Houston Chronicle: What DOGE can learn from Texas: How to scrub government of waste, fraud and abuse | Opinion

DOGE is right: Government agencies need to be ridded of waste, fraud and abuse. Texas' Sunset process shows the right way to do that.

On a January day in 1978, members of the newly created Texas Sunset Advisory Commission discovered that a state agency called the Texas Stonewall Jackson Memorial Board, established by the Texas Legislature in 1957, had never met during its 20 years of existence. The commission abolished the moribund agency the next year. Among agencies that met the same fate in 1958 were the Burial Association Rate Board and the Pink Bollworm Commission. 

Unlike Elon Musk’s cruel, chaotic and dangerous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Sunset commission was, and is, a sensible way to assess what government should be doing, what has outlived its usefulness, and what over the years might have become barnacled with waste, fraud and abuse.

Under the Sunset process, every one of the state’s 130 agencies, large and small, comes up for review, typically once every 12 years. Those under the magnifying glass cease to exist unless the legislature takes specific action to reauthorize them. 

Big agencies with a broad range of constituents, buttressed by cadres of well-paid lobbyists and lawyers, are not as easy to eliminate as, say, the Pink Bollworm Commission, but they’re still required to go through the process. 

Unlike DOGE’s chainsaw approach, the bipartisan Sunset Advisory Commission is just that — advisory (but with bite). Instead of relying on the whims of a vengeful chief executive or a megalomaniacal tech magnate, the process provides the people’s elected representatives a blueprint for change. Although Sunset doesn’t always work the way its creators envisioned, it’s a good-faith effort nonetheless. 

“Sunset is not designed to change the world. It is designed to give government a periodic scrubbing,” the late Paul Burka wrote in a 1993 Texas Monthly article that criticized then-Gov. Ann Richards for wanting to abolish the commission. Burka couldn’t understand why the governor was opposed, since the agency, in his words, “has done more to advance her favorite cause of open and responsive government and that has created less public mischief than any other branch of state government.”

Colorado came up with the “Sunset” concept in 1976. Maryland, Alabama, Florida and Texas soon followed. By 1981, 36 states had established some version of a Sunset commission. Unlike Trump, Musk and the zealots who concocted the radical anti-government blueprint called Project 2025, Sunset advocates in Texas and elsewhere have operated under the assumption that government has a role to play in people’s lives and that governmental functions at every level should be lean, efficient and responsive. It’s a classically conservative notion.

Lloyd Doggett, the 20-something state senator who sponsored the initial Sunset legislation in 1977, successfully persuaded colleagues that his bill would improve government efficiency. The Democratic lawmaker also reminded agency heads at the time that the Sunset Act presumed the agency under review would be abolished.

“Tell your staffs, board members and trade association that they will be dealt with fairly and consistently,” the Austin lawmaker said, “but not to expect a pat on the back until the ink is dry on any act that extends the agencies’” existence. 

“Sunset has certainly not achieved all my original objectives,” now-Congressman Doggett told the Chronicle editorial board in an email as his landmark legislation approaches its 50th anniversary, “but it has stood the test of time. DOGE will disappear when Trump’s ego separates him from Musk or when a greater number of Americans separate from Trump.”

On the federal level, the Trump/Musk effort has a number of precursors, although none as hare-brained and malevolent. President Theodore Roosevelt established the Keep Commission in 1905. His cousin Franklin established the three-member Brownlow Committee in 1936. Eleven years later President Harry S. Truman established the Hoover Commission, chaired by former President Herbert Hoover. President Dwight Eisenhower brought the former president back for a second Hoover Commission in 1953. Some of the efforts over the years were more successful than others at identifying and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.

President Ronald Reagan was confident that businessmen could slim and trim the federal government. His so-called Grace Commission — after its chairman, industrialist J. Peter Grace — relied on private funding and roughly 2,000 business executives (no federal employees) to ferret out waste and inefficiency. After 18 months, the commission came up with nearly 2,500 cost-cutting and revenue-enhancing recommendations that the commission itself estimated would save $424 billion over three years.

Only a few of the recommendations were ever implemented — closing unnecessary military bases, for example — but according to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, “the commission’s work provided a starting point for many conservative critiques of the federal government.”

More recently, former U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, preached the virtues of Sunset. He tried on numerous occasions during his long career in Congress to establish a federal Sunset process, but his legislation never made it to a president’s desk. 

The most ambitious effort to streamline federal government was President Bill Clinton’s Reinventing Government initiative, under the leadership of Vice President Al Gore. The project was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation, lasted several years and enlisted federal workers to re-envision their jobs. 

Elaine Kamarck, who ran Reinventing Government as a senior Gore adviser, estimates that the initiative resulted in total savings of $146 million, a significant amount of money but only a miniscule portion of the total federal budget.

Reinventing Government moved slowly, Kamarck told the Associated Press recently, to avoid interfering with government’s crucial obligations and responsibilities while taking on the task of restructuring. Musk, she said, doesn’t seem to share those concerns. 

“The stakes in federal government failure are really, really high in a way they’re not in the private sector,” Kamarck said. “We really worried about screwing things up, and I don’t think these guys are worried enough about screwing things up, and it’ll be their undoing.”

As UH political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus put it more recently, in an email to the Chronicle editorial board, “Sunset is a rational and humane way to scrub government of its excesses. Sunset is routine, consistent, and effective. Most of all, it never ends up tied up in the courts.  

“Critics complain that the process is used by lobbyists to target restrictions/regulations they don’t like,” Rottinghaus added. “No doubt this is true, but the process is done in the open (for the most part).”

Doggett notes that the Sunset process is designed to rely on “systematic expert analysis, public participation and bipartisan leadership.” DOGE, of course, does not.

“DOGE is just a political gimmick,” he said. “Efficiency may be in its name, but there is nothing efficient about its operations. Instead of careful analysis to determine where savings can be achieved without reducing necessary public services, it uses a meat axe approach to achieve a maximum body count without evaluating which employees and programs are working well and which are not. This all comes in handy for political broadsides full of unsupported Trump/Musk claims of waste, fraud, and abuse.” 

In Doggett’s view, and ours, DOGE itself epitomizes waste, fraud and abuse. “It wastes resources, misleads the public and abuses public servants," the congressman said.

Doggett is an outspoken partisan, to be sure. But as the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration and myriad other vital agencies falter and perhaps fail; as Americans lose their health care and rural hospitals close; as our glorious national parks go untended, and as the air we breathe becomes dangerous to our health; as bird flu becomes dangerous to humans; as air travel becomes dicey and weather forecasts grow less reliable — the dire list could go on — the Austin lawmaker won’t be the only one speaking out. Americans young and old, Democrat and Republican, will not so gently be suggesting that Musk and his arrogant, intrusive young Muskrats ride forthwith into the Sunset.