DOGE Can Rediscover the Power of Congress

Like the SpaceX platform catching a Falcon rocket on re-entry, the two men have captured a weary country's imagination with a vision for an institution that could do the seemingly impossible: hold federal agencies accountable for failure, reduce profligate spending and promote productive reform.

In theory, such an institution already exists. It's called the U.S. Congress, and the founders envisioned it as the dominant branch of government. In practice, however, many Americans don't recognize this role for Congress because the legislative branch has systematically surrendered its constitutional authority to the executive and judiciary, especially when it comes to spending.

Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy, with their "lean team of small-government crusaders," say their focus is "driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws." This is understandable given the dysfunction Congress displayed in the recent budget debacle. But if the DOGE men don't focus on reforming Congress's budget process, they will struggle to realize their ambition of revolutionizing the federal government and returning America to fiscal sanity. If the department focuses only on executive orders, it will pump water out of the swamp only to deposit it back in. DOGE will be remembered as a cheap public-relations stunt.

Instead, Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy must go full "founders mode," Silicon Valley slang for a maniacal effort to fix the hardest problems at every level of an organization. They must pair this with the mode of the American founders, tackling congressional reform and restoring the original vision of Article I powers.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has described Mr. Musk's management style as a laser focused on "the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed." To do that Mr. Musk must recognize that Congress's self-inflicted impotence, and the attendant budget dysfunction, is the biggest problem. Left unaddressed, this constitutional cancer will diminish DOGE's achievements.

Congress has routinely failed to pass a budget, leading to 131 stopgap spending measures since 1997 and multiple government shutdowns over the past decade. As a recovering congressman, I can confirm that there are no excuses for that sorry track record. That this happens every year also demoralizes new members who want to be part of a functioning institution.

As part of the next negotiation to keep the government open, scheduled in mid-March, DOGE's leaders should encourage members to pass something like the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act proposed by Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.). The bill would provide short-term funding to stop a shutdown while forcing Congress to stay in session and shutting down taxpayer-funded travel until legislators do their jobs.

Though DOGE plans to steer clear of entitlements, the country is being bankrupted because of mandatory government spending on autopilot without any congressional review.

Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy would fire a CFO who had no plan to address a company's looming bankruptcy.

DOGE should therefore champion the Trust Act, which was a bipartisan, bicameral proposal in the previous Congress until the Biden administration demagogued it as a "death panel" bill. Unlike other proposals to tackle entitlement spending, the bill would create discrete rescue committees for each of the federal trust funds that are at risk of insolvencySocial Security, Medicare Part A and highways. The bill would empower each rescue committee to bring its solution to the House and Senate floors for a vote, so congressional leadership couldn't kill reform efforts merely to shield members from making tough votes.

A truly bold DOGE would also help revitalize old proposals whose time has come. The department should start by studying the work of the 1993 Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, whose plan to streamline committee jurisdiction and thereby improve the budget and appropriations process was torpedoed by powerful, entrenched committee chairmen.

At the beginning of the 115th Congress in 2017, we briefly debated combining the authorizing and appropriations committees-as was the custom of the early Congress. These newly empowered committees would have to submit annual bills that both authorize and appropriate, thereby maximizing oversight and minimizing budgetary dysfunction.

The 2018 Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriation Process Reform recommended moving to a two-year budget process, which would allow more time for oversight and "free up time in the legislative calendar to enable Congress to not be mired down in annual budget resolution squabbles." Forcing Congress to rediscover its power, and thereby counteract the growing ambition of the administrative state, may prove more difficult than taking humanity to Mars. But as the Silicon Valley truism suggests, and as some in the Washington swamp are starting to believe, never bet against Mr. Musk.

If DOGE harnesses the American people's dissatisfaction with Washington, lays out a bold package of congressional reforms and uses Mr. Musk's unique platform to push legislators to vote on that agenda, we could realize the DOGE vision of "a federal government that would make our founders proud."