The Lawless Judges Stopping DOGE Are Keeping Inflation High

More than a dozen judges in the last month have issued near-immediate restraining orders banning President Trump from acting as the nation’s chief executive. A large number of these judicial orders strike actions from Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a cost-cutting initiative led by fellow tycoon Elon Musk.

The administration may not temporarily freeze discretionary U.S. taxpayer funds to ensure all payments comply with the policies that Americans elected Trump to enact, judges have ruled. It may not put federal employees on leave for insubordination or buy out their contracts to save Americans money, other judges ruled.

Fourteen Democrat state attorneys general sued Trump, Musk, and DOGE on Feb. 13, alleging that the president choosing his own subordinates and aides is unconstitutional. Their hilariously overwrought language shows Musk and Trump are joyously bouncing around inside Democrats’ mental OODA loops:

In recent weeks, Defendant Elon Musk, with President Donald J. Trump’s approval, has roamed through the federal government unraveling agencies, accessing sensitive data, and causing mass chaos and confusion for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people.

I am one of the American people, and I live out in the hinterlands known as the Midwest. I can assure you that “the American people” are not in “mass chaos and confusion.” Neither are our state and local governments. The mail is coming on time. The road crews are keeping that winter sleet driveable so we can attend work and school. The grocery stores are stocked. I walk my neighborhood every day, and there’s no “chaos” except the unhealthy and nauseating smell of secondhand illegal weed.

I’m in the majority, too. A CBS poll taken Feb. 5-7 found one of Trump’s best approval ratings ever, at 53 percent. Seventy percent say he’s doing what he was elected to do. The only chaos is inside Democrats’ heads, because they refuse to ever accept losing an election. This time around, their chief election-denier strategy seems to be insisting Republicans must lose even when they win to unelected judges who also hate the Constitution.

Plenty of people — including me and people far better than me — have pointed out that Democrats’ demands essentially amount to overturning the Constitution’s grant of executive authority to the elected chief executive. But there are other consequences. Few have noted that stopping DOGE from auditing spending also prevents Trump from addressing another top priority of voters: reducing inflation.

Because the reality is that inflation is caused by government spending. Every economist knows it. Everyone who has ever taken an Economics 101 class knows it. It’s just a factual reality, on the level of “men can’t become women.” Inflation is caused by government spending. To stop inflation, government has to stop spending. It’s the only way.

How Government Causes Inflation

Now, everyone has not taken an Econ 101 class, largely because American schools suck. So I’ll give the quick and dirty version of how this works. The government controls how much money exists — the total sum of all U.S. dollars available to everyone in the world. When government wants to spend more money than already exists, it effectively prints more. Today this “printing” is usually done by increasing numbers on various computer spreadsheets, but it amounts to the same thing.

But government doesn’t increase the value of anything. It in fact almost always decreases the value of everything, because it takes money away from productive uses, mostly for transfer payments: providing money to people who didn’t work for it and bureaucrats whose work largely diminishes the fruits of other people’s labor.

So big government means more dollars in people’s bank accounts without a corresponding increase in value. This is inflation: people getting money they didn’t work for. This is what Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman meant when he famously explained, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon … it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

When people have more money they didn’t work for — such as the “helicopter money” we all received in “Covid stimulus” or increased welfare outlays or more people working as bureaucrats instead of providing true market value to others — you get inflation.

Everything DOGE Is Targeting Causes Inflation

In other words, essentially all of the things DOGE is trying to stop fuel inflation. DOGE is reducing inflation. So the judges (and Congress) forcing the federal government to spend money on transgender comic books in Peru and fraudulent Medicaid bills and bureaucrats who leach away American productivity are foisting inflation on Americans.

They’re piling up more things we have to pay for from which we didn’t get a corresponding value. More things we pay for that others racked up on our credit cards. Waste, fraud, and abuse are government theft from American labor. And it could be argued that the vast majority of what our governments do now is waste, fraud, and abuse, because the vast majority of government activity is untethered from constitutional functions.

The Constitution essentially tells the federal government to a) protect Americans from foreign invasion, b) conduct foreign relations in American interests, c) govern interstate and international commerce in American interests, d) control immigration, and e) provide federal courts. Most federal action now concentrates instead on transfer payments that are unconstitutional.

Even its constitutional actions are rife with waste, fraud, and abuse — how many defense contractors do you think try to economize on their spending? How many things does our military do that do not contribute to our actual national security? Quite a few. Might be most. Are our immigration laws effectively enforced and upheld?

The United States is now a welfare state with a welfare-ish military. In other words, it’s an inflation state. Our government is effectively a giant inflation machine: a giant productivity sucker, a cancer on our society. Most of what it does damages its host.

Because that’s the case, everything DOGE does to cut spending also helps cut inflation. And all the judges, attorneys general, and members of Congress who stand in its way are inflation’s advocates, activists, friends, and beneficiaries.

Inflation Can End Empires

The annual inflation rate that just came out for January was 3 percent. Since 2020, inflation has increased 22 percent. Many items have gone up in price by 30, 50, or even 100 percent. We’ve noticed this spike because it was so sudden.

But this has been happening ever since President Nixon ditched the gold standard and the Supreme Court nullified the true meaning of the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause, two major factors allowing Congress to spend Americans’ money with essentially no restraints. Since 1900, cumulative inflation in the United States has been 3,657 percent. Insane.

Everyone who studies history — which again, due to our schools, is very few people today — knows bankruptcy is usually how empires fall. Overstretched militaries and unsustainable welfare states are the usual major causes.

If judges and Congress don’t help Trump rein those in, they’re signing the nation’s death warrant. We can start accurately using the word “chaos” when the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, or foreign nations stop lending us the debt to hang ourselves with. People who don’t work to prevent these potential futures don’t care about this country.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.