No, We Do Not Need a ‘Good’ DOGE
Using extra constitutional, illiberal methods to restore liberalism would be self-defeating
The release of “Project 2029” in May was surely the first of many efforts to identify “big ideas for America’s future.” The response flagged the challenge of the moment, with complaints that its proposals weren’t exciting and amounted to “establishment-friendly technocratic reform.” (In an anti-incumbent era, “establishment-friendly” is a bomb to blow something up.) The hurdle for what comes next, as Ezra Klein recently suggested, is that any alternative “cannot just build back; they can’t even just build back better. They have to build something different.”
Klein may be right, but calls for different, bold, and new only address part of the challenge without clear principles to restore trust in democratic institutions that protect the rights of all citizens. It is easy instead to wonder whether the Trump administration’s disruptive approach might be used for good. In a recent podcast, Derek Thompson asked Klein what he thought a “good DOGE” could do. The answer should be “nothing” because DOGE was illegal and didn’t understand or care about how government works. The question, however, illustrates the need to think through the deeper challenge of liberalism after illiberalism, and Americans should learn from the experiences of those facing similar challenges in places like Poland, Brazil, and Hungary.
DOGE Wasn’t Daring—It Was Unconstitutional
The lure of a good DOGE isn’t unique to the podcast. It’s a tension in many policy circles, op-ed pages, and roundtables seeking to identify next steps for America. Klein observed that, on the one hand, DOGE was clearly destructive, but that, “on the other hand, it was proof that you could do a lot more to the state than people thought you could, that the rules or regulations were not nearly as binding as people thought.”
The observation echoes an occasional reluctant admiration for the Trump administration’s determination to get things done, including many long-standing planks of past Republican Party platforms that had seemed stymied: shut down the Department of Education, fold the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department and slash foreign assistance, get NATO allies to increase defense spending. Thomas Frank illustrates the lure of the approach if not the ends, writing, “Like an anti-LBJ, Trump reminds the world every day what presidential power can do—the institutions it can wreck—when it is administered resolutely and with a little bit of daring.”
The creation of DOGE and the destruction it led to, however, was not just the result of Trump’s “daring.” It wasn’t proof that the rules are not as binding as people thought. DOGE did what it did largely by breaking the law, and Congress let it.
There is no mystery why this happened. Rather than assert its Article I power of the purse, Congress let DOGE and the Trump administration fire people and cancel programs it had passed into law. House Speaker Mike Johnson agreed that President Trump can assert prerogatives over spending and programs because, he said, there is a “presupposition in America that the commander in chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.”
Meanwhile, the courts have shown that they are not designed to stop the “move fast and break stuff” spirit that defines DOGE. While it may be possible to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center, many things will be hard if not impossible to reverse. Even if the courts were to rule that eliminating USAID was illegal without congressional approval, there’s little chance to bring it back now. There isn’t even a debate about whether this was unconstitutional. OMB Director Russ Vought told Congress in his confirmation hearings that he did not accept Congress’ authority over the power of the purse, having famously written in 2022 that he believes we are “living in a post-constitutional moment in our country.”
Big Ideas and the Reluctance to Challenge the Status Quo
Reimagining power will be at the heart of any big-ideas agenda: the power to get things done, long blocked by bureaucratic procedure and shrinking ambition. For years veteran policymakers have observed that government is like an enormous ocean liner that can only change course gradually, that change in the short term is only possible at the margins, in part because of zealous congressional earmarks and legislative guidance issued in the name of protecting taxpayer dollars. (I remember a USAID Administrator, when asked what he would do differently, ruefully commenting that his budget was already earmarked 110%.)
The instinct to restore the status quo ante will be strong, especially among those who watched decades of their work dismantled and now argue for restoring it. Klein acknowledges, “One thing DOGE very naturally did was create a rallying around the institutions of government among liberals — they’re trying to gut the N.I.H. and the National Science Foundation and U.S.A.I.D. and all these things, and we need to defend them.” But liberals have to treat institutions, he argues, “as much more liquid and malleable and have to take reports of their failure much more seriously than we do.”
