Andrew Rudalevige at Good Authority:
Probably the closest quasi-recent parallel is the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, convened by Ronald Reagan in 1982. PPSSCCFG was hardly a mellifluous acronym, so the body was usually known as the Grace Commission, after its chair, J. Peter Grace of the W.R. Grace & Co. chemical manufacturing firm. In the end, public administration professor Charles Goodsell later wrote, “some 2,000 business executives, managers, experts and special consultants were brought into the project, probably the biggest army of outside help given the government since World War II.” Goodsell concluded that some of the 2,478 proposals that resulted (after duplicates the number was closer to 2,160) were quite useful. One legacy, arguably, was the federal base closing process adopted in 1988.
But (Goodsell continued) the overall effort was of “decidedly mixed quality” and the amount saved by adopting these proposals fell far short of the $424 billion over three years that Grace himself claimed. Indeed, a joint GAO-CBO analysis put the figure at closer to $98 billion. In 1986, Reagan himself said the U.S. government had accepted 1,741 of the recommendations, but most still required congressional action – which would save just under $70 billion over five years. (At this point the federal budget was about $930 billion, so the savings would have been about 1.4% of each year’s spending.)
The Grace Commission exercise, then, had its analytic uses. But its contribution to cutting the budget deficit was greatly exaggerated. Further – as none other than John Roberts (yes, the current chief justice, then serving in the White House Counsel’s office) noted in two 1985 memos – the “Commission itself presented an unending parade of legal problems.” Indeed, “serious conflict of interest problems were presented … as corporate executives on the Commission scrutinized the internal workings of agencies charged with regulating their businesses.” (And yes, the potential Musk task force raises similar legal concerns – especially since Musk companies have $3 billion in federal contracts, according to the New York Times.)