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By Katherine Fung
Senior Writer
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When the president of the United States declared that he was taking a "historic step in reforming the federal government" to make it "both less expensive and more efficient," Donald Trump was still on his first marriage, and Elon Musk was an unassuming undergrad studying physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
More than 30 years before Trump triumphantly returned to the White House and created the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last month with Musk — now the richest man in the world — at the helm, Bill Clinton was putting his vice president in charge of a sweeping plan to "reinvent government."
The National Partnership for Reinventing Government, or REGO as it was known, was spearheaded by Al Gore and aimed at streamlining processes and cutting red tape. The initiative was recognized as successful, having delivered four consecutive budget surpluses — the last time there was a balanced federal budget.
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Touting its success, President Clinton said in his 1996 State of the Union address: "We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over."
It was a line that could have come from the mouth of Trump himself. But that is where the similarities between the attempts by Clinton and Trump to shrink the federal bureaucracy end.
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Morley Winograd, who served as Clinton's REGO director during his second term, told Newsweek while the both initiatives are similar in their objectives, "the approaches are vastly different."
'Good People, Bad Systems'
"[The Clinton administration] did what the Musk folks have said they're going to do," Winograd said in a Tuesday interview. "Which is auditing the way each agency functions and looking for ways to make it more efficient and effective so that it would, in the words of the of the task force, 'work better and cost less.'"
At the center of the REGO initiative was the thesis that federal employees "are good people trapped in bad systems."
"So, we focused on the bad systems that kept them from doing their work as effectively and as efficiently as they could and wanted to," Winograd said.
The cuts that Clinton made to the federal workforce followed a six-month period called the National Performance Review, launched in March 1993, soon after he took office. The review process ended in September of that year with a report that found nearly 400 recommendations, which Clinton then implemented gradually so that essential services were not interrupted even as the workforce shrank considerably.
"Nothing could be more different in that approach than the approach that Musk and his team have taken, which is to assume the federal government's employees are the enemy, and the less of them we have, the better," he said.
Over 10,000 federal workers have been fired so far as part of the Trump administration's plans for "large-scale reductions" in the government workforce. Many more are expected to follow, as representatives from DOGE make their way through the thicket of federal agencies and offices.
The layoffs come after only 75,000 workers took the president up on his original buyout offer. Federal employees were offered eight months of pay and benefits through September so long as they resigned by February 6.
So far, the job cuts—which have impacted workers in the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Energy, Interior, and Education, as well as federal health agencies like the FDA and CDC—have totaled to nearly four percent of the federal government's 2.3 million employees. More layoffs are expected to come this week, reportedly at the Pentagon and IRS.
Having already taken an axe to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and cancelled the government's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) contracts, Musk has said that he hopes to save as much as $2 trillion a year — a number widely seen as impossible without severe cuts to defense and entitlement spending. The annual federal budget is $7 trillion.
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The Clinton administration ended up making sizable cuts to the federal workforce with REGO, reducing headcount by 20 percent — some 351,000 positions — though Winogard recalled that only 10 percent of those layoffs were involuntary.
He said she was concerned that federal jobs are currently being slashed without real consideration for the downstream effects of those positions being eliminated.
"The problem with laying the workers off first is all the knowledge and expertise of how to get the work done walks out the door with them," he said.
Winogard brought up the recent layoffs at the Department of Energy, which included key nuclear safety staff who were critical to managing the country's nuclear weapon arsenal, including those tasked with assembling warheads. As a result, the department had to rush to rehire those employees, only to then realize that there were problems contacting these workers since their email access had already been shut off and their government-issued phones disconnected.
"The size of government is important, but the size has to meet the needs," Winograd said. "It's more important to say, 'How can we make the government more efficient and more effective?'"
"If you make [the government] cost less by getting rid of everybody, then people don't have a government that they're dependent on for key safety and security issues," he said.
Lawmakers and citizens alike have expressed concern over Musk's level of involvement, raising questions about how his apparently unchecked power undermines the idea of a smaller government. Federal workers and outside groups have filed lawsuits against the DOGE purge, claiming unconstitutional overreach.
The White House has pushed back on the criticisms in a Monday court filing, saying that Musk is not even technically part of DOGE but rather a "senior adviser to the president," who has "no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself."
Winograd said unlike DOGE, the Clinton effort made recommendations to lawmakers that only went into effect after receiving bipartisan support from a Republican-controlled Congress.
"It was an executive branch recommendation and task force, but the final decision about what was going to be done was made by Congress," Winograd said. "Which is why less than all the recommendations got implemented, because there were resistance to some things in Congress, but for the most part, they passed."
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The former Clinton official said there are also similarities between REGO and DOGE in terms of timing. Clinton's efforts to "reinvent government" were boosted by a then-nascent tech boom sweeping Silicon Valley, much like Trump and Musk's "government efficiency" efforts come on the precipice of the AI era.
"We used technology to make the government more efficient and to reorganize some of the processes," Winograd said. "Musk held out the hope that it would be similar to what to what we did, in the sense that, instead of the internet, there's the AI revolution going on, which holds out great potential for making the government more efficient."
But even for those similarities, Winograd said it was concerning to hear that Musk wants to use his relationship with the White House to gain single-source contracts with his own AI initiative, rather than allowing open-source systems to bid through a federal contract.
Who Said It: Clinton Or Trump?
Supporters of President Trump's agenda have pointed to Clinton's overhaul efforts as proof that the federal budget can be balanced again, even comparing Clinton's speeches in the early 1990s to things Trump and Musk have said, arguing that the resistance to DOGE has less to do with opposition to cutting the bureaucracy and more to do with a knee-jerk opposition of anything Trump does.
"Today, annual interest payments on the national debt have doubled in four years, reaching $1.17 trillion—now exceeding the entire U.S. defense budget. America is $36 trillion in debt. History proves it can be done," the popular conservative account @KanekoaTheGreat wrote on X, formerly Twitter on Friday.
The post, which includes a 40-minute montage of Clinton and Gore's remarks about cutting wasteful spending, has been viewed more than two million times.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made a similar point in an interview with Fox News on Monday, where she pointed out that both the Clinton and Obama administrations had promised to clean up waste and fraud within the government bureaucracy.
"[S]hut your eyes and listen to the words from those Democrat politicians, you would think you are listening to President Trump, Elon Musk and our entire administration, who are saying the exact same things that Democrat politicians promised the American people they would do for decades," she told Fox's Sean Hannity. "President Trump is just the first president in our lifetimes to actually do it."
Americans seem at least somewhat supportive of DOGE's efforts to root out federal waste. A Trafalgar poll conducted earlier this month showed that 49 percent approve of Musk and the department's stated objectives, while 44 percent disapprove.
At the end of the day, it's the public who the federal government needs to pay attention to as they continue their work, Winograd said.
"[It's] the citizens who depend upon the government for certain services and who depend upon the government to protect their freedoms."
Reflecting on Gore's efforts to ramp up federal safety and contrasting it with the recent round of layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Winograd said, "There's real costs here and we'll see if the blowback from people who are suddenly without the services they depend on, or are suddenly concerned about the safety of their lives—in the health and human services area, for instance, or even worse in their national security the country—when that all starts to go south, we'll see if Mr. Musk retains his support from the president."
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