Not long ago, Biden was being trumpeted as the next FDR (or LBJ) who knew how to pass big, complicated legislation. Yet the insight of the “abundance” analysis is that passing legislation isn’t enough: years after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, there was still little rural broadband and no national network of electric charging stations. When the Trump administration came into office, it reversed many of these policies in a move that previous wisdom said couldn’t be done because they had been codified in legislation. It happened not because there was more flexibility than policymakers realized, but because Congress refused to act as the check the Constitution intended.
The abundance approach calls for a return to first principles, to what we believe government should do, and to be willing to criticize the status quo where it prevents progress. In the case of the National Institutes of Health, Thompson argues failures have been created by “decades of cover-your-ass rules that force scientists to essentially become bureaucrats. … Let’s find a way to allow scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden.” Reinvigorating institutions sounds inspiring, but the peril surfaces when Thompson concludes, “that’s an approach that I would like to see a ‘good DOGE’ lean into in 2029.” But the problem is not that DOGE was put to bad ends. It is that DOGE is fundamentally illiberal. It normalizes illiberal power instead of rebuilding the case that government can deliver.
Instead, the next president should lead a national initiative to articulate a new compact of checks and balances with Congress, one that binds the executive branch through greater transparency and accountability in return for greater flexibility to innovate.
This doesn’t come without risks. Many caution that, if you open the floodgates, you may not like what you unleash in an era of political polarization. You might get an emboldened Project 2025, rather than a new national consensus. Democrats might vow to reject Vought’s vision of the unitary executive when in power, but it’s not hard to imagine Republican lawmakers rediscovering their belief in Congress’ oversight with a Democratic president.
Liberalism after Illiberalism
The hurdle for any “Project 2029” is not only ambition but what some have called the “challenges, dilemmas, and paradoxes of liberalism after illiberalism.” Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley observe:
A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract in the short term without resorting to the same methods that established them in the first place. Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook.
In Poland, the centrist coalition that defeated the authoritarian-leaning Law and Justice Party in 2023 confronted the fact that, even after winning elections, its defeated opponents were still in place, and determined to defend themselves. Faced with a legal system still populated by justices from the past government and vetoes blocking reform by the president allied with them, the new Polish government struggled to govern, ultimately judged to deliver on only 12 of the 100 policies it had promised for its first 100 days. In 2025, the coalition’s candidate for president lost an election to a candidate backed by the Law and Justice Party, setting the stage for continued gridlock over democratic reform.
Friends in Poland warn that if you do not move fast to dismantle the old regime while your political capital is greatest, its holdovers will undermine you. Yet Bill and Stanley suggest that “governments seeking to deal with the consequences of democratic backsliding face demands and incentives to act effectively, legally, and quickly, but realizing two of these goals often means excluding the third.” When the coalition floated bending the rules to overcome resistance, the predictable both-sides verdict followed: it was no better than the authoritarians it replaced.
Others are trying to learn from this. In Brazil, the Supreme Court took two years to convict former president Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to lead a coup after losing elections in 2022, proceeding despite international pressure from the Trump administration. In Hungary, Péter Magyar, who led the parliamentary defeat of Viktor Orbán, called for the president aligned with Orbán’s party to also step down, threatening to amend the country’s constitution to remove him using legal tools. Magyar, with an overwhelming parliamentary majority his Polish neighbors lack, recently suggested, “This process will take about a month, we are trying to adopt the necessary legislation as quickly as possible, and yes, there will be talk of removing all puppets.”
In the end, “good DOGE” isn’t just a poor choice of metaphor. It illustrates how difficult it can be to maintain clarity that rebuilding bolder, better, and differently must be accomplished through a renewal of democratic principles that govern the rights of all citizens. The experience of liberalism after illiberalism in other parts of the world reminds us of windows of opportunity but also that moving fast must happen through democratic institutions, not around them. Otherwise, it may not last.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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