The last time a comprehensive review of the federal government was completed, the budget was $848 billion, the national debt was $1.6 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio was 38 percent.  That was in 1984, when the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, better known as the Grace Commission, sent its final report to President Ronald Reagan. 

The budget is now $7 trillion, the national debt is $35.3 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio is 121.6 percent.  The need for a new government efficiency commission could not be clearer. 

On March 10, 1982, President Reagan asked the members of the Grace Commission’s executive committee to “… work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency.”

Seven weeks earlier, on January 20, 1982, he commented before the administration’s Executive Forum, “We’re here to cut back on waste and mismanagement; to eliminate unnecessary, restrictive regulations that make it harder for the American economy to compete and harder for American workers to find jobs; to drain the swamp of overtaxation, overregulation, and runaway inflation that has dangerously eroded our free way of life.” 

The Grace Commission’s 161-member executive committee consisted of CEOs and senior executives of America’s leading corporations; principals of top law, accounting, investment and management consulting firms; and leaders from other private sector fields, including education, medicine, labor, and the media.  More than 2,000 individuals were involved in the commission’s work.  The private sector “contribution” to the commission was valued at $76 million.  The only “taxpayer” support came from two employees of the National Security Council and one from the Office of Management and Budget that were assigned to help the commission’s management office. 

The Grace Commission’s 2,478 recommendations from its 47 task force reports were projected to save $424.4 billion over three years.  President Reagan took the recommendations seriously and adopted what he could within the executive branch, saving more than $100 billion.  He included proposals for Congress in his budgets and tracked their implementation.  He also talked often about the Grace Commission to make sure it was not forgotten and spoke to Peter Grace and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson about establishing a nonprofit organization to follow up on the implementation of the recommendations.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) reports that savings to date from implemented Grace Commission and other waste-cutting recommendations are $2.4 trillion.  President Trump’s comment that “trillions of dollars” can be saved from a new government efficiency commission headed by Elon Musk is not an exaggeration.  It would take a cut of only 10 percent from the $7 trillion budget to exceed $1 trillion in savings.  As a nonpartisan organization, CAGW would support a new efficiency commission established by whoever is elected as the next President of the United States.

Adopted Grace Commission recommendations include the base realignment and closing (BRAC) commissions, the sale of Conrail to the private sector, changing federal retirement from a defined benefit to a defined contribution system, and turning over Dulles and Reagan National airports from federal control to the local Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.  The commission also suggested that a “comptrollership” function be established in federal agencies, leading to the passage of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.

Some questions have been raised about Elon Musk being the chairman of the new commission.  But his successful efforts to make the procurement process more competitive and efficient give him practical experience and working knowledge about what should be done throughout the rest of the federal government.

In 2014, SpaceX sued the Air Force in an effort to open up competition for national security launches after an $11 billion sole-source contract was awarded to the United Launch Alliance.  The lawsuit was dropped after the Air Force agreed to let SpaceX bid for contracts.  The resulting savings to taxpayers and increase in efficiency in rocket launches have been obvious.

Another of Mr. Musk’s companies, Starlink, was initially frozen out of the bidding under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program under the National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA).  After realizing parts of the country are too expensive to reach through cable or fiber, the NTIA released proposed guidance for alternative technologies like fixed wireless broadband and low-earth orbit satellite companies, including Starlink and Blue Origin (launching in 2025), to provide broadband service under BEAD.

Starlink was initially approved in December 2020, and then rejected in December 2023 for an $885 million competitive award through the Federal Communications Commission’s $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.  Commissioner Brendan Carr’s dissent from the decision  said the agency was “making up an entirely new standard of review that no entity could ever pass and then applying that novel standard to only one entity: Starlink.”  He added that the decision to apply that standard was “made up on the fly.”  Following the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene, Commissioner Carr said that “communities across the country would be in a materially better position today, in terms of connectivity, if the government had not unlawfully revoked the 2020 award Starlink lawfully won.”  Not only has the government requested satellite connections from Starlink but also the company offered free service for 30 days in impacted areas for both new and existing customers.

Making the federal government more efficient is a challenging task.  The innate response in the nation’s capital to solving a problem is to create a new program, even if there is an existing program to accomplish the same objective.  Broadband deployment is a good example.  A May 22, 2022, Government Accountability Office report uncovered at least 133 broadband programs across 15 agencies that spent $44 billion between 2015-2020, and found that the duplicative and overlapping requirements and programs have made it more difficult to connect Americans to the internet. 

A significant advantage that a new commission has over the Grace Commission is the technology available today that was not available in 1984, which will not only make it easier to analyze the operations of the federal government but also make the recommendations accessible to taxpayers, the media, and lawmakers.  That should lay the foundation for an essential effort to bring down the budget deficit, reduce the national debt, and secure the financial success of the United States instead of continuing down the path to fiscal ruin.