USA: Bill Clinton also made massive cuts – but unlike Trump and Musk

Denver. A new president moves into the White House and announces that he will overhaul the government, streamlining bureaucracy with the help of entrepreneurial know-how and new technology. Millions of federal employees are being offered severance packages and spending is being cut in order to balance the budget.

That may sound like what has been happening in Washington for a good four weeks, following the controversial radical operation carried out by billionaire Elon Musk on behalf of Republican President Donald Trump. But the largest operation in modern history to reform the US federal government took place 30 years ago, under Democrat Bill Clinton and the motto "Reinventing Government". Vice President Al Gore was in charge of overseeing the implementation at the time.

Scientists, researchers, and their supporters gather outside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on February 19, 2025 in Washington, DC to protest recent funding cuts to research, public health workforce reductions, and censorship of scientific data.

Source: SIPA USA/Matthew Rodier

Musk himself recently pointed out a connection to that time. "What @DOGE is doing is similar to the Clinton/Gore Dem (Democratic) strategies in the 1990s," he wrote on his platform X. Doge stands for Department of Government Efficiency, the agency for government efficiency that Musk practically runs and which has become synonymous with the operation.

However, the Clinton project at the time was very different from Musk's chaotic approach, say those who were actively involved in it or observed the processes. Clinton's reform was approved by law - with support from both parties - and implemented slowly over several years to determine where changes made sense. In addition, federal employees themselves were involved in redesigning their jobs. "There was a huge effort to understand what was happening and what should change," says Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, an organization that advocates for improvements in federal personnel.

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Musk's efficiency operation has already seen thousands of federal employees fired without warning, other government employees offered to quit and then be paid until September, and agencies gutted - both bypassing Congress, which the government should have involved. Sometimes judges have stepped in and halted the actions, at least temporarily, but in most cases Musk has been able to keep going. The technology entrepreneur and richest man in the world has promised to save billions of taxpayer dollars by cutting costs.

People familiar with the Clinton-era initiative, however, say there are lessons to be learned from that effort, both in terms of bureaucratic reform and the comparatively meager savings that such efforts can achieve.

Elaine Karmack was a high-ranking Gore advisor at the time, in charge of "Reinventing Government." Unlike Musk and his people, they did not believe that government efficiency made a difference on a "huge trillion-dollar scale," she says. "Their mandate (that of Musk and his people) can only be shortened. Ours was: If it works better, it costs less."

Karmack said the program's staff grew to 400 people, drawn from the pool of federal employees. The group worked to make government more efficient, focused on customer service, and adopted private sector practices such as employee performance standards. The team also worked to sell workers on what was then a brand-new technology - the Internet. Many government websites and programs, such as electronic tax filing, were the result of the Clinton-era initiative.

In this Dec. 20, 1996, file photo, then-President Clinton holds Socks the cat on his lap as he and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton welcome Washington elementary school children to the White House.

Source: Ruth Fremson/AP/dpa

Don Ketti, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, finds it particularly remarkable how much the employees themselves were involved in reforming the bureaucratic apparatus at the time - an expression of appreciation, as he describes it. "One significant difference is that the Trump administration sees federal employees as the bad people, and the Clinton administration saw them as good people."

And Clinton also worked with Congress to get approval for $25,000 severance pay for federal workers. The reform resulted in the elimination of 400,000 jobs between 1993 and 2000 through a combination of natural and voluntary attrition and a relatively small number of employer terminations.

Elon Musk holds a chainsaw as a symbol of red tape reduction as he arrives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.

Source: Jose Luis Magana/AP/dpa

The job cuts did not save money, Ketti said, because the government had to hire contractors to take over the duties of retired employees, something the professor also said will happen if Musk and Trump continue to cut federal staff.

Karmack estimates the total savings from Reinventing Government at $146 billion, or about €139 billion at current rates. That's a significant sum, but still only a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Karmack compares her team's slow, deliberate and collaborative approach to the task with the breakneck pace of Musk and his associates, a group of young outsiders he has appointed to take the axe to government agencies and their staff.

The reason for the slow pace of "reinventing government" was that they didn't want to get in the way of its many important functions while restructuring them, Karmack says. Musk seems to have little concern about that. But "the risks of the federal government failing are really, really high, in a way that they aren't in the private sector," the expert says. "We were really worried about screwing things up, and I don't think these people are worried enough about screwing things up, and that will be their undoing."

RND/AP