The numbers come first. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury is now paying $3 billion a day in interest on the national debt. Against that backdrop, Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at The Johns Hopkins University, and David M. Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States, published a joint commentary in Fortune on August 11, 2026, arguing that the federal government requires nothing less than 'radical reconstructive surgery.'
A Constitution Reduced to a 'Parchment Barrier'
Hanke and Walker trace the problem to a structural collapse of fiscal discipline. For the first 140 years of U.S. history, they write, two rules kept federal spending in check: the Constitution's eighteen narrowly defined powers granted to Congress, and an informal norm that borrowing was reserved for recessions and wars. Both guardrails, they argue, have since become 'little more than a parchment barrier.'
The result: a federal government that has 'grown too big, promised too much, lost control of the budget, undercut states' rights, and has no strategic plan with outcome-based performance indicators.' In their words, it is 'flying blind, without an instrument panel, in mountains of debt.'
DOGE Fell Short. So Will the Vance Task Force.
The authors are direct about recent reform efforts. DOGE, they write, 'fell way short of achieving its much advertised savings goal and has subsequently largely disappeared from the news flow.' The current follow-up — the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, headed by Vice President Vance — is, according to Hanke and Walker, 'making the same mistake that DOGE did by grossly overestimating its actual savings,' even as it aggressively pursues fraud identified in programs in Minnesota and California.
The Proposal: A Government Transformation Task Force
To break the cycle, Hanke and Walker call on the President to create a Government Transformation Task Force by Executive Order. They describe it as more strategic than President Reagan's Grace Commission (1982–1984) or President Clinton's Reinventing Government initiative (1993–2001). The Task Force would draw on public and private sector experts with direct transformation experience and would:
- Measure what federal departments and agencies actually do against their constitutional and statutory mandates. - Develop outcome-based national performance indicators spanning economic, diplomatic, national security, and domestic metrics. - Make recommendations on consolidation, termination, devolution, privatization, partnership, and expansion. - Establish a new fiscal constitution to replace the informal rules that have eroded over 140 years.
The authors note that some state and local governments already use outcome-based metrics for budgeting — a model they believe can scale nationally.
CEO Times Editorial View
At $3 billion in daily interest payments, the federal government is no longer a policy debate — it is a compounding liability on every American taxpayer. Hanke and Walker are right that DOGE was a headline, not a transformation, and that the Vance task force risks repeating the same overreach in its savings projections.
The case for a fiscal constitution is fundamentally a case for the rule of law over the rule of appropriators. Capital rewards clear rules. When Washington operates without an instrument panel — no binding spending limits, no outcome metrics, no constitutional anchor — the cost falls on private enterprise, on savers, and on the next generation of workers who will inherit the bill. A Government Transformation Task Force built around measurable results and constitutional fidelity is not a radical idea. It is the original American idea, long overdue for revival.
