As I watch the current chaos around cutting our national budget, I’m reminded of the common assertion that “we should run government like a business.” Ironically, in a sense, this is what both President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing. But I don’t think anyone signed up for running our national government like President Trump’s bankruptcy-prone business ventures or even running it with the Musk/Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” approach.
The phrase “run government like a business” has been a political talking point dating at least to the early 20th century Progressive Era. In fact, the reason we have a national budget process (at least on the books) dates to the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act that created the Bureau of the Budget — the precursor to the current executive Office of Management and Budget — and created the process, in which the executive submits a unified budget to Congress for consideration. The legislation also created the General Accounting Office, the precursor to the Government Accountability Office, to help Congress provide audit and oversight. This all was put in place to “run government more like a business.”
Historically, what policymakers have meant when they talked about running government like a business was establishing budgeting, hiring and management practices with a keen focus on efficiency. They also have envisioned an organized and systematic process.
The lawless slashing going on right now is anything but efficient, and it’s adding another layer of chaos on top of the already-eroded mess that is our current national budget process. While there is quite a bit in our national government that can be reasonably cut or restructured, there also is quite a bit that is utterly essential to our national security, health, safety and economic well-being. And “Oops, my bad” or “I’m going to make mistakes,” as Elon Musk admitted about the Department of Government Efficiencyis not even in the ballpark of acceptable.
For starters, one of the most important reasons we move services into the public sector is because we want to drive risk close to zero. In other words, unlike private businesses, failure is not an option for these services. A pretty obvious example is air traffic control, managed by the Federal Aviation Administration, or the management of our national nuclear stockpile.
Meanwhile, because many DOGE actions and, increasingly, the President’s actions are likely illegal — or, at the least, outside the legal framework of a regular budget process — they are generating court challenge after court challenge, with services being stopped, turned back on, stopped again, then turned back on again. It should go without saying that this is not “efficient.”
At the same time, DOGE and the president are cutting services that actually bring in revenues, such as the Internal Revenue Service (our national “accounts receivable” department) and our federal inspectors general, whose job is to find and stop waste, fraud and abuse. It is not implausible that after all of this chaos, the budget-cutting efforts actually make the federal deficit larger rather than smaller.
But this mess doesn’t lie only at the feet of the president. Congress, which should be demanding accountability, appears to have decided to roll over and play dead. Republicans obviously have decided to cede authority to the president — though, for many GOP members, their distress is leaking through as they face town hall after town hall of irate constituents.
What are Democrats doing? One reason it was so infuriating that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer failed to demand concessions for Democratic votes for the budget in mid-March was that this was the one lever that he (or anyone) had to restore regular order and rule of law to the budget process.
So here we are.
If there is one takeaway from this debate — and, really, the entire scene in Washington, D.C. — it is that we need to have a serious conversation about Congress doing its job. And this goes for members of Congress in both parties.
A good place to start would be re-establishing regular order around our national budget. We are $36 trillion in debt and running $2 trillion annual deficits, with no plan to close the gap — a potentially catastrophic situation.
Contrary to popular perception, we actually do have a budget process that can work. In fact, it worked fine for most of the 20th century. Congress just has gotten out of the habit of using it. After rising concern about deficit spending in the 1970s and 1980s, Congress balanced our budget in 1998, legally, with support from Democrats and Republicans alike, and with the added benefit of debate about expenditures and revenues so we didn’t accidentally cut anything really important.
But Congress hasn’t passed a full budget on time since then. Instead, our national government runs on haphazard, short-term continuing resolutions, omnibus budgets often passed well into the fiscal year, and “reconciliation processes” that originally were supposed to be about bringing revenues and expenditures into alignment to reduce the deficit but now are almost exclusively used for partisan bills to blow massive holes in the budget.
For those who complain that Congress is just politically dysfunctional and can’t get the job done, I point out that almost every single state and local government in this country manages to pass budgets that are on time and reasonably balanced. Certainly, they are no strangers to the difficulties of highly political democratic processes.
It can be done. It must be done. What we have right now is no way to run a business — and much less the affairs of the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Carolyn Bourdeaux is a former member of Congress from Georgia’s 7th District. She also is executive director of the Concord Coalition and Concord Action, organizations dedicated to education and advocacy in support of fiscal responsibility.
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