Donald Trump begins his presidential term without having filled a vast majority of vacancies in his administration. That could be a disaster in the making -- or it could be the beginning of a new era, in which Americans find out they can do just as well without so much federal government.
My Bloomberg View colleague Jonathan Bernstein points out that Trump has only proposed candidates for 28 of 690 positions requiring Senate confirmation. A number of federal departments and agencies have only one incoming Trump appointee, and that's not always the top person, which means some will be leaderless early in the administration, when the incoming president has the chance to do the most.
This sounds scary, but only if one believes that the 1.4 million U.S. federal government employees are mostly essential to the country's well-being.
The bureaucrats are good at making that case. Rick Perry, Trump's nominee for energy secretary, once wanted to abolish the department he's been tapped to run, along with the departments of commerce and education. Now, he says he regrets it "after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy."
But perhaps Trump and his few appointees shouldn't listen to that siren song.
In 2004, ex-Soviet Georgia's legendary reformer, Kakha Bendukidze -- like Trump, a businessman who developed an interest in reshaping his native country -- started out with a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy.
A libertarian who, as an influential entrepreneur in Russia, helped push through the country's successful 13 percent flat income tax, he didn't quite understand what most of the ministries and agencies were for, so he found it easy to abolish them. Under his guidance, the government got rid of all 18 independent government agencies, merging them into ministries, and then reduced the number of ministries to 13 from 18.
In the first year of Bendukidze's reforms, 35 percent of ministerial employees were laid off -- just 40,000 people in Georgia, but the equivalent of slashing the U.S. federal bureaucracy by almost half a million people. The Bendukidze cuts were accompanied by a radical simplification of regulations and taxes. Georgia had 21 taxes when he came in. Soon only seven were left.
The country's economy responded to the changes with an almost surreal boom. The economy grew 5.9 percent in 2004, 9.6 percent in 2006 and 9.4 percent in 2006.
Georgia, of course, is a tiny country of just 4.5 million -- the size of a small U.S. state. It also never had a functioning state bureaucracy with accountable institutions. But such radical reforms as Bendukidze masterminded are not the exclusive province of small, relatively easy-to-govern states.