How past failures to rein in US federal sprawl led to DOGE

By Justin Fox

The federal government was growing much too fast, the young lawmaker warned. “One thing that we must do is to begin reviewing existing programs to determine whether they are still effective, and whether they are worth the money that we are putting in them,” he proposed. “We must eliminate the wasteful ones. One thing that we have all observed is that once a federal program gets started, it is very difficult to stop it, or even change its emphasis, regardless of its performance in the past.”

A few months later, a nationally known figure whose last name began with the letters M, U, S and K took up the torch. “We have 228 health programs, 156 income security and social service programs, 83 housing programs, et cetera, et cetera,” he said. “In addition to the 11 Cabinet departments, we require 44 independent agencies and 1,240 advisory boards, committees, commissions, and councils to run the federal government. … Government has become out of touch and out of control.”

The speakers were Democratic US Senators Joe Biden of Delaware, then just two years into his long career in national politics, in July 1975, and Edmund Muskie of Maine, who had been the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1968 and a leading contender for the party’s presidential nomination in 1972, in February 1976. They were both introducing bills that called for federal programs to come up for review every four years and be shut down if Congress didn’t reauthorize them. Muskie’s legislation, which got a lot further than Biden’s, though it never became law, exempted debt service and “programs under which individuals make payments to the federal government in expectation of later compensation,” meaning Medicare, Social Security and other government-run retirement plans, but put the rest of the government on expiration notice.

While neither Muskie nor Biden titled their original bills that way, such proposals became known as sunset laws. Dozens of states went on to adopt them, but the federal government never has despite repeated waves of interest through the decades.

There are echoes of these efforts in Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government this year. Congressional Republicans, frustrated with their own inability to rein in spending and regulation, have for now willingly ceded their authority to the de facto sunset law that is Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Much of what DOGE is doing may eventually be judged by the courts to be illegal, and it would surely be better to accomplish such changes in democratic, transparent fashion. But the (not entirely accurate) perception that past such efforts have failed helps explain why the dominant figure in the US government right now is a chain-saw-wielding billionaire in a baseball cap.

The idea that US laws and government institutions shouldn’t be permanent goes back to the nation’s founding. In a famous 1789 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson mused that laws and constitutions should not bind future generations and should instead expire after 19 years. One of the most important institutions of the early federal government, the central bank precursor called Bank of the United States, was chartered in 1791 for 20 years and shut down in 1811. The second Bank of the United States was chartered for another 20 years in 1816. After a bill to recharter it was vetoed by President Andrew Jackson, it too closed its doors. The federal income tax enacted during the Civil War was also temporary, with the final iteration, the Internal Revenue Act of 1864, allowed to expire in 1873.

There’s still federal legislation with end dates, with the most notable in recent years being tax legislation such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which came with expiration dates for many of its provisions — coming up next year — to get around Senate budget rules. But for the most part, the agencies and programs that Congress sets in motion have indefinite lives. Congress has the power of the purse and of the law, according to the Constitution, but since the great expansion of the federal government that began in the early 1900s it has struggled to rein in what it creates.

An early effort to address this difficulty came after World War I, during which there was a big expansion of government that was only partially reversed afterward. Republican former mining executive and entrepreneur Herbert Hoover, first as Commerce Secretary and then as president, asked for the power to shut down and consolidate federal agencies that Congress had created. “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” Republican US Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania said as Congress prepared to grant Hoover his wish in 1932. “Leave it to Congress and we will fiddle around here all summer trying to satisfy every lobbyist, and we will get nowhere.”

Reed also said he wasn’t really “proposing that we make Mr. Hoover our Mussolini,” and the empowering legislation included — at Hoover’s suggestion — the provision that either house of Congress could veto the president’s actions by a simple majority vote. By the time Congress reconvened, Hoover was a lame duck, and in January 1933 the House opted to leave the reorganizing to President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, passing a resolution disapproving all Hoover’s proposed changes.

Such “legislative vetoes” were used for various purposes after that, until the Supreme Court decided in 1983 that they violated the constitutional separation of powers unless they required a joint resolution of both houses of Congress, which a president can veto. The Congressional Review Act enacted in 1996 allows Congress to cancel recently issued federal regulations, for example, but because of the presidential veto threat has been used only after shifts in party control in Washington to nix regulations promulgated in the latter days of an outgoing administration.

