DOGE Prequel: Silent Cal Speaks

Attn Elon & Vivek

Calvin Coolidge is making a comeback, 95 years after he left the White House.

POTUS 30 was a vice president who assumed office in 1923 on the sudden death of his predecessor, Warren G. Harding, the one who called for a return to normalcy.

Before this recent bump in his popularity, I knew only two things about Coolidge.

One is that wife Grace Coolidge was elegant and gifted and interested in preserving parks and other of nature’s wonders. Also that — as his presidency sped into the Roaring 20s — she was seen, scandalously, wearing a flapper dress.

The other is that Coolidge, from a family of frugal Vermonters, Republican governor of Massachusetts, was so quiet the press called him ‘Silent Cal.’ Aware of his taciturn reputation, one woman seated next to him at a White House dinner told him she had a wager she could get him to say three words. To which Calvin replied, “You lose.”

Now, Coolidge is being praised by Glenn Beck, Ron Desantis and others as a slasher of government excesses. During his six years in office, he reduced the marginal income tax rate to 25% and cut the national debt by a third, from $22.3 billion to $16.9 billion. Every year he was president, he balanced the budget. In fact, Coolidge slashed so much that when he left the White House in 1929, the federal budget was actually lower than when he arrived at the White House 67 months before.

“I am for economy, and after that I am for more economy,” he once remarked.

If you read his autobiography, you will understand that Coolidge believed in economy because his father John practiced it on the family farm in Plymouth Notch, Vt. The farm cost $40 a year to rent, $100,000 a year to run, and made $1,200 a year in profit.

For months after the end of WW1, he observes, there was “much extravagance and reckless buying. Wages had been paid that were not earned. The whole country, from the national government down, had been living on borrowed money.” As the GOP vice presidential candidate in 1920, he gave a speech in Philadelphia in which he argued that “the only sure method of relieving this distress was for the country to follow the advice of Benjamin Franklin and begin to work and save.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, who with Elon Musk is co-chairing Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, talks often about the history of our bloated federal footprint. He calls Woodrow Wilson, who served just before Harding-Coolidge, “the godfather of the modern administrative state,” enacting progressive reforms that created a nanny state, training Americans to rely on government handouts rather than their own initiative. Amid the Depression, this excess government spending exploded under FDR’s New Deal programs. “Just about all presidents since then expanded the alphabet agencies,” Ramaswamy says. “This led inevitably to the waterfall of (constitutional) responsibility from the president and Congress — to bureaucrats.”

With a mission from Trump to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget, there is much low hanging fruit that DOGE can pluck, starting with the Pentagon, which just failed its financial audit for the seventh year in a row, unable to account for $850 billion, while some veterans are subsisting on foodstamps. As my friend and tax strategist Julio Gonzales wrote on The Hill today, just cutting unused office space, redundancy of government functions and studies on animal behavior would be a good beginning.

But the bigger nut, the one Vivek anticipates, is the nanny state — handouts supported by liberals, and those embraced by conservatives. “We don’t want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state,” Ramaswamy said. “We want to dismantle that nanny state altogether.” The result: “a modern revival of 1776.”

He calls his view national libertarianism. As he explains:

“Do we as national conservatives really want to be handing woke government agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau more power? The national libertarian answer to that question is simple: Hell no! I don't care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. I think that's a mistake the Left has long made, using the administrative state as a way to coddle certain groups of Americans. And I don't think we're going to beat the Left by becoming the Left.”

Cutting government programs may prove more difficult in practice than in theory.

Coolidge was not immune from sympathy for the disenfranchises. Early in his presidency, he signed the Indian Citizens’ Act, declaring that all Native Indians were henceforth citizens of the United States. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage — no matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.”

But in 1924 Coolidge vetoed a bill to give bonuses to vets of World War I, which had ended five years earlier. Coolidge worried the bonuses would “overstretch the budget.” In his veto message, he wrote, “The gratitude of the nation to these veterans cannot be expressed in dollars and centers. Patriotism can neither be bought nor sold. It is not hire and salary. It is not material, but spiritual.”

In the end, Congress overrode his veto, and that could happen again with DOGE, when individual congressmen and senators step in to save their favorite programs.

In 1928, Coolidge announced he was not going to run for re-election. He had served nearly two years of Harding’s term and four years of his own. “A president should not only NOT be selfish,” he wrote, “but he ought to avoid the appearance of selfishness. The people would not have confidence in a man that appeared to be grasping for office.” He wanted to exit the “artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation” that visits presidents in Washington D.C, “which sooner or later impairs their judgment.”

And so he left, quietly.

In 1981, 52 years after Calvin Coolidge left office, a new president, Ronald Reagan, put a photo of Coolidge in the White House Cabinet Room.

Maybe Trump will return it to its place of honor.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. And there is so much to celebrate.