This is the Cato Daily podcast for Thursday, December 12th, 2024.

I'm Keelip Brown.

Doge, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, may present a unique opportunity

to radically reduce the level of federal imposition, both financial and regulatory in the lives of Americans.

The Gato Institute has a similar report identifying trillions. That's trillions with a T, spending

cuts as well as major regulatory reforms, to advance a smaller government and a freer society.

I spoke with report editors Ryan Bourne and Alex Nerasta yesterday.

Big picture to start here, Alex. How do you evaluate the task that Doge is being assigned,

although informally assigned by the next president.

Doge has a very important task.

Trump said in his tweet, where he announced the creation of Doge that it is, quote,

paved the way to dismantle government bureaucracy slash excess regulations,

cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies, unquote.

Now, we think that that's actually too narrow and that the systematic problem with government, quote, and efficiency, unquote, in wasteful spending and bad projects and problems and imposes on the economy is a direct result of it being too big.

Ryan, on the economic side, what do you see the big opportunities here?

Well, there are big opportunities when it comes to reform in the regulatory state.

In one of their opening op-eds after the announcement of Doge, the heads of Doge,

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramoswami, talked about changes to rulemaking, executive actions,

types of law changes that Congress could pass, which would liberate certain sectors of the economy. So there are certain things that

we probably expect that President Trump would be quite keen to do, whether that be liberating

some aspects of the energy sector,

loosening some of the mandates around energy efficiency of certain products, for example,

...