President Donald Trump and EV mogul Elon Musk's new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has opened up a line of communication for Americans to inform the top levels of the executive branch on waste, fraud and abuse at federal agencies.
Owner-operators, can you think of anything like that? On Sunday DOGE solicited direct messages via Musk's social media website X, formerly Twitter.
"DOGE is looking for help from the general public!" read a post from the central DOGE account. "Please DM insight for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or awesome ideas, to the relevant DOGE affiliates."
Among those "affiliates," of interest to trucking might be the DOGE X accounts for the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, the Small Business Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.
Obviously missing from that list is a direct line to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, trucking's chief regulator. They're of course housed under the DOT, though, and DOGE's post said it would add more affiliate accounts over time.
Trucking hasn't spent much time through history as anything like a top presidential priority, or even a top DOT priority, and the fact that on January 29, DOT Secretary Sean Duffy's first day in power, a helicopter and plane collided over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., likely further pushed focus towards aviation.
Now, Duffy says he plans an overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA's "unsustainable software systems that we’ve inherited are symptomatic of the endemic problems that plagued the Biden administration: a bloated bureaucracy that pushed overregulation instead of innovation, and radical DEI instead of merit," Duffy wrote in an op-ed on Fox News.
New administrations typically enjoy a "blame the predecessor" period, but Duffy's assertion about DEI -- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or an organizational framework that seeks to correct perceived historical imbalances among certain populations, like minorities or women, for example -- has some merit.
In 2013, under then-President Barack Obama, the FAA changed its hiring practices from having a skills-based test generate a qualified pool of applicants to requiring applicants to complete a pass or fail and additional biographical questionnaire with some frankly bizarre questions. For example, an applicant to work as an air traffic controller would be asked what their lowest graded subject was in high school. The only "correct" answer? Science.
When one applicant got a perfect score on the skills-based test but failed the biographical questionnaire, he sued. The case, Brigida v. U.S. Department of Transportation has been partly settled with the dismissal of some claims, but Trump has pointed to it as a failure of Obama-era policy, though the testing policy continued through part of his first term.
Drivers, given the Trump administration's efforts to reorient federal agencies and get the best workers supervising our transportation systems, what ideas would you submit to DOGE's DOT account or any other agency?
Do you have insights into unsafe, abusive, fraudulent or wasteful practices within the government or industry?
We'd love to hear from you on that front on that front, too. Email me at [email protected] with insights, ideas or information.
