> But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over.
It's one thing to reform regulatory agencies, but it's another to reform the courts. It seems like we now play racquetball with the courts, with each opposing administration appointing judges who are sympathetic to its viewpoints. This leaves the underlying system untouched and just points it back and forth, while the judges themselves are left with the same wicked problem of applying ambiguous laws to specific situations.
But I don't know if DOGE is really about analyzing government operations and producing recommendations for reform. For one thing, we already have the Government Accountability Office, and also the Congressional Budget Office. For another, personnel is policy. Musk and Ramaswamy aren't accountants. They're pundits. I would expect the primary difference between DOGE and previous attempts at government reform will be its strategy in engaging with the public.