Peter Jacobsen
Peter Jacobsen is a Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means. Like clockwork, Congress tries to push through a 1,500-plus-page spending bill with handouts and waste to “prevent a government shutdown.” The fact that this happens so frequently would seem to indicate a systematic dysfunction that demands repair, but, apparently, the majority of our congressional representatives disagree.
However, this time things appear to be different. Representatives are apparently pulling support for the bill, as constituents are calling around the clock asking them to kill it.
What’s caused this reaction? According to journalist Eric Daugherty, the incoming heads of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are behind it:
Both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been loudly critical of the bill on X. Ramaswamy even took it upon himself to read the more than 1,500 pages in the bill, resulting in a decidedly negative assessment:
While I’m all in favor of Musk and Ramaswamy taking down this bloated handout parade masquerading as a bill, the more interesting story is how the bill is being taken down. This episode is giving us insight into how DOGE will work once it’s in full swing.
Meme Department, Meme Means
When I first heard of DOGE, I’ll admit I was disappointed. Musk and Ramaswamy brought an interesting outsider perspective to the table for a new Trump administration, and my impression when it was announced was that DOGE would be a kind of ‘containment department,’ where the two would be siloed off from any real power. DOGE is not part of the official cabinet.
However, if their campaign to kill this spending bill is successful, then I’ll be happy to admit I was wrong. Strictly speaking, DOGE doesn’t even exist yet. It shouldn’t have any power before Trump takes office. The problem with this analysis, though, is it assumes that DOGE needs official authority to get things done.
This mistake is akin to thinking a CNN interview is better exposure than an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. While it’s true that CNN is more official (they have the White House Press passes, after all), power is increasingly leaking out of the official institutions.
If DOGE kills this bill before having any legal standing, there’s no reason it won’t be able to do even more with the limited legal status it gains.
The name DOGE is based on a meme, and that’s exactly where the department’s real power rests, and it’s perhaps part of the reason the idea is disliked by many. By memeing about waste, Musk and Ramaswamy threaten to accomplish more than they would by running the Government Accountability Office (GAO) or something like that.
Trump’s campaigns have centered themselves on bristling against long-standing institutions (legacy media, universities, bureaucracies, and more). Many explain Trump’s initial success in politics as the result of memes. DOGE’s means of cutting down the government via internet communication, then, is a fitting piece of the new political era.
Rational Ignorance and Advertising
So how did Musk and Ramaswamy influence the likelihood of this bill succeeding without official power? Well, to understand that, we have to explore the economics of politics, commonly called public choice.
One of the founders of public choice theory is Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who pioneered the idea of “politics without romance.”
How does this differ from politics with romance?
Analyzing politics with romance often means viewing the situation with rose-tinted glasses. A romantic view of politics looks at politicians and bureaucrats as public servants who have the good of the citizens at the forefront of their minds. Voters, in this view, are informed and active participants attempting to improve the political system and outcomes.
While this would be nice, much of politics is not romantic. Many politicians are primarily interested in holding on to power—even if they wouldn’t admit it to themselves.
Voters, for their part, tend to be ill-informed. They often don’t know the voting record of their representative, or even who their representative is. Why don’t they know, or bother to find out? Because individual voters are unlikely to affect the outcomes of elections with their votes. As such, they are unlikely to benefit from casting well-informed votes.
Public choice economists call this rational ignorance. It’s rational because becoming informed has a high cost, but almost no chance of real benefit.
This is where DOGE comes in. Austrian Economist Israel Kirzner in 1972 wrote for FEE’s magazine The Freeman on the economic advantage of advertising. In this piece, Kirzner argues that advertising is valuable because it shares information with the customer. But this highlights a new question: Why the shouting? In his words:
Information can be provided without the characteristics of advertising that we know, without the color, without the emotion, without the offensive aspects of advertising. Surely information can be provided in simple straightforward terms. The address of this and this store is this and this place. These and these qualities of commodities are available at these and these prices. Why do illustrated advertising messages have to be projected?
Kirzner doesn’t just leave us with a question. He gives us an answer. All of these methods make the information more easily digestible for consumers. He says:
It is not enough to buy gas and put it in the ground. The entrepreneur puts it in the ground in a form that the consumer recognizes. To do this requires much more than fabrication. It requires communication. It requires more than simple information. It requires more than writing a book, publishing it, and having it on a library shelf. It requires more than putting something in a newspaper in a classified ad and expecting the consumer to see it. You have to put it in front of the consumer in a form that he will see. Otherwise, you’re not performing your entrepreneurial task.
What does this have to do with DOGE? It’s true that we should expect voters to be rationally ignorant. But even rationally ignorant voters will learn more about the political system when it becomes extremely cheap for them to do so.
That’s what DOGE did with this bill on X. As voters were scrolling through their social media feeds, they were presented with a simple explanation of the waste being crammed into the shutdown bill.
When voters saw what was actually proposed, they picked up their phones and called their representatives.
It’s too early to tell whether DOGE’s meme sharing of government waste will be enough to make a real impact, but I’ll admit to being more optimistic thanks to this recent development.
This article was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
