I vividly recall the clever imagery used by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when they sought to demonstrate to the public and Congress the inefficiencies created by an over-regulated federal government. They loaded thousands of pages of government regulations onto forklifts which they rolled onto the White House lawn, where they discussed their plans to increase government efficiency. The idea was to show how slow and heavy-handed the federal bureaucracy had become and how sclerotic and in need of reform the federal government was during the early 1990s.

Gore subsequently enlisted the help of government managers from many federal agencies to determine the possibility of reform and the need for innovation in areas such as automation, procurement and personnel management. Gore and his team sought to create a “government that costs less and works better.” On the basis of a highly analytical process involving conversations with hundreds, if not thousands of federal employees, the National Performance Review, later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, issued a scathing critique of the executive branch of government and made numerous recommendations for reform. Some of the recommendations resulted in congressional legislation, such as the Government Performance and Results Act, which mandated that agency budgets be determined not by the amounts of money they received the preceding year but by the results they were able to demonstrate having achieved since the previous budget cycle.

Gore led the effort with great tenacity, care and some humility. Decisions were made on the basis of rigorous empirical research and vetting through the minds of the experts — the men and women who led the agencies. Each proposal for change was carefully considered and debated, and the administration even set up “possibility laboratories” to try out some of the new ideas on a small scale, where failure would not be catastrophic. In the end, the National Performance Review did not realize all of its aspirations but helped introduce several significant changes, including the Government Performance and Results Act, greater flexibility in hiring procedures for federal agencies, more sensible procurement regulations and the increased use of technology in government operations. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama built on these ideas and continued to introduce business practices to government.

More recently, we have seen another, less compelling, image: Elon Musk at a CPAC conference gleefully wielding a chainsaw to display his and President Donald Trump’s approach to reforming the federal government: cut, slash and burn! There is no humility associated with the effort, no attempt to consult current leaders and managers, and no philosophy of what the real goals are. There is the presumption that agencies are too large simply because they have large staffs. There is no attempt to determine the importance of the functions of each agency being cut or the possibility for better alignment of their mission with their operations. People are accused of being “guilty” of malfeasance simply by having a job in a given agency, or, worse, being unsympathetic to the (unclear) goals of the new administration. Probationary staff are being fired for the dubious reason of inadequate performance, with absolutely no evidence. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team has fired staff from essential, sensitive positions, such as the management of nuclear weapons assembly, only to later recognize a need to rehire them.

Will Congress and the American people really stand by and let this happen? Will we forget that there is a discipline and logic to public administration? Will we forget that people spend years developing expertise about the content — medicine, transportation, security — of their agencies’ work, as well as the complex processes of translating noble ambitions into viable public policy? If the pushback against DOGE in recent town halls with Republican members of Congress is any indication, I think and hope the answer is no.

Michael Eric Siegel (MSiegel1@jhu.edu) is an adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Lessons in Leadership from the White House to Your House.”