A screeching effort has failed to stop Trump White House advisor Elon Musk from seeing the government’s books and flagging waste, fraud and abuse in the Executive Branch’s 16,436 subordinate offices. Democrats are calling it a constitutional crisis.
It’s more like the overthrow of a constitutional crisis.
Remember that time the government locked the entire American population in their homes for an extended period, forced the cancellation of everything from graduations to funerals, mandated a series of injections as a condition of employment, manipulated the press and social media to suppress dissent, ran up trillions of dollars in debt that caused ruinous inflation and attempted to imprison a presidential candidate supported by more than 70 million Americans?
It turns out that this treatment has some side effects. It can cause an extremely sharp decline of public trust in the nation’s institutions, followed by an overthrow.
That’s what we’ve got. President Donald Trump was re-elected with a mandate despite the hysterical efforts of rival politicians, professional experts and stuffed-shirt institutions to call him a racist, rapist, criminal, traitor and, when none of that worked, Hitler.
Although some people believed it and believe it still, the number of people who once believed it and now can’t believe they believed it is growing.
It appears from Trump’s rising popularity that Americans are just fine with mass resignations of government bureaucrats and with the shutdown of government agencies that burn through taxpayer dollars while everything gets worse. They don’t mind the DOGE team sleeping in the office to spend more time exposing outrageous contracts and wasteful spending.
You can follow their work on DOGE.gov or X.com/DOGE and watch as the contracts are exposed and then canceled. Here’s my personal favorite so far, from the Department of Education: A “$3 million contract to write a report that showed that prior reports were not utilized by schools.”
The same department spent $33 million on “professional learning” in such topics as “Identifying and Disrupting Your Whiteness.” DOGE posted a video clip from one of these sessions in which a woman states that whiteness is “a way of seeing the world and a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” and “often unrecognized.”
It’s amazing how many things are invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen with a government contract.
Cutting waste and fraud is a perennial campaign promise. After the election, it’s typically stopped by a chorus of people (paid by your tax dollars) who jump up and yell that government provides public safety and national defense, therefore cuts to government spending will kill us all.
That always worked before, but it has stopped working. Maybe that’s because somewhere along the line, public safety was swapped out for advice not to wear jewelry in public, and national defense was redefined as military aid for other countries, an open border, frisking and facial scans for U.S. airline passengers and mass collection of everybody’s phone and internet data.
Add COVID, and everything that followed.
The people in the jump-up-and-yell business lost public trust. Americans seem to have stopped caring what they think or say.
This is the fertile soil from which emerged the idea for a Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. The name is a humorous reference to an internet meme. The department is no joke.
The Trump team had already worked for years to vet and select potential appointees for every government department. After the inauguration, they instantly filled the jobs that did not require Senate confirmation, jobs that were high up but below the level of Cabinet secretary. Musk brought in teams of tech wizards and together with the Trump appointees obtained read-only access to the government’s IT systems. They created algorithms to crawl through the contract and payment data and report back.
And did they ever.
While DOGE has made splashy headlines with its exposure of government spending that ranges from the absurd to the bat-guano crazy (we paid $32,000 to create a transgender comic book in Peru and $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland), DOGE has also thrown a spotlight on some big-ticket waste.
For example, every year the government pays out tens of billions of dollars or more to obvious fraudsters all over the world because it doesn’t verify the identity of the people who receive money from entitlement programs. This is also how California lost tens of billions to unemployment benefits fraud during COVID.
Testifying in front of the DOGE Subcommittee in the House of Representatives this week, Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Special Services, told lawmakers that if government used the same security processes that businesses use, it would stop $1 trillion of fraud annually. “Between federal, state, and local government,” Talcove said, “you can save $1 trillion a year by simply putting in front-end identity verification, eliminating self-certification, and monitoring the back-end of the programs that are providing the benefits.”
Yes, every year, American taxpayers have been handing out $1 trillion to criminals through unverified federal, state and local applications for benefits. That’s some honor system.
A lot of people have been lying to us, especially the ones who insisted the only way to balance the budget is to reduce Social Security benefits, limit Medicare and raise taxes.
In the coming months, we’ll probably learn a lot more about how so many people in government jobs were able to buy so many mansions.
Their overthrow could be the least of their problems.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley
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