Eagle-Tribune Op-Ed : "We Don't Need DOGE, We Need Carefully Considered Solutions"

The following op-ed appeared in the Eagle-Tribune on March 8, 2025. It can be found online HERE.

Everyone at DOGE should love the first law I passed through Congress. The “Faster Care for Veterans Act” did just that, getting veterans into VA appointments more quickly and using technology to do so—a great example of making government more efficient.

Unfortunately, what Musk and Trump are doing with DOGE isn’t making government more efficient—it’s making arbitrary and erratic cuts. This isn’t strategy; it’s a hatchet job, and while it might make for good political theater, it doesn’t make for good government.

Americans deserve a government that works better, delivers services faster, and spends taxpayer dollars wisely. Nobody thinks we have that today.

A recent poll found 21% of Americans believe the government listens to the public, and only 23% think federal services are easy to navigate.  We must do better. 

For years sitting on the Armed Services Committee, I’ve focused on how the Department of Defense needs to modernize and cut areas of wasteful spending. The question is how you go about it. If you have inefficiencies in your business, you don’t just fire half your employees overnight and hope for the best.

In one of his very first moves, Musk succeeded in making government less efficient by inviting the best, most talented and dedicated employees, to make more money elsewhere. I received two calls from friends who received that email and are close enough to ask me for advice. Both had turned down higher salaries in the past because they thought it was important to serve.

By slashing the federal government without a plan, we’re losing a generation of experienced public servants – and maybe worse, we’re losing future generations of bright young Americans who will never, ever, want to pursue public service for our country. I’ve heard this already from college students who had planned to serve and are seriously questioning that decision now.

This isn’t cost-cutting, it’s self-sabotage. It could take a decade or two to get good people back.

No responsible business leader would run their company like this. A good example of what not to do is what the new CEO of Twitter has done. Twitter’s revenue has collapsed by 84%. The company’s overall value has plummeted.

So how is this all going to impact us? First we can expect delays in small business loan processing, longer waits for veterans’ services, backlogs at the IRS, weaker disaster response, and fewer resources for national security.

Companies that receive federal contracts from the government account for about 7.5 million jobs – that’s about 4.5% of the nation's workforce. Small businesses account for about $3 of every $10 in contracts.

Here on the North Shore, we’ve got a lot of federal funding on the line. I’m doing everything I can to ensure it doesn’t suddenly disappear, but I’m also not naive enough to think that I can protect it all.

Cuts in EPA funding will mean less support for cleaning up the Merrimack River and putting a stop to CSOs. Cuts in Department of Transportation and FEMA funding will limit our coastal communities’ ability to build more resilient shorelines capable of protecting our residents from the havoc wreaked by more intense storms and flooding.

In Massachusetts, more than 2 million people rely on MassHealth, including 45% of all children. MassHealth keeps low-income families healthy and out of emergency rooms, where costs are quickly passed on to all of us. Medicaid is also a key source of end-of-life care, providing peace of mind when families need it most. 

This is all bad. But if you agree with me that we do need government reform, this just isn’t the way to do it, how should we do it? Actually there’s a good example from not all that long ago.

Look at what President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore did in the 1990s. They cut wasteful spending, streamlined programs, and modernized agencies—without simply gutting the workforce. They actually got federal workers to buy into the process, encouraging them to help find efficiencies themselves.

The result? The largest surplus ever (the last time there was a balanced federal budget), the largest three-year debt pay-down in American history, reduced regulations, a smaller federal workforce, the lowest inflation in decades, and extended Medicare solvency. They did this by working with federal workers and Congress, not against them, and passed multiple laws with bipartisan support.

Democrats and Republicans should all be interested in the real solutions that make life better for everyone in America. This is a challenging time for our country, but we’ve overcome dark days before. We can do big, bold things again, but undermining the very foundations upon which our great country was built is not the way to get there.