Democrats rage against DOGE — but shouldn’t everyone be against waste?

Democrats cannot have it both ways. They are either against waste and fraud sucking up taxpayer dollars, or they are for it.

And their relentless attacks on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency make it clear which side they’re on. Spoiler alert: It’s not the side of the taxpayer.

Resistance to DOGE is coming from many quarters. Loopy Democrats like Maxine Waters, who is vowing to “fight!” (what exactly?); ambitious radicals like Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is irate that her pet project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, may be gutted. It is ironic that Warren is howling about Musk being “unaccountable” when her main achievement in the Senate was the creation of a bureau that answers to no one.

The ever-helpful leftist media also opposes Musk’s investigations, of course. The New York Times reported on a recent Oval Office event with President Trump and the multibillionaire, deploying this hilarious propaganda headline: “Appearing with Trump, Musk makes broad Claims of Federal Fraud Without Proof.” To be clear, an abundance of proof exists, even if Musk did not haul out spreadsheets chronicling all the monies purloined from the federal government. Democrats and their media allies just don’t want to look for all the fraud and waste — and they certainly don’t want you to see it.

After all, it was the non-partisan Government Accountability Office that reviewed several years’ data and estimated last April, while Joe Biden was still both the president and a candidate for president, that “the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.”

You might think that after receiving such a drastic report, suggesting that up to half a trillion of taxpayer money was being stolen every year by fraudsters, the government would have issued an all-hands-on-deck to track down the losses. The GAO at least tried, writing, “Given the scope of this problem, a government-wide approach is required to address it.” GAO laid out various recommendations, including that “Treasury should identify methods to expand government-wide estimates of fraud — prioritizing higher-risk program areas.”

What did the Biden White House — and, specifically, his Treasury Department — do? Nothing. So forgive us if we contempt for the opinions of Janet Yellen, Biden’s Treasury secretary. She never once raised her voice Biden's out-of-control, reckless spending, even as our national debt topped $36 trillion and inflation jumped to decades-high levels. And now, along with four other former Democrat-appointed Treasury secretaries, she has dared to publish a piece recently claiming that Musk was threatening our democracy by giving his DOGE allies access to the Treasury payments system is an outrage.

If anything threatens our democracy, it is an unaccountable bureaucracy and a federal budget that grows without check and with very little oversight. My question to those preening critics: Why didn’t these former Treasury secretaries use the payments system to track down fraud and waste? Where were they during their terms in office?

After his meeting with Musk, Trump signed an executive order titled: “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” The order is meant to “restore accountability to the American public,” something most Americans cheer. The president directs DOGE to “reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.” It especially targets “All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law.”

In other words, if Congress did not pass a law setting up an agency, it is on the chopping block.

It may well turn out that the inertia and dysfunction of the federal government will be enormously useful to Trump and Musk. Last year, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported that “$516 billion in appropriations for 2024 was associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations.” In addition, CBO wrote, “Nearly two-thirds ($320 billion) of that $516 billion was provided for activities whose authorizations expired more than a decade ago.”

That a great deal of money went to activities not currently authorized by Congress does not mean that legislators did not intend the funds to be spent. Rather, they were simply too careless to re-up the laws that authorized the spending. In some cases, the programs intended for funding had expired. For DOGE, those monies are now presumably fair game.

Trump’s order charges Musk’s team with reviewing federal agencies; it will take a while. According to the Federal Register, there are 441 agencies, many of which most people have never heard of. What, for example, does the Administrative Conference of the United States do?

When did the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board last meet, or the Emergency Steel Guaranty Loan Board? Do we really need The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, whose board evidently last met in 2008? Or how about the Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries, established in 1974, which last published a report in 2011?

You get the point. The federal bureaucracy begs for scrutiny, but the left is up in arms. The Times piece mentioned above claims that “Musk’s team is operating in deep secrecy, surprising federal employees by descending upon agencies and gaining access to sensitive data systems.” Musk disagrees, saying, “I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”

Maybe the Times reporters should take a break from their hard-hitting anti-Trump agenda, pay a visit to X and check out the @DOGE account there, which has 3.9 million followers. Almost every day, the group reports on findings that validate its existence.

A recent post: “Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.”

This is the kind of inefficiency and waste Democrats want to protect. Talk about political suicide.

Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.

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