For DOGE To Successfully Cut Waste, There Can Be No ‘But’ About It

As Democrats and the media continue to grip their groins in agony over Elon Musk and his DOGE team’s audit of the federal government, it’s fun to hear them all periodically pause to offer some variation of, “Everyone wants to end wasteful spending, but…”

That’s the surest indicator that a person has absolutely no interest in cutting a single dollar from our nearly $7 trillion budget.

There are of course places we can trim, but…

There are ways to increase efficiency, but…

Nobody likes seeing fraud and waste, but…

What follows the “but” is invariably some excuse for why a proposed cut isn’t practical; a claim that the cut will result in “literally millions of deaths;” or, my personal favorite, an assertion that the target of the cut is “only” some infinitesimally small fraction of the budget (in which case I say it should automatically get cut).

CNN’s Dana Bash did one of these on Friday regarding Musk’s recent aims to dramatically slash the Democrats’ favorite slush fund widely known as “USAID.”

“I don’t think even the biggest supporters of USAID would argue that it’s not worth looking into,” she said, “and making sure that if there is money that is being misspent or on fraudulent programs, that is worth looking into and doing away with, but…”

The Washington Post had a particularly humorous version of this pattern on Thursday with its editorial board declaring, “Of course, a compelling case can be made for significant changes to the federal government.” The paper did not specify any cuts in federal spending but did essentially recommend accelerating the hiring process for yet more government workers.

I’m not joking. A major problem right now with government efficiency, according to the Post, is that “the hiring process is arcane and inefficient.” I get the impression that maybe the editors aren’t entirely sure what the purpose of DOGE is.

All of this is to say, I don’t know to what extent Musk and DOGE will be successful in reducing even just one penny from the federal budget, but their approach so far — auditing the Treasury payment systems and aggressively pushing to eliminate mass numbers of government workers — is the only serious way to try.

Democrats and their media friends are pretending the process has been in breach of various laws and violated privacy rights and a court has intervened, supposedly to determine whether all of this is proper. (Why wouldn’t the president of the United States be allowed to deputize anyone he wants to have full access to agencies that fall under the executive branch?) But whatever the case, when this all shakes out, cutting the hundreds and billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal budget is only possible by doing exactly what Musk is doing.

Everyone in Washington, even Republicans, says they’re dead-set on reducing the bloat. Then, perhaps after a performative government “shutdown,” during which government workers get a paid vacation, a budget is passed that either sustains or, more likely, increases the previous one. This week, though, the public is getting a fresh, in-depth look at the obscene and despicable expenditures our elected leaders are allowing — billions of dollars toward DEI initiatives abroad and funding useless projects here.

Democrats and the media naturally reacted with a mix of horror at being exposed and insistence that eliminating even the entirety of it would have a negligible effect on the budget, so DOGE should just look elsewhere.

Nah, we’ve gotta start somewhere, and there’s no better place.