We’ve needed DOGE for a long time. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt ballooned the size of the federal government back in the 1930’s and 1940’s, we have had the proverbial problem of the inmates running the asylum.
To be fair, President Roosevelt had to deal with the aftereffects of the Great Depression. His solution was a huge expansion of the federal government in size and scope over his thirteen-year reign. The “New Deal”, as it was called, created numerous social assistance programs (including Social Security), ostensibly to help people hit hard by the Depression. When the effects of the Depression finally passed, these stopgap social services remained in place. FDR doubled the size of the federal workforce to manage their operations.
Ultimately, these programs and their progeny grew to create a fiscally calamitous public dependency on “entitlements” that now consume 75% of the federal budget. Equally as bad was the Pandora’s box that resulted from having to manage and maintain a government workforce of what is now 3 million people. With a worker population this large, it is impossible to know if every single employee is consistently carrying out their duties in accordance with the policies of whoever occupies the oval office.
Most of these government employees have careers spanning multiple presidential administrations. Thus, there will always be cases of ideological conflict for some employees who were hired under the administration of one party, and then sometime later must work to beneficially support the policies of the other party.
Many employees cannot make this transition. They are instead motivated to undermine rather than advance the policies of a President with whom they do not ideologically agree. Because the workforce is so large, these efforts at subversion are easily hidden under many layers of bureaucracy. While this happens to some degree with every administration, it took a much more severe turn during President Trump’s first term.
From 2008 to 2016, President Obama thoroughly seeded the federal workforce with activist ideologues. His Administration convinced most of them that racism and social injustice were inherent in our society and that white conservatives were to blame. Once Trump (a white conservative) was elected in 2016, these pre-programmed Obama era “foot soldiers” now believed that any subversive actions they might take against Trump would be acts of heroism and patriotism serving to save democracy.
This led to absurd statements and actions from prior administration holdovers like James Comey, Alexander Vindman, and Fiona Hill. In then-FBI Director James Comey’s case, he famously proclaimed he had a “higher loyalty”1 governing his actions than his sworn duty to the President. With others parroting this same kind of seditious rhetoric, it became painfully obvious that Trump’s administration was being hamstrung from within by the numerous arsonists of conservative policy Barak Obama had embedded in the federal workforce.
Fast forward to today and Trump’s (delayed) 2nd term. Not only is much of the original Obama cancer still present in the 3 million strong federal workforce, but during the intervening Biden administration it metastasized into previously “clear” areas like the military. As with a cancer in the medical context, it must be eliminated, and quickly, to save the patient. This is exactly what DOGE is starting to do right now.
Think of DOGE as chemotherapy. While the goal is to be as targeted as possible and eliminate only the cancer cells, there will invariably be some amount of surrounding healthy cells wiped out at the same time. That “collateral” damage will be the worst in departments where the cancer has spread the most. Some departments are so far gone, they will need to be excised entirely.
For years, the Obama/Biden operatives in the workforce have been openly acting as if they were never going to be discovered or interfered with. While the White House provided top cover for them, they took ever greater risks. Taxpayer money was overtly funneled to far-left liberal causes with abandon – USAID is just the first glaring example. They cared not about any waste, fraud, or inefficiencies that lay in the path of that money to its final destination. By simply following the money trail, DOGE is not only exposing all that waste, it is being led directly to the guilty saboteurs.
Predictably, DOGE is provoking consternation and hysteria in all the expected places. Dem politicians are angrily bloviating, their lap dog press is barking shrilly, lawsuits are flying in every direction, and activist judges are pounding their gavels.
However, there is a bigger problem. The wasted money DOGE is uncovering and the numbers of federal employees Trump is dismissing (firing, buyouts, resignations) are not anywhere near the scale they need to be to effect the change that is necessary.
As far as the budget is concerned, finding and cutting billions of dollars in government spending due to inefficiency is always good. But our current fiscal deficit is measured in trillions, which is a figure between 100 and 1,000 times larger than what DOGE is presently uncovering. Also, all the efforts so far to shrink the federal workforce is only amounting to tens of thousands of people at best (assuming Trump wins the court battle to allow buyouts). However, the federal workforce is so bloated, it needs to be reduced by at least half. That means getting rid of well over a million people.
President Trump and the DOGE team are smart enough to know this. We anticipate a plan to be unveiled in the near future that outlines a way to dramatically “scale up” both fiscal and personnel reductions. Musk and Trump play to win for real. Neither of them will be satisfied with the small potato reductions their current efforts are producing, despite all the positive inroads those efforts are creating.
For DOGE to truly eradicate the galactic-sized fraud, waste and subversion within our over-sized federal government, Trump and Musk must unleash an attack plan of Death Star-like proportions. We look forward to the onslaught.
1 Comey later cashed in on a book carrying the “Higher Loyalty” title.