds of the cases challenging their regulatory actions, the Trump administration could not even win one in four,” wrote Jonathan Adler in a December article for Civitas Outlook. The two Supreme Court decisions since then that Musk and Ramaswamy believe will help them do better are more likely to make things more difficult. West Virginia v. EPA applies to only a relatively narrow slice of regulations. The overturning of Chevron deference “will actually make it more difficult for the executive branch to revise some longstanding interpretations of agency authority because courts will have no obligation to accept the new interpretation.”

Adler writes, “It is a core principle of administrative law that amending or revoking a regulation generally takes the same amount of time and effort that it took to adopt the regulation in the first place.” That is the fundamental problem that zero-based regulation solves. Enacting it would require congressional buy-in to ensure that it won’t disappear immediately during the next Democratic administration.

Trump hasn’t even taken office yet, and there’s still time for the DOGE to recalibrate its strategy in light of more input from regulatory experts. Musk and Ramaswamy are both smart men with ample capacity to learn quickly. The bigger problem they are going to run into is the inherent contradictions in their principal’s campaign promises.

Even in the protectionist case for tariffs, they are purposely inefficient, supplanting the more efficient market transactions that protectionists find undesirable with government-directed transactions that seek to remedy consumers’ and producers’ allegedly harmful behavior. Musk seems to be at least partially aware of this, having posted “Good move” on X in November in response to Milei’s cutting of tariffs in Argentina and having spoken out against tariffs on Chinese-brand EVs. “Things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good,” he said last May.

If “government efficiency” means stabilizing the government’s budget deficit in any lasting way, that will be impossible to do without reforming entitlements. According to Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, over the next 30 years, Social Security, Medicare, and the borrowing they will require to pay benefits as promised will add $124 trillion to the national debt. The entire rest of the federal budget — defense, anti-poverty programs, education, infrastructure, veterans’ benefits, law enforcement, foreign aid, all of it — over those same 30 years will run a $9 trillion surplus. In the budgetary big picture, nothing else matters.

So, yes, we need to cheer for the DOGE. We should do so both as free-market conservatives who want our ideas to continue being embraced by Republicans and as Americans who want our federal government to be run at least slightly responsibly and to better serve the people from whom our Constitution says it derives its power. If the counter-DOGE aspects of Trump’s agenda win out, it will be a major setback for both of those goals.