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Department of Agriculture. Abolish. Gone. Department of Commerce. Abolish. Gone. Wise words wrote Elon Musk about this 1999 viral clip described as Milton Friedman casually giving the blueprint for Doge.
And we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. Musk is right. Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist, did offer a solid blueprint for creating a smaller, less intrusive government. At the peak of his fame, he seemed poised to influence an American president to finally slash the federal bureaucracy. But those efforts ended in disappointment because they were blocked by what Friedman called the iron triangle of politics.
Slashing government waste and making the federal bureaucracy more accountable are incredibly important, but Trump and Musk are hitting the same wall Reagan did more than four decades ago. Now, more than ever, it's time to pay attention to Milton Friedman's advice for how to defeat the tyranny of the status quo. [Music]
In the 1980s, Friedman's influence reached deep into the halls of power. "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Like Trump, Reagan was preceded in the White House by a big-government liberal who expanded the size of government and whose presidency was plagued by inflation. Inflation is forcing many people to buy cheaper cuts of meat, drive older cars, wear last year's wardrobe, and make some hard decisions about housing.
Reagan, who awarded Friedman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, promised to enact the libertarian policy ideas laid out in his 1980 bestseller, co-authored with his wife, Rose. "I don't think it's an exaggeration to call Milton Friedman's 'Free to Choose' a survival kit for you, for our nation, and for freedom." But for the most part, the Reagan Revolution failed. "Reagan's free-market principles clashed with political reality everywhere," wrote his former budget director, David Stockman, in his 1986 book, *The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed*. For the Reagan revolution to add up, he wrote, "All the people lured by politicians into milking social services had to be cut off."
President Reagan tried to keep his promises, but like most presidents, he was only partly successful. Reagan lifted price controls on oil, cut taxes, and pushed for deregulation. But his commitment to those initiatives quickly fizzled. Federal spending exploded, and he even left trade quotas in place for the automotive industry.
Will Musk and Trump's cost-cutting initiative fizzle out too? Why is it that what I assert to be a distinct change in public opinion has not succeeded in changing actual policy? What is it about the tyranny of the status quo? What is it about the role of pressure groups? What is it that has produced this result?
The failure of the Reagan revolution inspired the Friedmans to write *The Tyranny of the Status Quo*, which examines the political obstacles that obstruct government cost-cutting. Their insights are as relevant today as they were 41 years ago. The book, which came out in 1984, pinpoints the iron triangle of politics as the main obstacle to cutting government. The triangle's three points reinforce each other to uphold the status quo: the beneficiaries, the politicians, and the bureaucrats.
The beneficiaries are the interest groups and connected industries that profit off government programs at the expense of taxpayers. The benefits go to a small, select group, while the costs are spread widely, and therefore the beneficiaries have more political clout than the recipients. "The people who are going to pay the taxes, as you said before, are dispersed and few. Maybe it's going to cost each one $5 extra. Nobody's going to go down in Washington and scream about that $5."
Today's beneficiaries include farmers who receive federal dollars. The new budget bill backed by the Republican party would extend the farm bill, which subsidizes crop purchases. As Friedman said, the people paying the bill are dispersed. You might not have noticed your share of the 2.1 billion going to prop up corn, soybeans, wheat, and other prices when you paid your 2023 taxes. But the farmers who got that money certainly did.
The politicians are supposed to be responsive to their constituents but end up serving interest groups instead. But it's the bureaucrats who actually distribute the money. They grow their power when politicians grow the size of their departments, which generates more spoils to distribute to the beneficiaries. It's a symbiotic relationship, all at taxpayer expense. "Bureaucracy tends to proceed by laws of its own," wrote Friedman, noting that in the half-century between FDR's New Deal and the Reagan Revolution, the US population didn't quite double, but federal government employees multiplied almost five-fold.
"If we continue along the road we've been going on, of usurping more and more power to governmental officials to control our lives, I see only one end, and that's a loss of anything that has any meaning as democracy, a loss of human freedom, and a prison state. That's the end."
"What is the goal of Doge? Or and and I think a significant part of this of presidency is to restore uh democracy." Musk also observed that a metastasizing bureaucracy proceeds by laws of its own. "If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in in the form of the president and and the senate and the house then we don't live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy." And like Friedman, he senses danger if the ballooning of the bureaucratic state isn't reversed. "The the overall goal here with the Doge team is to help address the enormous deficit. We simply cannot sustain of the country a $2 trillion deficits. We're spending like over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go become de facto bankrupt."
DOA's strategy is to try breaking through the iron triangle by the force of a thousand cuts, looking for little inefficiencies with the mindset of a software engineer. "I actually just pull myself a couple tech support here." The executive order that created Doge actually just rebranded the Obama-created agency called the US Digital Service. That is almost a literal description of the work that the Doge team is doing: is helping fix the government computer systems. It's a good start. The federal workforce should be streamlined, and much of it maybe even automated.
But Musk might be repeating some mistakes of the Reagan years. As Stockman observed, the Reagan revolution floundered because his team only focused on easy solutions, like ferreting out "obscure tidbits of spending that could be excised without arousing massive political resistance," which yielded savings that amounted to rounding errors in a trillion-dollar budget. To make real progress on cutting spending, the cost reduction must go deeper than tech support could manage on its own.
Friedman knew that the path to shrinking the federal government began with abolishing federal agencies. Housing and Urban Development. Department of Agriculture. Abolish. Gone. Department of Commerce. Abolished. Gone. Department of Education. Abolished. Gone. Trump has already shut down the Department of Education. Kind of. His executive order directs the education secretary to draw up plans to eliminate or shift some spending to other departments. It keeps major spending like federal student loans intact, and a total dismantling will require Congress to act. The Trump administration has made severe cuts to USAID and had defunded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, which made access to credit banking more difficult for low-income customers. Doge also enticed 75,000 federal workers to resign. But many of these cost-cutting initiatives have been challenged in court.
