Dear Elon and Vivek,
Congratulations on the formation of the Department of Government Efficiency! I know that making government work more efficiently has been of great interest to both of you, and I am happy that you were able to go to Capitol Hill to make your dream become reality. The first tweet from DOGE clearly established your goal of ensuring that our tax dollars will be spent wisely.
Although we come from different political and professional backgrounds, I agree with your core premise — the government should use its resources wisely, focusing on how to improve people’s lives at the lowest cost possible.
If we are on the same page on the core premise, then we have an opportunity to push efficiency even further. Pointing out duplicative bureaucratic titles gets old quickly, and the legend of the $600 hammer went out of fashion in the 1980s.
I know that you think big, so let’s take the biggest swing possible. After all, it is hard to save $2 trillion from silly-sounding research grants. Plus, once you realize that more than 80 percent of federal spending is on Social Security, health care, national defense and interest on the debt, you might want to reframe your objectives a bit.
Let me start with a no-brainer. What if I told you that there was a long-standing governmental regulation that had benefits more than 30 times the costs? And what if I told you that a recent update to it was projected to cost $470 million per year but save $36 billion per year?
I think we could agree that this would be a poster child of government efficiency — regulations that save people a lot more money than they cost.
What I am describing is air pollution controls under the Clean Air Act. An analysis of the benefits of the Clean Air Act from 1990 to 2020 showed that the health benefits, in monetary terms, were at least 30 times the cost of pollution controls.
The health benefits, by the way, amounted to $2 trillion, in case that number is meaningful for you. An analysis of the 2024 proposed update to the fine particulate matter ambient air quality standard showed costs of $470 million and health benefits of $36 billion each year.
Pretty efficient, right? Past performance is not necessarily an indication of future performance. But an area that has shown substantial benefits in the past, relative to costs, is an area we want to investigate for further benefits. DOGE should be all in on the Environmental Protection Agency.
At this point, you are probably shaking your heads and thinking that I completely misunderstand DOGE. After all, your mandate is to reduce wasteful government spending, and here I am talking about a beneficial regulation from the EPA, whose budget is spit in the ocean of the overall federal budget.
While I am certainly not in a position to lecture the two of you about business, I suspect that before you make cuts at your businesses, you try to figure out how the cuts would affect your ability to make a product or reach short-term or long-term goals.
Here’s another example for you. During the presidential campaign, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) referenced the free school meal program in Minnesota. It turns out that for every dollar spent on school meals, you get more than two dollars back in benefits to society.
This is because kids eat healthier foods than they would otherwise and their families have more money to spend on other things. Kids are also better able to learn in school when they aren’t hungry, with fewer behavioral problems and improved attendance.
Universal free school meal programs are also more efficient because they reduce the paperwork burden related to determining eligibility. Perhaps DOGE can come to the rescue and advocate for universal school meals at a national level, as an efficient way to save money and increase productivity.
Does every public health intervention save money? Of course not. We are not magicians. Is every health and environmental agency and program run as efficiently as possible? Of course not. Every agency can do a better job trying to achieve the greatest benefit as quickly as possible at the lowest possible cost.
But government efficiency is not measured in how many jobs you cut or how many agencies you eliminate. And I hate to break it to you, but the government is not intended to be a profit center. The efficiency of government should be measured in how much good it can do with the resources it has.
If DOGE takes this mission to heart, you could ditch the arbitrary firing of 50 percent of the workforce and the targeting of people who work in areas like climate change and environmental justice, and instead roll up your sleeves, get a start-up mindset going, and think about how the government can better promote smart and nimble investments in programs that make people healthier and make their lives better.
Jonathan Levy is professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health.
