Democrats Had Their Own Version of DOGE Under Clinton and Gore. Why Are They Terrified Now?

While Democrats in Congress howl over President Donald Trump’s cuts to wasteful and fraudulent government spending, they’ve been hit with a partywide case of amnesia.

They’re forgetting their own party once stood for fiscal responsibility, even creating their own version of the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative called Reinventing Government—REGO for short.

Also known as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, REGO was a federal government reform initiative launched in 1993 by then-Vice President Al Gore. REGO aimed to save the federal government some $108 billion over five years by eliminating what a press report from that era called “scores of wasteful programs and regulations.” 

“This report tells us how to cut waste, cut red tape, streamline the bureaucracy, change procurement rules, change the personnel rules, and create a government that works better and costs less,” Gore said as he touted REGO, while standing beside President Bill Clinton.

REGO reportedly created 800 recommendations, including eliminating 12% of the federal workforce and merging some government agencies, such as the FBI with the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. 

It also recommended closing hundreds of government offices outside Washington, D.C. 

If all that sounds familiar, it’s because today, DOGE is calling for similar things, from streamlining duplicative programs and departments to shaving off nonessential government workers (freeing them up, as DOGE founder Elon Musk noted, for the productive private sector, which creates, rather than destroys, value).

The Left has gone far adrift from its ’90s ethos, which also included historic welfare reform passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Clinton (lifting millions of people out of poverty). So it’s no wonder that Democrats’ approval is tanking to a record low. New polling from Quinnipiac University released Wednesday found just 21% of voters approve of the way Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 68% disapprove of their performance—including a whopping 49% of Democrats. 

Conversely, congressional Republicans hit their highest marks in the poll’s history (since 2009), with 40% of voters approving of the job they are doing. But they can’t get complacent or take this moment for granted. As my former boss, journalist-columnist Robert Novak, joked: “God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don’t do that, they have no useful function.” 

While Republicans hammer out a historic tax bill that would build on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which spurred new job growth and allowed millions of middle-class Americans to keep more of their money, they’re living out one of their central purposes: namely, to grow freedom and human flourishing.

In contrast, Democrats lost their way and seem to be doubling down on their rejected agenda and approach. Democrats still hamstring Trump’s Cabinet nominees, and Kamala Harris, who led her party to an earth-shattering defeat is defiantly still considering running again and is high on lists of possible 2028 nominees. A Harris rerun would be a gift to Republicans.      

All but two House Democrats voted to let men compete in women’s sports. By a vote of 218-206 last month, the U.S. House passed a bill to restrict men from participation in women’s sports. Sadly, Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who previously had courageously stood up against his own party, later caved to the bullies and voted against it. The bill is now pending in the Senate. It would provide more permanent protections, building upon Trump’s fantastic executive order for the same thing this month—but which could be undone by a future president.

Bafflingly, Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers just created a proposal to amend state laws to replace the term “mother” with “inseminated person” in artificial-insemination statutes. With this unabashed embrace of gender ideology, seeking to erase women and mothers, it appears Evers has been suffering from amnesia since Election Day last year, when Americans profoundly rejected this ideology. 

Now that we have a new health and human services secretary recently sworn in, perhaps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can look into why the Left seems to be suffering from such widespread memory loss, not only of a time when Democrats stood for fiscal responsibility, but also of the indelible events of Nov. 5.

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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