DOGE: Can Elon Drain the Swamp?
Was He Insane to Even Try?
Two weeks ago, on President’s Day, a friend mentioned that she was on her way to a political protest. Knowing her to be left-leaning and strongly anti-Trump, I assumed that she was attending to object to the usual leftist issues – racism, sexism, transphobia, colonialism, etc.
I was wrong. It was organized, as one of the sponsors put it, to protest “how our constitutional rights are trampled upon, how the authority of the President is being usurped by those who seek to consolidate power for personal gain.”
Expressed more directly, they were protesting Elon Musk and his leadership of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency.
But why? What’s wrong with eliminating government waste and inefficiency?
I haven’t yet figured that out. I hope it’s not Trump Derangement Syndrome – the brain disease whereby victims reflexively believe that everything Trump does is an existential threat to not just democracy, but to life as we know it.
DOGE was created by President Trump through an executive order he signed on Inauguration Day. Under the order, DOGE will be a temporary organization within the White House that will spend 18 months (until July 4, 2026), carrying out its mission.
This is not the first time in my lifetime that presidents have hired teams to eradicate government waste. Jimmy Carter did it. Bill Clinton did it. Even Barack Obama did it.
And why wouldn’t they?
Consider the size of federal spending today: The government will spend approximately $7 trillion this year, with a budget deficit of almost $2 trillion. (Spending on Social Security old-age and survivor benefits will be around $1.4 trillion, and net spending for Medicare will be close to $1 trillion.)
And now think about the way those dollars are spent. Do you know how many bills, acts, orders, and allocations comprise that spending? Thousands! And the number of individual payments? We must be talking about tens of thousands of checks issued, if not more. With a spending machine that large, how could there not be considerable inefficiency and waste?
And when you consider the fact that most of this spending gets initiated, approved, and processed through unelected government agencies that report to no one but themselves, how could there not also be enormous corruption and fraud?
Which is to say that there should always be an effort to reduce waste and fraud and government spending as a general principle.
But it should not surprise anyone that if somebody took such a mission seriously – and went about seriously eliminating waste and fraud – there would be serious if not deadly resistance to it.
Which is to say that I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that so many publications that I once thought of as conservative (and fiscally conservative, certainly) – like Forbes and the WSJ – would be aligning themselves with Democrats in questioning and even challenging much of what DOGE is trying to do.
Millions of government employees are making more than their counterparts in the private industry, with, for the most part, a lifetime employment guarantee and with, for the most part, little or nothing meaningful to do every day. Why wouldn’t they want to get rid of Musk and his damn DOGE?
On an episode of the Joe Rogan show, he said that he had discovered what “might be the biggest fraud in history.” He was talking about the Social Security Administration, and he made two assertions:
* The SSA has 394 million names registered as “eligible” for Social Security payments. Yet there are only 334 million people living in the United States.
* Of those 394 million eligible recipients, 20 million are over 100 years old, according to the SSA. Yet, according to the US Census Bureau, there are only about 101,000 Americans over 100 eligible to receive Social Security benefits.
Although spokespeople from the SSA do not dispute the numbers per se, they insist that they do not represent checks being cut. The discrepancy, they say, is due to longstanding glitches in SSA’s computing system, that, for some reason, have not be corrected.
Anyway, this is Just the Facts, so let’s look at the facts – the seemingly crazy expenditures that DOGE has been uncovering. (Caution: Remember, these are early numbers and they have not been thoroughly vetted. Some of them are almost certainly wrong. And some others may be accurate, but the conclusions we can draw from them may not be as easy as some, including me, would like to believe.)
Let’s begin with USAID, since that’s the agency that has so far attracted the most attention.
The United States Agency for International Development
USAID was created in the early 1960s, ostensibly to provide aid to impoverished peoples and distressed regions around the world, although it’s long been known to involve itself with all sorts of political and social intrigue.
The agency currently operates out of 60 nations and employs 10,000 people. Of all the questionable expenditures DOGE has taken note of, USAID has some of the most questionable.
For example:
* $10M for “Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision”
* $9.7M for UC Berkeley to develop “a cohort of Cambodian youth with enterprise driven skills”
* $2.3M for “strengthening independent voices in Cambodia”
* $32M to the Prague Civil Society Centre
* $40M for “gender equality and women empowerment hub”
* $14M for “improving public procurement” in Serbia
* $486M to the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening,” including $22M for “inclusive and participatory political process” in Moldova and $21M for voter turnout in India
* $29M to “strengthening political landscape in Bangladesh”
* $20M for “fiscal federalism” in Nepal
* $19M for “biodiversity conversation” in Nepal
* $1.5M for “voter confidence” in Liberia
* $14M for “social cohesion” in Mali
* $2.5M for “inclusive democracies in Southern Africa”
* $47M for “improving learning outcomes in Asia”
* $2M to develop “sustainable recycling models” to “increase socio-economic cohesion among marginalized communities of Kosovo Roma, Ashkali, and Egypt”
* $17M to an NGO (non-governmental agency) to produce a knockoff Muppet show in Iraq (which ended up getting 200 views per episode)
The Dept. of Education and the National Institutes of Health
Selected head-scratchers:
* $370M on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs
* A $419,470 university study to “determine if lonely rats seek cocaine more than happy rats”
* $2M in government grants handed to Cornell University to infect cats with COVID-19 (When the experiments were over, the cats were killed.)
* $288,563 in taxpayer money to create “affinity groups’’ among birdwatchers based on “who they are and how they identify’’
* And my favorite: a $10,000 grant to the National Endowment for the Arts for The Bearded Ladies Cabaret – a “queer cabaret arts organization”– to support its “climate change-themed ice-skating performances”
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The Defense Dept. and the Pentagon
The Pentagon’s $850 billion budget is in DOGE’s target range. There’s no doubt that some percentage of that is being misspent or spent unwisely. And that’s hardly news.
* The Defense Business Board found in 2015 that the Dept. of Defense could save $125 billion over five years by renegotiating service contracts and consolidating bureaucratic processes.
* A congressional inquiry in 2018 found that the Air Force was spending $1,300 for each reheatable coffee cup aboard one of its aircraft. The Air Force spent $32,000 replacing 25 cups, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
* A two-year audit by the Defense Department Inspector General last year found that Boeing overcharged the Air Force by 8,000% for soap dispensers. They overpaid by $149,072.
The Environmental Protection Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), inspired by DOGE’s crackdown on federal spending, said it had located $20 billion in tax dollars within the agency that the Biden administration reportedly “knew they were wasting.”
The EPA found that just eight agencies were controlling the distribution of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to different entities “at their discretion,” such as the Climate United Fund, which reportedly received just under $7 billion.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency
You may have heard that FEMA gave over $59 million to house illegal immigrants in luxury New York City hotels just last week. That turned out to be not entirely true, as only $19 million of it was for direct hotel costs, and none of the hotels were luxury.
So, what does it all amount to?
So far, DOGE has reported that it has uncovered nearly $1 trillion worth of inefficiency, waste, and/or fraud that occurred in Biden’s last year in office, plus $900 billion that occurred in 2021. There will be, as there has been already, some too-early assumptions about corruption, but it’s hard to argue with the gross facts: one trillion dollars and counting.
