The Cato Institute has prepared its "report to DOGE," authored by Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies Alex Nowratseh, and Chair for the Public Understanding of Econommics Ryan Bourne. This is a very good idea.

It's a good document, and it has one definite quality we always appreciate in a think tank report: it makes for enjoyable reading.

It's split in three main parts: "Bureaucracy and the Administrative State," "Regulation," and "Spending Cuts and Tax Reforms."

It's full of good ideas, especially on ways to make the Federal bureaucracy more effective, and returning some prerogatives to the states or the private sector. If, like your correspondent, you have spent many hours on Cato's very fun and interesting "Downsizing Government" website, you will recognize a lot of items, such as the stuff about privatizing Federal lands in the West, an important issue.

But, eventually, the reading becomes repetitive, and even frustrating. The report is a wishlist.

It contains little awareness of tradeoffs, potential or political. For example, it recommends privatizing Amtrak, noting, correctly, that it is inefficiently-run and costs a lot of money. But it shows little awareness of the fact that train travel is a natural monopoly, and that simple privatization can just create a cash-extracting private monopoly, rather than more efficient provision of public services (as has been the case with highway privatization in France, for example). Maybe these concerns can be alleviated in some way, through smart regulation or a clever privatization auction process, or something. But the report seems unaware of the idea that these very legitimate concerns that are known to all who have studied this issue exist. Our recommendation for libertarians who are interested in being better public advocates for their ideas is that they should spend less time acting as if their views are both divinely-ordained and self-evident, and instead try to respond to objections made against them.

It also contains little sense of prioritization. Every prescription is presented on its own, as a bulletpoint item. At some point, we checked to make sure we were reading the actual report, and not the executive summary. This lends reading it an almost surreal quality. For example, narrow, popular, and obviously useful regulations such as executive orders making it easier to fire civil servants for incompetence, are presented in exactly the same way, and as curtly, as the proposal to raise the eligibility age for Social Security, a political nuclear bomb, and something President-elect Trump has promised not to do. There is no prioritization between proposals that require executive action, or agency action, or legislative action, even though these three things are vastly different in practice. There is no prioritization, as we've seen, between ideas that are popular and those that are politically toxic. There is, no doubt, value in think tanks and other participants in the policy debate sometimes making green-field arguments for ideal policies independently of political and administrative reality, as a way of broadening everyone's horizons, but this is explicitly a report submitted to "DOGE," i.e. to policymakers for implementation in the real world. Even if you believe that deep cuts to Social Security are politically sellable and can pass Congress, you should try to explain how.

Some proposals attempt to sound populist, but end up sounding only bizarre, such as defunding the OECD. Though it has the legal status of an international organization, and the accompanying pomposity, complete with lavish headquarters in a giant chateau in the middle of Paris, the OECD is essentially a think tank that does valuable work collecting and publishing economic data on rich countries. But, because the OECD has written a report (wrongheadedly, perhaps) arguing that its member countries should seek to "harmonize" their tax rates rather than engage in tax competition, and pushed for voluntary agreements by its members to do so, some have imbued it with mighty powers and seen it as some sort of conspiracy to rob American companies of their profits, or something. (It should be noted that America's corporate rates are not particularly low by global standards, so that it's not even clear that "harmonization" would ill serve its interests, or those of its national champions.) And even if it were true that OECD is some shadowy globalist conspiracy to rob Americans, it's not like defunding it would accomplish anything, since its other members would just make up the funding shortfall.

As we've said, the report is full of good ideas, and makes for good reading at times. We recommend browsing it, especially the part on Bureaucracy.

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