OPINION: As It Turns Out, the Federal Government Does Valuable Things

While all eyes have been on the Capitol Hill maneuvering around the 900-page bill [H.R.1 — One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)] carrying out President Donald Trump’s agenda, something interesting has been happening in federal agencies. They’ve been bringing laid-off workers back. In fact, CNN reported late in June, they’ve been “scrambl[ing] to fill critical gaps in services left by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-led effort to shrink the federal workforce.” Not long after that story appeared, The Washington Post published another, reporting that DOGE “has lost the power to control the government’s process for awarding billions of dollars in federal funds.” Instead, individual federal departments and agencies will again be able to post funding opportunities directly to the government website used by organizations and businesses around the country. But that’s only after grants for funding things like health workers who care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and efforts to prevent falls by older adults were delayed and, possibly, derailed altogether. Meanwhile, much of the drama in Congress around the mega-legislation — which will add significantly to the national debt, strip millions of Americans off Medicaid, and cut taxes on the wealthy—has flowed from a simple fact: [The OBBBA] is extremely unpopular [according to some recent polling]. As Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — who decided not to run for re-election after announcing his opposition to the bill — put it to reporters, “I don’t bow to anybody when the people of North Carolina are at risk, and this puts them at risk.” The same is true in states all around the country. Taken by itself, any of these storylines would be interesting. But taken together, they point to one conclusion: As Americans, we may not be fond of the federal government, but on the whole we like the services it provides or [funds]. We like government that’s efficient and on top of its game. We like having an effective military, warnings of approaching hurricanes, and an air-traffic control system that keeps us safe. We even like the social safety net — because among other things, Medicaid helps keep your neighbors healthy and our hospitals operating, and Social Security and Medicare mean that you don’t have to go bankrupt to help your aging parents or grandparents live decent lives. That CNN story is instructive. As Eric Bradner reported, even though the administration is backtracking, “the rapid rehirings are a warning sign that it has lost more capacities and expertise that could prove critical — and difficult to replace — in the months and years ahead. ‘There are time bombs all over the place in the federal government because of this,’ said Elaine Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. ‘They’ve wreaked havoc across nearly every agency.’” And so the federal government is trying to regain the capacity it lost on everything from mine safety to preventing childhood lead poisoning to pursuing food safety to responding to bird flu. There is no question it could work more efficiently, or that you can find instances of waste and abuse. But I’m struck by a quote from a former DOGE staffer who gave an interview to NPR in which he said, “I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was. This isn’t to say that it can’t be made more efficient … but these aren’t necessarily fraud, waste and abuse.” This country is engaged in an experiment. [The OBBBA] that the GOP leadership in Congress has muscled through will reduce federal spending on health care by over $1 trillion — most of that coming from Medicaid — and cut up to 12 million people off health insurance over the next decade [according to estimates]. These are unprecedented numbers, and those cuts will reverberate throughout our country: in rural hospitals, in community health centers, in neighborhoods where health-care workers have been laid off, and in spending Medicaid enrollees will now have to devote to their physicians rather than their local stores.     

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Lee Hamilton, 94, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.