DOGE isn’t meeting its goals — you can thank the political establishment
Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox News’s Martha McCallum recently that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “not going away” and that “this incredible initiative is moving forward.”
Hopefully that is true, despite DOGE chief Elon Musk heading out the doorto save Tesla, now under attack by left-wing loons. On X Wednesday, DOGE claimed, “Current year non-defense federal obligations are down 20.5% as compared to 2024. Cash outlays will follow as obligations come due. Persistent government wide contract reviews … are bearing fruit.” An indicated $16 billion saving is encouraging.
But Republicans have published their version of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and there’s no evidence of the spending cuts that the DOGE team promised. Instead, GOP legislators in the House are relying on controversial Medicaid reforms to make their tax cuts possible. What went wrong?
The truth is that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who volunteered to head the DOGE effort, undoubtedly overpromised. But he was also undermined by the political establishment.
At one point Musk projected his team could cut spending by up to $2 trillion. With a federal budget of $7.3 trillion, that was clearly a reach. He slimmed down his projections several times, announcing a new goal of $150 billion at an April Cabinet meeting. Musk is doubtless disappointed, as should be anyone who cares about our country’s fiscal prospects.
The DOGE chief has been thwarted at every turn by judges, claiming he was violating peoples’ privacy as his team sought to review data on Social Security, the Department of Education, the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management. The White House’s attempts to fire federal employees were also blocked recently in court.
Perhaps legal constraints should have been expected, but the wholesale repudiation of DOGE’s program is infuriating. Musk, who campaigned with a chainsaw to symbolize his ambitions, discovered that the federal bureaucracy is much more immune to reform than any corporation, and that the establishment’s appetite for progress is next to zero. The reform effort met resistance from all sides, with even Republicans voicing concernsabout aggressive cuts to federal agencies.
It didn’t help that Democrats and their media allies undermined Musk from the start, putting heat on GOP legislators, especially when USAID and DEI programs were among DOGE’s earliest targets. The Media Research Center reports that while 92 percent of the legacy media’s reporting on Trump’s first 100 days was negative, an astonishing 96 percent of the reporting on Elon Musk was unflattering. By contrast, 59 percent of former President Biden’s early days’ coverage was positive.
The attacks on Musk and on DOGE continue, now focused on how DOGE has not met its goals. Bloomberg published a piece this month asking, “DOGE Isn’t Saving Money, So What’s it Really Doing?” and proposing six theories to explain what is happening with what the author calls Musk’s “pet project.” The condescension is despicable; Musk is not wrong when he warns the country is going broke.
Musk and Trump are not the first to be thwarted by the federal leviathan, of course. In 2009, then President Obama promised to “trim federal fat,” as the New York Times reported, by “the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective.” In 1984, Ronald Reagan spoke to the nation in a radio address “about reducing waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government — problems that for too long were permitted to grow and spread like an unchecked cancer, plundering your pocketbooks and hindering government’s ability to provide essential public services in an efficient and timely manner.”
These historical efforts came up short, and the “cancer” continued to metastasize.
But today’s technology, including AI, can help Musk’s team sort rapidly through billions of Treasury payments and Social Security numbers to find fraud, which was not possible in the past. It may turn out that DOGE’s greatest gift will be the technology upgrades it is enabling, rather than spending cuts.
As of June 2, the tech wizards report that federal employees will be able to retire quickly, with a new online portal replacing the underground mine that previously held paper employee records. Presumably they are also looking to modernize the technology at the heart of our FAA, which is mired in antique systems. Such improvements will save taxpayers money over time.
But we will still wonder why the broader effort to attack fraud, waste and abuse, which amounts to between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, according to an extensive study by the Government Accountability Office, is so impossible. That horrific total does not include “improper payments” during fiscal 2023 that the Government Accountability Office estimates at $236 billion.
Maybe it’s because not everyone is on board.
Democrats were alarmed that DOGE found tens of billions of dollars that flowed to (mostly) Democrat-aligned non-governmental organizations. Musk called these “fake” enterprises that are in effect engaged in “money laundering” of taxpayer resources. On Fox News, he called for the arrests of these organizations’ leaders, saying “These are fake charities [run by] mostly Democrats … there’s sometimes a little bit of Republican in there, because they sometimes throw the Republicans a bone to say, ‘Hey, be quiet about this.’ So that’s where you start getting the uniparty thing going on,” Musk said.
Musk also came out in late March calling for an investigation into how so many members of Congress became “strangely wealthy,” accumulating millions of dollars despite being paid about $174,000 per year. He promised an audience in Wisconsin that, “We’re going to try to figure it out and certainly stop it from happening.”
DOGE threatening to investigate insider trading or shady handouts of taxpayer money to political allies is likely a terrifying prospect to any number of legislators. You can begin to understand why DOGE has slipped off the front page and seems to be sputtering.
It is essential that the White House continue its pursuit of federal flab, to pursue a saner and more responsible federal budget. The establishment be damned.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5302937-doge-musk-spending-reforms-fail/
Published in The Hill
