DOGE is no joke — don’t underestimate Trump’s attack on government inefficiency

How entertaining it will be in coming months to watch Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy take a hatchet to our bloated, inefficient federal government. After all, their threats to do just that are already causing massive meltdowns on the left, and they haven’t fired a single person.

Entertaining, yes, but shrinking our government and cutting unnecessary regulations is also deadly serious.

Elon Musk recently posted: “The excess government spending is what causes inflation!” He is right, and it is clear from recent CPI and PPI reports that the fight against inflation has stalled. Spending must drop.

Outsized federal outlays are driving prices higher and undermining our fiscal health, while the regulatory blitz undertaken by Joe Biden’s government hampers the growth necessary to dig out from under our government debt.

The CBO reports that “in fiscal 2024, the deficit was equal to 6.4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product,” above the 50-year average of 3.8 percent. That 6.4 percent “has been exceeded only six times since 1946 (from 2009 through 2012 and in 2020 and 2021)” — that is, when we experienced a national emergency. The past two years saw deficits jump, from $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2022 to $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2024, despite there being no emergency (other than Democrats desperate to maintain power).

This is why President-elect Donald Trump is calling his newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, of course) this era’s Manhattan Project. DOGE must — and will — stop the gravy train.

Democrats hate the idea; for them, Big Government is the solution to every woe.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren went on X to mock Trump’s appointment of the two outsider billionaires charged with overseeing DOGE. She posted: “The Office of Government Efficiency is off to a great start with split leadership: two people to do the work of one person. Yeah, this seems REALLY efficient.”

Unhappily for Warren, who should know better than to match wits with Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder couldn’t resist parrying her snide post by retorting, “Unlike you, neither of us are [sic] being paid, so it is very efficient indeed. DOGE will do great things for the American people. Let history be the judge.” Touche! (Well, except maybe for the grammar.)

In the coming months, we will see a massive mobilization of citizen-investigators uncovering vast amounts of federal waste and fraud, bringing voters aboard their mission.

It has already begun. People are already posting examples of fraud on X, like the Illinois man who pleaded guilty to bilking the Department of Health and Human Services out of $14 million for COVID-19 testing that his lab never actually performed.

Other examples of squandered funds will pour in. Michael Kaplan and James Franey, writing at the New York Post, recently published a summary of “$386 billion in government waste.” Included in this horrifying rundown: $1.3 billion in checks sent out in 2023 from the IRS, Medicare and veterans’ groups to dead people in just 2023 alone; $171 million in unemployment payments or Social Security given to criminals the government thought were unemployed but who were actually in prison; and $15 million per year reportedly being spent on personal security for Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Open the Books, a watchdog organization that annually reports on stupid things financed by our tax dollars, reports, for example, that the Department of Health and Human Service is dishing out nearly $40 million per year on 294 employees tasked with overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for the Biden-Harris White House. My guess — there’s abut $40 million a year taxpayers will get back.

Some of the New York Post’s revelations are priceless. For instance, its report states that in 2021, the National Institutes of Health handed $549,000 to a Russian lab that performed surgery on cats to see if they could still walk on a treadmill after a section of brain had been removed. It also relates that $20,600 was spent by the State Department in 2022 to produce 12 drag theater performances in Ecuador.

It’s somewhat comical to read that $7 billion is spent annually on federal office space, even though some 88 percent of that space is unused, but there’s no humor in discovering that somewhere between $200 billion and half a trillion dollars of COVID relief programs was effectively stolen. Monies were dispatched quickly to keep the economy from buckling under the pandemic shutdown, but oversight was nonexistent.

This is a major reason DOGE will be so vital to our future — huge government spending encourages gigantic amounts of theft and corruption. “ALL government spending is taxation” rightly says Musk. But stolen government spending is an especially harmful tax, in that it does no good at all and robs programs meant to help people.

Ditto the regulatory burden that stems from excess government red tape spewed across businesses and individuals. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that, “Federal regulatory burdens cost the average household more than $15,000 per year — more than food, clothing, education, or any other household expense except for housing. In total, regulation imposed a $2.1 trillion total cost, rivaling the $2.3 trillion income tax cost.” DOGE will take a crack at undoing some of that damaging red tape.

Unlike past efforts to streamline government, like Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission, which resulted in a mammoth report that went unread by Congress, DOGE’s activities will be public, posting on X and inviting public comment (and scrutiny.) That will make it impossible for Congress to ignore.

Ramaswamy promises that on America’s 250th anniversary, July 4, 2026, “DOGE will deliver our nation the birthday gift of a government that’s actually accountable to its people, rather than the other way around.” What a gift that would be. And what a victory for President-elect Trump!

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