On the campaign trail in 1932, Roosevelt also pledged to rein in “extravagant government spending,” but after taking office he and Congress moved quickly in the opposite direction with the government-expanding New Deal. William O. Douglas, who joined the staff of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 and was later appointed by Roosevelt to the SEC chairmanship and then to the Supreme Court, wrote in his autobiography that he believed any new agency was “likely to become a prisoner of bureaucracy” after its first decade and had “told FDR over and over again that every agency he created should be abolished in 10 years. And since he might not be around to dissolve it, he should insert in the basic charter of the agency a provision for its termination. Roosevelt would always roar with delight at that suggestion, and of course never did do anything about it.”

It was another big expansion of government in the 1960s and early 1970s that sparked the sunset movement, led by government-watchdog group Common Cause. In Washington, a watered-down version of Muskie’s sunset bill passed the Senate by an 87-1 vote in 1978 but didn’t get anywhere in the House. The first state sunset law was enacted in Colorado in 1976.

In Colorado’s kinder, gentler version of DOGE, a federal Office of Management and Budget retiree who was teaching at the University of Colorado hired a team of 10 interns to evaluate 12 state agencies. They recommended shutting down the Colorado State Athletic Commission, the Board of Registration for Professional Sanitarians and the Shorthand Reporters Board, and merging the State Barber Board and Board of Cosmetologists, which the legislature did. The effort cost $175,315, a lot more than the $6,810 combined annual budget of the three closed agencies.

Other states had similar early experiences, and the cost and effort required for sunset review eventually soured many on it. The number of states with an active sunset process went from a peak of 36 in 1981 to at most 25 as of 2022. Still, the states that stuck with it seemed to achieve positive results. A 2009 study by economist Jonathan Waller found that states with systematic sunset laws (as opposed to laws that allow legislators to pick and choose the agencies to review) “reduce spending at the state level, while increasing the level of government services provided.” In Texas, which has been tracking the costs and benefits of its sunset process since 1985, the state Sunset Advisory Commission says that it “has had an estimated positive fiscal impact of $1 billion in state and federal savings and revenue gains, with a return of $16 for every $1 appropriated to the Sunset Commission.”

Two Texas Republicans, House member Kevin Brady and President George W. Bush, led a resurgence of sunset interest in Washington in the 2000s, but again no sunset law was enacted. This year, Texas Republican Michael Cloud has introduced a Federal Agency Sunset Commission Act, but there appears to be more interest in attacking regulation in particular. Tennessee Republican Mark Green’s Sunset Chevron Act would lead to the expiration, in the absence of congressional action, of every regulation upheld by a federal court under the “Chevron deference” doctrine that the Supreme Court abandoned last year, while the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act of 2025, from Florida Republican Kat Cammack and 79 co-sponsors, all Republicans, would bar major new federal regulations from taking effect unless Congress approved them.

The partisan nature of these efforts marks a big shift from the sunset movement of the 1970s, of which both Republicans and Democrats were enthusiastic backers. Musk’s DOGE, which attracted some support from congressional Democrats before it actually set to work, has driven them all away since with its seemingly ideology-driven, act-first-think-later approach, along with Musk’s clear conflicts of interest. Sunset-law backer Common Cause, tellingly, is vehemently opposed to Musk’s efforts.

Meanwhile, what has probably been the most successful US effort at government reorganization and size reduction, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government led by Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s, relied on neither shock tactics nor a forcing mechanism such as sunset law. The partnership developed its proposed changes with help from federal civil servants, relied on buyouts and attrition more than layoffs and pushed reforms that required changes in law through first a Democratic-controlled Congress and then a Republican one. Non-Postal Service civilian federal employment fell 19 per cent during the Clinton-Gore administration, and federal spending went from 21.5 per cent of gross domestic product to 17.7 per cent, and while Gore’s effort wasn’t the only cause of this — post-Cold War defense cuts and other austerity measures imposed by the Republican Congress after 1996 played a role, too — it certainly didn’t hurt. Perhaps the best solution to seemingly intractable political problems is just regular politics.