Trump and Musk want to create a government efficiency commission. It’s not a new idea

One of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign promises is to establish a task force that would cut federal programs and crack down on improper payments. 

Trump said the idea came from tech billionaire Elon Musk, who would lead the proposed government efficiency commission and who has donated millions to re-elect the former president. 

“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump said in September. “And Elon, because he’s not very busy, has agreed to head that task force.”

The New York Times has reported that Musk’s businesses — such as space company SpaceX and electric-vehicle maker Tesla —  in 2023 were slated to receive roughly $3 billion from contracts with 17 federal agencies. Additionally, his companies have been the subject of at least 20 federal investigations or reviews, prompting conflict of interest concerns with the potential Musk-led commission. 

The businessman also has a penchant for making inflammatory and offensive statements as well as spreading conspiracy theories. 

Creating a commission to trim wasteful federal spending is not a new idea; both former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton established similar task forces. Looking back, those past task forces resulted in mixed effects and reveal possible shortcomings and issues with Trump and Musk’s proposal. 

Grace Commission 

Reagan in 1982 launched a group led by about 150 private sector leaders to review federal agencies and make recommendations to reduce waste and inefficiency. 

“Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don't leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the 40th president told commission members. 

Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, it was better known as the Grace Commission after its chairman, J. Peter Grace. 

Grace was the chief executive of his family company that specialized in chemicals and health care. Like Musk, he attracted controversy, such as when his company admitted that in the early 1950s it hired a German chemist who was convicted in the Nuremberg war crimes trials and “after a 1982 speech in Dallas when he commented that the federal food stamp program was basically a subsidy for Puerto Ricans.” 

After leading the commission, Grace co-founded Citizens Against Government Waste, an organization that has backed the proposed Musk task force. 

“A significant advantage that a new commission has over the Grace Commission is the technology available today that was not available in 1984, which will not only make it easier to analyze the operations of the federal government but also make the recommendations accessible to taxpayers, the media and lawmakers,” wrote CAGW President Thomas Schatz in an October blog. 

Similar to Trump’s possible government efficiency initiative, there were conflict of interest concerns raised with the Grace Commission. 

“Thousands of corporate executives roamed throughout the government bearing a political endorsement by the White House that gave them tremendous leverage in obtaining information. Although task force members signed an agreement not to reveal externally what they learned, one cannot avoid some cynicism about the efficacy of this control,” wrote professor Charles T. Goodsell in 1984 in Public Administration Review. “Moreover, the task forces were in a position to make recommendations that, if implemented, would help the private parties affected.” 

The Grace Commission issued nearly 2,500 recommendations that it said would save $424 billion over three years. However the Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office (then called the General Accounting Office) analyzed nearly 400 of the recommendations that represented almost 90% of the estimated savings and found they would reduce spending by only $98 billion. 

But the joint 1984 report acknowledged that the disparate numbers are not fully comparable because the commission and agencies used different metrics, and some proposals were too vague or lacked necessary data to make budget estimates. 

The report also determined that the commission went beyond suggesting ways to reduce waste and inefficiency. 

“Most of these recommendations involve various management improvements that could be implemented administratively,” the report authors wrote. “The bulk of the potential savings, however, relate to recommendations that would require significant changes in current laws and policies.” 

For example, the private sector group recommended raising interest rates on government loans, repealing or modifying Davis Bacon Act minimum prevailing wage rates for federal construction contractors and reducing civil service retirement benefits.  

Ultimately, “[m]ost of the recommendations, especially those requiring legislation from Congress, were never implemented. However, the commission’s work provided a starting point for many conservative critiques of the federal government,” according to the Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. 

That being said, the Grace Commission recommended that the Defense Department close unnecessary military bases, and the first Base Realignment and Closure process took place four years later in 1988. 

Commission recommendations also helped pave the way for transferring Dulles International and Reagan National airports from federal control to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and passage of the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act, which standardized chief financial officer positions at federal agencies. 

Reinventing Government

Led by former Vice President Al Gore, the National Performance Review, which was renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government in Clinton’s second term, had similar aims as the Grace Commission, but went about achieving them in diametrically-opposite ways. 

Rather than bringing on experts from the private sector, the Clinton administration relied on federal employees. At its height, there were roughly 250 civil servants working on the initiative.

“It is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t,” said Elaine Kamarck, who served as a policy aide to Gore, in congressional testimony in 2013. “A successful reform effort cannot take place without their wisdom and without their participation.”  

NPR and Reinventing Government also avoided questions of policy.  

“In general, we focused on how the government works, not on what it should be doing. We chose to target the overhead costs, not the organizational structure, of agencies,” wrote NPR deputy John Kamensky in a 1999 history of the initiative. “The vice president asked that, to the extent possible, recommendations should be administrative changes, not proposals requiring statutory changes and that recommendations for ‘further studies’ were not acceptable.”

Kamarck testified that agencies implemented more than two-thirds of NPR proposals, generating $136 billion in savings, and that a regulatory review resulted in the elimination of 640,000 pages of internal rules. 

She also said that, between January 1993 and September 2000, the federal workforce shrunk by 426,200, making it the smallest one since the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The reduction was brought about through a large-scale buyout program and about 25,000 layoffs. 

In a 2013 Government Executive article on the 20th anniversary of Reinventing Government, Donald Kettl, then dean of University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, criticized how the workforce shrinkage was achieved. 

“The reduction didn’t happen in a way that matched workforce needs because they used a strategy for downsizing to hit a target,” he said. “The effort got in the way of the ‘making government work better’ piece. Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we’d have wanted to leave.” 

NPR and Reinventing Government also are associated with the expansion of electronic tax filing, increased use of agency performance targets, setting the foundation for how the internet would affect government services and the creation of the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.