Truly eliminating federal agencies requires congressional action. Because Trump holds only slim congressional majorities and didn't win on a platform to slash government, he won't be able to eliminate entire federal departments like Commerce or Agriculture. But what would happen if the Trump administration had really followed the Friedman blueprint, learned from the shortcomings of the Reagan revolution, and created a political movement capable of pressuring Congress to finally start permanently eliminating entire agencies?
Friedman says it would actually make the federal government function better by narrowly focusing on providing what state governments and the private sector can't. "So one function of government is to protect the country against foreign enemies, national offense. A second function of government, and one which it performs very, very badly, is to protect the individual citizen against abuse and coercion by other citizens, to keep you from being hit over the head, mugged on the street, your house broken into, and so on. And I believe that the government performs that function very ineffectively because it's trying doing so many things it has no business doing."
Musk wields a chainsaw gifted to him by Argentina's libertarian president, Javier Milei, who more closely followed the Friedman blueprint by targeting the beneficiaries in the bureaucracy, which he calls Lacasta. In Argentina, it took massive poverty and triple-digit inflation to spark a real libertarian movement that now has a chance of overthrowing the tyranny of the status quo. "We don't want to wait for things to get that bad. Governments around the world should be actively deleting regulations, uh questioning whether departments exist. Obviously President Val is I think it seems to be doing a fantastic job on this front, uh just deleting things, deleting, deleting entire departments. Fantastic. Yes, fantastic indeed."
But how to overcome the iron triangle in the American system? Doge can't legally delete entire departments. Doge's website claimed $105 billion in cuts out of its $2 trillion goal as of early March 2025, but they haven't provided full documentation, and various media and open-source analyses have ballparked Doge's total savings as more in the 2 to 7 billion range. Either way, Doge isn't anywhere close to reaching its goal of cutting 2 trillion in government spending or almost 30% of the $7 trillion annual budget. The CBO found the deficit grew 5% in February compared to the previous year, despite DOA's early cuts. Meanwhile, the Republican majority is growing spending by passing a budget projected to add $3.4 trillion to our $28.8 trillion debt over the next decade. And we haven't even talked about Social Security and Medicare, which are the major drivers of debt and which Trump has promised not to touch.
"Can you guarantee that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security will not be touched? Yeah, I I mean I have said it so many times. You shouldn't be asking me that question." Stockman came to realize this is a bipartisan problem. "They're bad. Okay. On that issue there isn't any difference. When it comes to the debt they blame each other. Okay. Uh the the uh Republicans say it's the big spending Dems. Well it's not true. Under Trump spending grew at a 9% real rate per annum, 9%. Uh Obama was five. Reagan, my man, was three. The average in the post-war period going all the way back to Eisenhower is 2.5%. How in the world can we keep adding a trillion dollars to our public debt every 3 months? How are we going to get away with basically uh enslaving the next generation of Americans with debt?"
The only way to break the iron triangle, Friedman suggested, is to push through deep structural reforms that are hard to overturn: a balanced budget amendment that forces Congress to spend responsibly; a line-item veto allowing a president to eliminate special interest handouts without scrapping an otherwise popular law; a flat tax to eliminate special interest carve-outs; and a hard limit on how much money the government can print each year. Sounds easy, right? Of course, it isn't.
Friedman believes that to defeat the iron triangle, a popular politician must break free of the grip of the triangle's other two points. A new president with a broad popular mandate and a bully pulpit is in a unique position to push the kind of radical but necessary reforms needed to cut government. And it all must happen, says Friedman, within the first six-month honeymoon period. "Whether in the United States, Great Britain, France, or Germany, a new administration has just about 6 months to make major changes that will benefit the community at large. Those changes will have bad effects on small concentrated groups. The bad effects will be visible and immediate. The good effects will be less visible, take longer to manifest themselves, and longer to be recognized. Unless the occupant of that house, Republican or Democrat, makes such changes in the first few months after being elected or re-elected, the tyranny of the status quo will assert itself and prevent further change."
Trump entered his second term with a bold and disruptive plan. But he's spending his political capital unwinding America's global trade and defense partnerships, not on slashing spending to really cut the government. Friedman says, "You must capture the White House with a plan to cut spending and then make it harder to spend more." Trump isn't fighting that battle. He went to war with Congressman Thomas Massie for opposing the GOP's bloated budget. "If the Republican plan passes under the rosiest assumptions, which aren't even true, we're going to add $328 billion to the deficit this year. We're going to add $295 billion to the deficit the year after that, and $242 billion to the deficit after that, under the rosiest assumptions. Why would I vote for that?" And with Trump's tariffs throwing the market into turmoil, legal challenges to his executive action piling up, and his popularity already waning, the honeymoon is already over.
The gargantuan task of breaking the iron triangle will probably be left to whoever comes next. But the iron triangle will remain unbroken, and the looming threat of an increasingly centralized and bloated government will persist until a movement emerges that is dedicated to achieving enduring structural reforms. As Friedman wisely observed, it's not only short-term results that matter but the methods and their long-term consequences. "If you are made dictator for one day, the next day the No no I don't want to be made dictator. And I don't believe in dictators. Okay. I believe we want to bring about change by the by the agreement with the citizens. I don't I don't believe in arbitrary. Let me put it this way. Then you're I can't persuade if we can't persuade the public that it's desirable to do these things. We have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it."
DOA's mission to rein in our catastrophic debt and unrestrained federal government is one of the most important political battles of our time. But it's a mission that will need more than a single executive agency to ultimately succeed. It needs a mass political movement.