I'm ready to gear up for WW III baby! Errr?
The World War II Lesson for DOGE
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy could emulate the ‘dollar-a-year men,’ who built the greatest military production machine the world has ever seen.
By Arthur Herman
Dec. 9, 2024 5:24 pm ET
A Trump revolution is poised to unleash the innovative and productive power of the private sector, transforming the federal government. If it happens, Americans will witness the most significant change in the operation and philosophy of governance in 120 years. Fortunately, the precedent for this kind of transformation occurred more than 70 years ago, when American private industry mobilized to win World War II.
At the dawn of the Progressive Era, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke of reining in the “malefactors of great wealth,” who frustrated the operations of government “so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing.” The focus of governance in Washington ever since has been to restrain private energy and productivity—i.e., capitalism—for the health and safety of the American people and to secure equal treatment under the law.
One hundred twenty years later, those government restraints—i.e., federal regulations and regulatory agencies—have become unsustainable burdens. If the experience of Covid, open borders and diversity, equity and inclusion has proved anything, it’s that the progressive model is a threat to basic health, safety and equal treatment.
The second Trump administration is poised to bring the lessons learned from business to reform the public sector. The Department of Government Efficiency will aim to do more than simply cut waste, fraud and abuse—or reduce government regulation. As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy noted in these pages, “DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.”
Those structural changes won’t succeed, however, unless the private-sector virtues of competitive innovation and productivity can breathe new life into the government. To do this, Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy and Donald Trump can look to the mobilization of American industry in World War II, in which a handful of industrial executives—the so-called dollar-a-year men—built the greatest military-production machine the world had ever seen.
In 1940, faced with an America unprepared and unequipped for modern warfare, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to give American industrial leaders the lead in key decisions and strategic planning for mobilization. The man Roosevelt recruited to lead the effort, General Motors President William Knudsen, asked for 18 months and promised to mobilize enough of American industry to produce the greatest outpouring of modern weaponry the world had ever seen—from planes, tanks and machine guns to ships, submarines and aircraft carriers.
The result was that by December 1941, when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was already poised to outproduce Nazi Germany in war materiel. By 1944 American industry was producing eight aircraft carriers a month, 50 merchant ships a day, and a war plane every five minutes. Two-thirds of all the war materiel used by all the Allies in World War II came from America—as did the most powerful innovative weapon in history, the atomic bomb.
The World War II model can help revive and restore America’s ailing defense industrial base. It can also serve as a model for the Trump revolution in government as a whole, by following three rules that governed the creation of what Knudsen and Roosevelt called “the arsenal of democracy.”
First, seek out the most productive. Knudsen turned to the leading automotive, steel, chemical and electronics industries because they had the largest engineering departments—people who could figure out how to produce the decisive weapons the military needed in record numbers, from bazookas (General Electric) and torpedoes (Westinghouse) to entire B-24 bombers (Ford)—and eventually the plutonium for making the atomic bomb (DuPont).
Today we have the Magnificent Seven companies and many other successful tech firms that can be turned loose to design and create the next generation of defense and restore our manufacturing economy, as well as build and sustain a new more efficient model for American governance.
Second, focus on results, not process. While entrepreneurs are dedicated to making sure things happen, bureaucrats are good at making sure they don’t happen. Sometimes that’s necessary to prevent serious risks to health or public safety. Increasingly, however, overregulation has made bold public initiatives impossible—or produced boondoggles such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
By contrast, the most successful and productive companies understand how to balance risk with efficiency. Government can learn the same lessons, by re-evaluating how to measure costs through methods such as dynamic scoring—and how to measure the cost of big opportunities that get lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth.
Third, establish incentives for innovation. America wouldn’t have won World War II without applying new technologies. Yet how many government agencies systematically reward those who find ways to work faster, quicker and cheaper? A large part of the bureaucracy is dedicated to insulating vested interests from disruptive changes. Until government views key innovations such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing as private companies do—as opportunities rather than threats—a lasting revolution in government won’t be possible.
Leadership begins at the top. Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy could be our generation’s dollar-a-year men. The same is true of Mr. Trump. Together they can transform how government operates for the next century.
Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.”
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