If you’d expect anybody to be enthusiastic about the Department of Government Efficiency, it would be Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. A fiscal conservative of unimpeachable credentials, she’s worked as a policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation, as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and as staff director of the U.S. Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. She’s a regular on Washingtonian’s annual list of the 500 most influential policy professionals in D.C.
Despite her commitment to smaller government and fiscal discipline, however, she’s been conspicuously unimpressed by the results produced by DOGE to date, documenting its faults in a New York Post op-ed, a long essay in The Atlantic, and (most recently) a roundup of expert takes on DOGE in the libertarian magazine Reason.
We spoke to her about why DOGE’s efforts to reduce government spending are leaving many fiscal conservatives cold—and what a smarter and more serious effort might look like.
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