Editor,
President-elect Trump selected Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency. This is a once in a generation opportunity to cut wasteful government spending and over regulation to reduce the massive 36+ trillion-dollar national debt that continues to grow.
Unless something is done to address this issue, we could one day wake up to find that the dollar is close to worthless making the Great Depression look like a church picnic.
I spent 31 years in big government and the waste that I saw was truly mind boggling. My experience leads me to the conclusion that it cannot be reformed from within, I know because I tried in my area and stupid and greed kept winning.
They have stated that they plan to post detailed information as they assemble their recommendations making the process transparent to give everyone the opportunity to defend what may be in place if it is valuable.
The goal is not to destroy necessary regulation or harm the environment but to make sure that waste, redundancy and useless regulations are cut. Once this process begins the lobbyists and special interest groups will descend like locusts to defend the pork.
I think it is also important to realize this process will be messy once the obvious waste is identified and this is part of the cost of achieving this goal and not a reason to back away from the process.
It would be prudent as citizens that we follow the process and let our elected officials know what we support. Past such efforts have failed because of lack of citizen support.
Joseph Kaffl
Hillsboro
