For people who value social skills and refinement, America’s newly re-elected President Donald J. Trump is a difficult man to like. He comes across as a swaggering bully intent on instilling fear into government employees and heads of state abroad.

America’s 46th president is only too aware that the United States is the world’s wealthiest, economically and militarily most powerful nation, and he wants every other country worldwide to acknowledge it. Sometimes one wonders whether he is aware that he occupies the world’s most powerful political office, and isn’t play acting in The Apprentice, a television reality show that brought Trump, a flashy former real estate developer, into America’s national limelight.

However, there are some good qualities in every individual. Trump is a straight-talking businessman with healthy contempt for sly career politicians given to wasting taxpayers dollars on self-aggrandising schemes and causes.

Therefore, immediately after his election, he established a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chaired by billionaire businessman Elon Musk, with the brief to cut the Federal government’s establishment expenditure by a massive $2 trillion, a sum equivalent to 50 percent of India’s GDP. Although America is a free enterprise economy with very few public sector enterprises, the Federal government has 3 million well-remunerated employees on its payroll and its annual government expenditure aggregates an estimated $6.8 trillion. Therefore cutting government flab and expenditure to release dollars to upgrade America’s very deficient (by developed OECD and European standards) public health, housing and education systems was long overdue. According to official government data there are almost 1 million (771,480) homeless people in the US and 26 million without health insurance cover in the world’s richest and militarily most powerful nation.

This is right time for the BJP/NDA government at the Centre to take a leaf out of the Trump government’s playbook. According to Prabhu Chawla writing in the New Sunday Express (February 16), while the Trump administration comprises 15 ministries and the UK 20, the Government of India is run by 55 ministries with over 100 departments. Entitled to dozens of servitors, motor cars, unlimited domestic and foreign travel, every minister including a plethora of junior ministers of state, costs the public exchequer Rs.3-4 crore annually, writes Chawla.

Maximum governance at minimum cost was a major poll promise of Prime Minister Modi when he swept General Election 2014 and again five years later. However government and the bureaucracy — a major stumbling block to industrial growth, especially to labour intensive MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) — is more bloated and ubiquitous than ever.

Time to establish our own DOGE, PM.

Also read: United States: Imminent Trump clampdown