DOGE – the US Department of Government Efficiency – quickly captured attention across the world and now, just a few months later, it is already clear that it may have saved little, and that many of its actions could cost the US in the future – notably the cuts in science.

Yet some of the questions DOGE asked were good ones, about how governments can reduce waste, inefficiency and unnecessary bureaucracy, even if not properly thought out or implemented. Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s speech last month emphasised the central importance of productivity to Australia’s future. But it had less to say about what this means for government itself – a critical question ahead of next month’s economic reform roundtable in Canberra with its focus on fiscal sustainability.

Almost every country in the world faces a long-term fiscal crisis, which means that pressures to achieve savings are not going away. Ageing populations, more people living with long-term chronic conditions, rising defence spending: together these combine to push up costs and potentially to reduce revenues, with severe impacts on governments’ room for manoeuvre. Australia faces less severe pressures than many other countries. But it too faces a potentially big and growing gap between revenues and demands, and a wider challenge around productivity.

The political context makes these pressures even more intense, with apparently rising suspicion and distrust of politics and bureaucracy, and populist parties promising big savings. In the UK, for example, the Reform party has promised £150 billion (about $310 billion) in annual savings from public spending and now leads in most opinion polls. And governments also face an additional challenge. In the market, there are pressures for variation, experiment and innovation – and then for adopting more efficient methods. If you do not adapt, you disappear. Government agencies and departments lack a comparable pressure.

That is why it seems to be an iron law of bureaucracy that forms and functions tend to grow. Public spending has steadily risen globally, even through decades supposedly dominated by neoliberalism, most prominently with Reaganism and Thatcherism. So has red tape: in the US, despite the prevailing ideology, federal regulations have grown from 20,000 pages in the early 1960s to over 180,000 today.

In recent decades, the political right globally has owned the issue of efficiency in government – setting up units, initiating drives and favouring a rhetoric that emphasises slashing bureaucracy and regulation and promoting culture wars against bureaucrats.

Consequently, few progressives feel comfortable advocating for cuts of any kind, particularly if they will hit frontline staff providing essential services. Indeed, DOGE’s actions have sometimes pushed the left into appearing to defend every job, service, function and institution, sending a message of indifference to waste or bureaucratic excess. This is bad in principle and also bad politics. The chainsaws of Elon Musk and Javier Milei may be unpleasant. But to respond simply by defending the status quo means falling into a trap.

There is nothing progressive about waste, bureaucracy and stagnation. Progressives (and indeed governments of all stripes) should be particularly concerned about frugality and efficiency – using scarce resources to the best possible effect – since waste makes it much harder to achieve progressive goals.

That is why, in a recent report for UK think tank Demos, I argue for progressive alternatives to DOGE. I spell out practical steps that can be taken in national, state or local governments, including:

• Central teams, answering directly to the head of government (prime minister, premier, chief minister or even mayors), focused on value and efficiency that work more like a guerrilla army or a movement than a traditional government unit.
• A networked approach to achieving results, mobilising teams across central and local government, and activating ideas from front line staff as well as outside.
• Smart uses of technology, including rigorous measurement of results.
• Promoting a culture that is hungry to cut unnecessary rules and regulations.

I show the detailed methods that they can use to seek out economies, often through reshaping services. These are often not well-understood in ministries of finance, which tend to default to the traditional menu of cuts, delays and trimming. Instead, the tools I propose include:

• Seeking economies of scale, scope and penetration.
• Cutting “failure demand” where government picks up the costs of failures (for example, avoidable readmissions to hospitals or recidivism in criminal justice).
• New divisions of responsibility between citizens and the state.

I also point to the many methods used around the world to cut regulations, including “bureaucratic budgets” to slim back rules and laws, and moves to save the time of citizens and business by streamlining compliance processes. As Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood has pointed out, some regulations in Australia have mushroomed, with damaging effects on growth. The answer is not always less regulation; but there does need to be a sharper understanding of the trade-offs.

The same is true of AI, which has great potential, in everything from healthcare to welfare, tax to policing. But we must be realistic about the difficulties of getting it right, the challenges of boosting productivity rather than just raising costs, and the risks of bias and error.

Finally, it is vital to have better numbers. Few governments have good measures of public sector productivity (though the UK’s Office for National Statistics has tried). Even fewer can analyse the variation of productivity between schools, hospitals, courts and police forces, to help them concentrate on the poor performers. But without that data, it is hard to have an intelligent conversation about how to boost the public sector contribution to productivity. Though some governments in Australia at the state and federal levels have recently adopted broader metrics for government performance, such as the Commonwealth’s “Measuring What Matters” wellbeing framework, measures of public sector productivity remain elusive.

In short, there is no shortage of methods that can be much more effective than the random chainsaws of DOGE. And in any system, it is vital to regularly consider culls: to cut back what is unnecessary, from rules and processes to committees and programs.

Frugality is a virtue; waste is a vice. In democracies, waste should be unacceptable because it undermines the chances of the public’s interests and values being served. If politicians want to be trusted to use money well, they need to be hungry for savings, incentivising civil servants and the public to identify waste and eliminate it. If they do not want to use the methods described here, they need alternative ones – and to have good arguments why they will work better.

DOGE is a prompt to the rest of the world to do better. The questions it asked were necessary ones. Now we need better answers.

This article draws on the report “DOGE Done Better: The Case for Progressive Efficiency and a Streamlined State” published by Demos.

Sir Geoff Mulgan is a Professor at University College London (UCL). He was previously CEO of Nesta and the Young Foundation, director of the UK Government’s Strategy Unit and head of policy in the UK Prime Minister’s office. He is the author of many books, that have been translated into over 20 languages, including most recently “When Science Meets Power”.

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