What the Feds Could Indeed Improve—Without DOGE

Having explored in Part 1 how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) represents a fundamentally flawed approach to federal transformation, let’s now turn to the realistic alternatives that could deliver meaningful, sustainable improvement.

The Realistic Efficiency Opportunity

Based on my extensive experience with organizational transformation across private and public enterprises, federal efficiency can improve dramatically—without the chaotic DOGE approach:

  • The Engagement Economy: In most public organizations, employee satisfaction is high while engagement remains low. This combination is the worst cost-wise: maintaining “satisfaction” requires continuously increasing monetary rewards while output remains stagnant. When expected raises don’t materialize, productivity often drops. The disengaged workforce becomes a perpetual drain—costs must grow by definition while the value produced either plateaus or declines. In the federal government, this dynamic translates into a costly spiral: agencies pour money into retention and salary increases to maintain ‘satisfaction,’ yet productivity stagnates or declines, leading to ballooning budgets without corresponding improvements in public service delivery. In contrast, an engaged workforce requires minimal additional input while delivering consistently growing productivity and output.
  • The 50% Potential: These organizations have tremendous “room for improvement” (as corporate jargon would put it), and therefore can realistically achieve productivity growth of up to 50% through improved leadership and culture change. Rather than forcing layoffs, this level of efficiency gain would naturally reduce the need for half the current workforce. With over 25% of federal employees nearing retirement and natural attrition rates of 5-10% annually, a hiring freeze and strategic backfilling could realistically shrink the workforce by 50% within 2-3 years. This translates directly into a 50% reduction in salary expenditures—without mass layoffs or disruption to critical services.

The Math of Sustainable Savings

If we apply this approach systematically, here’s what the math looks like:

  • Federal Workforce: 2.4 million workers (plus 600,000 postal workers)
  • Average Annual Pay: $106,382 plus benefits (38%), totalling $146,808 per employee
  • Total Salary Fund: $352 billion

With strategic leadership improvement and a hiring freeze leveraging the 25% of federal employees approaching retirement within the next 36 months:

  • Annual Salary Savings: 25% of total compensation, or $88 billion per year (target 50%, averaged over two years)
  • Additional Engagement-Driven Savings: typically with improved engagement, operating costs will go down by at least 10%, or approximately $560 billion (less waste, minimal fraud, less legal expenses)
  • Total Sustainable Savings: $648 billion annually

This estimate nearly matches Musk’s $700 billion dream target—but with preserved or even improved service levels, and without destroying institutional knowledge and employee morale. More specifically, this approach will not cut government programs, destroy people’s lives, or violate the Constitution in any way.

The Implementation Roadmap

Unlike the DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach, sustainable efficiency implies:

  1. Leadership Selection and Development (Months 0-6): Invest in creating better federal managers who drive engagement through a combination of training, coaching, and accountability metrics tied to employee engagement scores. In this environment, a 10% improvement in leadership effectiveness may bring 25-30% productivity gains.
  2. Natural Attrition Strategy (Months 0-24): Implement a strategic hiring freeze while allowing normal retirement and turnover. Critical positions would be backfilled selectively, with a target of 30-40% non-replacement overall, guided by service priority frameworks.
  3. Process Optimization (Months 3-18): Improve interdepartmental communication and eliminate redundancies through cross-functional process mapping and redesign. Federal agencies typically discover 15-20% of immediate process waste through structured optimization initiatives.
  4. Performance Management Overhaul (Months 6-12): Replace outdated evaluation systems with engagement-focused approaches and tools that emphasize outcomes over activities and collaborative achievements over siloed metrics.
  5. Technology Integration (Months 12-36): Deploy AI and automation tools to augment (not replace) human capabilities, focusing first on high-volume, low-complexity tasks that consume disproportionate resources while adding minimal value.

Ironically, the last two points above could have benefited from a federal digital transformation unit—something that already existed as the U.S. Digital Service before Musk slapped a meme name on it and turned it into a wrecking crew. But instead of building on this existing expertise and actually improving government operations, Musk has chosen destruction over transformation, undermining the very institutional capabilities needed for genuine efficiency—a pattern of breaking rather than building that Musk appears to excel at.

Conclusion: Frogs or Humans?

We return to our 17th-century mill and its frog-lubricated gears. The approach worked—until it didn’t. Modern machinery requires modern solutions—yet we are witnessing the federal apparatus grinding to a halt like an old mill whose gears, getting clogged with crushed amphibians, can no longer turn efficiently. The peasants who entrusted their wheat expect flour in return, just as citizens who pay taxes expect government services.

Musk’s DOGE represents dangerously short-sighted thinking that will lead to institutional collapse. True efficiency isn’t measured by how many people you can fire or how quickly you can slash budgets. It’s measured by sustained performance improvement, service quality, and organizational health—precisely what the sustainable approach outlined above would deliver.

The federal government doesn’t need a chainsaw—it needs a scalpel, wielded by someone who knows the difference between gutting an organization and making it work better.

The choice is simple: Do we let the old miller keep up his act—pretending to fix the mill while frantically grinding more frogs, knowing full well he has no intention of making it work? Or do we finally admit that the government isn’t his personal playground, and that we—its workers and citizens—aren’t just raw materials to be crushed for his own benefit?