You could plausibly claim that the 2024 presidential election was about any number of issues— immigration, inflation, or tariffs. But nobody can seriously claim that the candidates ever debated whether a corrupt billionaire should be given the illegal power to destroy vital state capacity on a whim. Yet that’s precisely what the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been doing.

The cynical response to the illegal firings and impoundments pursued by DOGE has been, “So what? Government doesn’t do anything useful anyhow.” But that’s far too cheap a response given the stakes involved. The federal government performs functions that are vital for a decent society. It performs a number of them suboptimally and could use a good faith drive to improve its efficiency and step up its capacity. But compared with the other big centers of power in the U.S. economy—say the tech or finance sector—its employees do far more valuable work for far less money. Relative to these sectors, it is the epitome of efficiency.

For example, the federal government collects revenue for, administers, and distributes money for a number of programs that literally determine whether tens of millions of people will live in grinding poverty or not. In 2023, Social Security kept 27.6 million people out of poverty, refundable tax credits (even after the expiration of the expanded child tax credit of 2021) kept 6.4 million people out of poverty, and housing subsidies and food stamps combined to keep 6.2 million out of poverty. The value of Medicaid and Medicare, which cover roughly 140 million Americans with health insurance, boosts incomes in the bottom half of the income distribution by tens of thousands of dollars per household each year.

To be clear, the U.S. welfare state is the stingiest in the advanced world (and making it more protective and generous should be a genuine priority), yet it is extremely well targeted and utterly vital to tens of millions of people. And it needs a smart and dedicated federal workforce to administer and maintain it.

This set of programs keeping tens of millions of Americans out of poverty is run incredibly efficiently. One easy metric showing this is simply that the combined pay of federal civilian employees is about 5% of the entire federal budget, and only a small fraction of these employees is in charge of administering these safety net programs.

Health care is, by far, the largest sector in the U.S. economy and arguably the most complex—and it is the federal government that administers payments for roughly half of all health expenditures. The government cannot just rely on the honor system to direct these payments. The employees, skills, and expertise needed to oversee this spending in an efficient way is daunting. For example, the reimbursement rates set by public payers like Medicaid and Medicare for thousands of different medical interventions act as reference points for payers across the system, providing a valuable public good even for the half of health spending that is not being directly overseen by the federal government. Good faith efforts to find real efficiency in government spending would actually raise the administrative resources available to government-run health systems to ensure we’re getting even better value for the money. Finally, the publicly run portion of U.S. health care performs better than the private sector on essentially every metric including satisfaction of beneficiaries, cost containment, and efficiency.

Besides administering vital anti-poverty programs and huge portions of the U.S. health system, another key competency of the federal government is blunting the ability of corporate predators to take advantage of workers, customers, and communities. The federal government regulates workplaces, factories, and other production sites to make sure workers and customers are safe. It is responsible for ensuring that employers actually pay the wages they have negotiated with workers and for ensuring a level playing field not dominated by monopolies.

Because these protections keep corporate interests from profiting through the exercise of raw market power, corporations, predictably, don’t much like these protections. Corporations drive every lobbying effort or illegal impoundment of funds aimed at reducing staff and capacity in the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). These corporate lobbies want to stop workers from forming unions and exercising some leverage to achieve higher wages—and are willing to break the law to do it. The ferocity of the DOGE campaign to harass and fire federal employees can be largely explained by the fact that many federal employees are unionized, and corporate power does not want empowered employees working in either the private or the public sector.

There is real money to be made by the worst corporate actors if they can succeed in destroying the federal government’s capacity. Take the tax gap as an example—the difference between the taxes people owe and what they actually pay on time. The tax gap in 2022 was estimated at over $600 billion and has grown larger because of decades of Republican efforts to shrink the capacity of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to collect taxes from the rich and corporations. The collateral damage of letting tax cheats get away with not paying their legally required taxes is that honest taxpayers have less access to professional IRS staff who can help with tax questions and issues.

Many people think that state and local governments are more “in touch” with constituent preferences and concerns and that many public functions could be moved from the federal government to states. Maybe, maybe not. But even if that were true, it’s worth noting that about a third of the spending that states do is financed by grants from the federal government, hovering around $1 trillion annually in recent years. These grants finance health insurance coverage, public K–12 school systems, community colleges and other higher education institutions, roads and transit systems, public safety and order, and the upkeep of key infrastructure like water and sewer systems.

The era of cheap cynicism about the value of the federal government and its workforce is over, one way or the other. One alternative is that DOGE and the other illegal efforts of the Trump administration will thoroughly destroy state capacity and quickly make typical families poorer and less secure, and the value of what was lost will become painfully clear through its absence. The other, more optimistic alternative is that people across the ideological spectrum will realize that having a government that simply “does less” would be a disaster and will be able to successfully roll back the DOGE effort.

In the coming weeks, we will begin a series of illustrative posts on various agencies and federal government functions that highlight their value. We’ve already posted one snapshot of who these workers are and where they work. Often, we’ll note shortcomings in some of these agencies’ work and argue what a genuine “efficiency” agenda would look like to make them better.

But the plain truth is that we were already spending too little of our national resources in securing a high-functioning government. Our federal employees were already overstretched and underpaid. Further cuts are not an answer leading to a better society for anybody, except for corporate predators.