Can DOGE Dodge the Hillarycare Hurdles?

Will President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency meet the same fate as Hillarycare? That’s the question amid a slew of lawsuits filed against the president’s fledgling cost-cutting initiative. The suits echo the legal salvoes against President Clinton’s health care task force, led by his wife Hillary Clinton, over her panel’s lack of legally-required transparency. Mr. Trump, though, seems to have learned from Mrs. Clinton’s debacle.Mr. Clinton, after all, hamstrung his own signature policy project by placing the First Lady in charge of it. Within days of taking office, he announced the creation of a Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Who better to lead it, he reckoned, than America’s “First Lady of many talents”? He averred that she would “bring people together around complex and difficult issues to hammer out consensus and get things done.” Well, not quite.Yes, Mrs. Clinton’s task force was depicted by the liberal press as a triumph in the making and even a vindication of her decision to marry her fortunes to Mr. Clinton. The Times reported that the job reflected “the image she wants,” as “an independent person who symbolically resumed the use of her unmarried name, Rodham, and who is unapologetically involved in serious policy issues like overhauling the health-care system.”It was “the moment for which she had waited her entire life,” is how the National Legal and Policy Center, which would emerge as a bête noire of the Clintons, put it. The NLPC called her leadership role in health care “not only revenge over her husband and every critic of the last two years, but also over every detractor and rival in her life.” Yet in a characteristically Clintonesque way, the First Lady, in her zeal to socialize health care, ran afoul of certain legal niceties.The warnings emerged within a few weeks in a Washington Times story that was ignored amid the liberal press’s adulatory coverage of the Clintons. “First lady’s task force broke law on secrecy,” the headline cautioned. The panel, it turned out, was ignoring the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972. That law applies, the NLPC explained, “when a President convenes a group of people which includes private citizens to advise him on a particular issue.” The law required, say, notice for meetings, and opening them to the press and public. Watchdog groups pounced on the panel, only to be stonewalled by the Clintons. Yet even the Times called the first lady’s penchant for secrecy “unseemly, possibly illegal and wrong.” Legal scrutiny on the panel exposed special-interest influence on the task force’s deliberations and raised voter suspicions. It was partly why Hillarycare failed and, in 1994, the Democrats lost Congress.Have Mr. Trump and his advisers learned a lesson from the Clintons’ task-force disaster? Monday’s executive order suggests the possibility that they have. Like health care reform for Mr. Clinton, cutting government spending and regulation is emerging as a hallmark of Mr. Trump’s new term. He initially pitched DOGE as an effort to “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government.” Yet he ended up making DOGE an executive agency. Indeed, instead of inventing DOGE from scratch, Mr. Trump’s order renamed an existing body, the United States Digital Service, as the “United States DOGE Service.” The agency is in the Executive Office of the President and will report to Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. That, it seems, could go a ways toward blunting the impact of yesterday’s lawsuits, which, like the scrutiny on Mrs. Clinton’s task force, touch on whether DOGE is a federal advisory committee.Will Mr. Trump’s parry prove effective against the legal onslaught? One of the groups that filed suit to stop DOGE in its tracks, Public Citizen, tells the Sun that the agency still looks like a task force for the purposes of the law. It’s shaping up as a question for the courts. Yet the speed with which the anti-DOGE suits were filed shows how the idea of spending cuts has unnerved D.C., and underscores the need for Mr. Trump to move ahead with all deliberate speed.

Can DOGE Dodge the Hillarycare Hurdles?

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