Government efficiency is a front and center topic like never before. The Department of Government Efficiency aims to reduce $2 trillion from the federal budget. One of the best ways to reduce waste and streamline bureaucracy — two of DOGE’s stated goals — is through technology and software solutions.

In my decades-long career supporting the Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as a federal employee, contractor and now vendor, I’ve experienced firsthand what has worked — and more acutely, what does not work. I saw hardworking, smart and loyal employees who were not empowered to make major changes or try new technologies, even ones that would deliver savings and radically improve efficiency.

All too often, when employees take risks, the smallest mistakes result in new rules that snowball into massive risk aversion over time, making it difficult to make any headway or real process improvements. When you compound that with a perpetual lack of budget certainty, it’s impossible for employees and agencies to plan strategically. So the old, tedious, cumbersome ways of doing things prevail, to everyone’s dismay.

This is the fault of the system, not the individual employees, who are often just victims of the world’s most inefficient management system.

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How to (really) enable government efficiency

Technology can and must be an enabler for government efficiency. So what do we do?

Identify what’s truly broken

Peanut butter cuts (that distribute budget cuts across all programs and related contracts) and slashing jobs at federal agencies simply to reach an arbitrary budget goal are intellectually lazy and won’t get us closer to long-term government efficiency. In fact, this approach will damage high-value programs and eliminate much-needed expertise in the workforce, all without cutting deeply into the areas where wasteful spending actually exists. No private sector company would run their business this way.

Streamline procurement

Technology is mission-critical to the government, and we can’t keep suffering in an environment where it takes the government longer to decide how to buy a solution than it takes the private sector to actually build it. To change this, agencies need budget certainty and a procurement process that moves much faster.

Government deals take up to 6-10x longer to execute than the same deals in the private sector. Almost all of the technology modernization needed to support DOGE budget goals will require procurements. If those procurements take two years to complete and another 18 months to get those new purchases approved and in the budget, most of the administration’s term will be over before the first checks clear. This is insanity.

Fix incentive misalignment

Allow contractors and federal employees to get paid bonuses for cost savings, creating a culture that celebrates making daring decisions that generate returns for the American taxpayer. We’re far more likely to streamline bureaucracy and increase efficiency when everyone is appropriately aligned and incentivized. If these teams can get the job done well with less and return the money to the Treasury Department, allow them to benefit economically from downsizing the government. Instead of fighting the frozen middle core of management, thaw it by helping them get paid for making real improvements. As I was always taught, what gets measured gets managed, but what gets paid gets done.

Automate what’s left

The federal government is still practically analog, relying on manual, paper-based processes and reviews that can and should be automated so that human power can be better focused elsewhere. But remember, costs often get bloated because nobody ever challenges federal requirements. One of my favorite sayings is “automating stupid is not an accomplishment.” This isn’t a knock on federal employees; they and the contractors who work alongside them, frankly, aren’t incentivized to save time or money. They are penalized by auditors for ignoring even the most trivial requirements, rendering our government slow and inept. Watching the government try to digitally transform is the virtual equivalent of watching a snail racing contest. Intelligent automation can help bring them into the 21st century. Intelligent requirement cutting is what will truly bring costs down.

Compliance management drains resources

One of the most time and resource-draining challenges in government is compliance management, and more specifically, authority to operate (ATO). As I have experienced myself, obtaining a government ATO for new technology is one of the most boring challenges in human history. In fact, if you were to take a few working groups and challenge them to design the most inefficient cybersecurity system possible, I highly doubt any of them could construct anything as manual and burdensome as the current system used by the federal government. In fact, if you bought everyone in that same working group a Bentley for their efforts, it would still be cheaper than trying to get an ATO in the Defense Department.

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Automating the way to government efficiency

Legacy GRC tools and systems grind progress to a halt, especially as the world has embraced the cloud, open source and digital transformation. The federal government must transition to automated, cloud-based compliance platforms to allow federal employees and contractors to improve the speed and cost-effectiveness of how they operate. By bridging security, risk, and compliance through a set of common controls, it’s possible to lower program costs by automating evidence collection, integrating compliance into DevSecOps processes, and mapping controls across frameworks faster. Organizations using these tools report a 90% faster path to certifications and a 60% reduction in audit preparation efforts.

The truth is that the federal government is not currently designed to be efficient, and sweeping staffing and budget cuts aren’t the solution. We can fix it by finding and keeping what’s truly valuable, cutting useless requirements, streamlining procurement, realigning the federal culture and incentives, and automating wherever we can. Let’s take advantage of this opportunity to incentivize much needed change, fix a broken system, and enable a government that can operate effectively within a balanced budget. This should be something all American taxpayers can agree upon.

Travis Howerton is co-founder and CEO of RegScale.

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