“DOGE ‘doesn’t exist’ with eight months left on its charter,” blared the Reuters headline. The Leftmedia outfit had grabbed two words from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor’s comments to make a splashy headline for a nuanced story about President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE might be gone, but it’ll live on in our hearts forever. I’m paraphrasing with a smirk, but Kupor did say “the principles of DOGE remain alive and well.” DOGE’s work over the last 10 months will be shifted to other areas of government, he said, now that it’s no longer a “centralized entity.”
As White House spokeswoman Liz Huston added in a statement, “President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment.”
Reuters complained, “DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but it was impossible for outside financial experts to verify that because the unit did not provide detailed public accounting of its work.”
That’s not true. DOGE posts its savings on its website, showing pages and pages of receipts. It claims to have saved an estimated $214 billion through a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.” Reuters might not like the way the receipts are presented, but that doesn’t mean DOGE was opaque or that it’s “impossible” to divine the mysteries of its wizardry.
Nevertheless, the Leftmedia experts are unconvinced. Newsweek quotes Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Unfortunately, the numbers coming out of this effort have proved to be completely unreliable. So I have no reason to believe this [$214 billion] estimate.”
If the name Jonathan Gruber sounds familiar, it’s because he was a key architect of ObamaCare, a massive government entitlement program with intentionally grossly misrepresented costs. In fact, Gruber is the guy who infamously said that ObamaCare’s details should be hidden because of “the stupidity of the American voter.”
Yet to Newsweek, he’s still an expert worth quoting with no caveats or context whatsoever, and the average Newsweek reader would never know the difference.
Last November, Trump tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE, and they laid out its vision. In an article one year ago today, I noted that I was pretty excited about the prospect of what DOGE might accomplish to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. In particular, the dynamic duo addressed the administrative state that really runs our government, calling it “antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision.”
That said, I wrote then, “I’m realistic enough to know that government inertia is almost insurmountable. Even the eternal optimist Ronald Reagan saw that, famously quipping, ‘A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.’”
I hate to say it, but I was right.
It wasn’t long before Ramaswamy was out. The room wasn’t big enough for him and Musk. Then, the African-American entrepreneur ruffled a lot of feathers with, among other things, that “what do you do here?” email requirement. He also famously wielded that “chainsaw for bureaucracy” at CPAC. Eventually, though, Musk himself left — as planned — in May, as leftists claimed his scalp. Now, eight months before the nation’s 250th birthday, at which point DOGE was supposed to wrap up its incredible work, it’s largely gone.
Don’t get me wrong: DOGE succeeded in some key things, such as reducing the federal workforce. According to Kupor, “The government hired roughly 68,000 people this year, while approximately 317,000 employees left the government.” Purging scams like USAID was a win, too.
Furthermore, saving $214 billion is nothing to sneeze at. DOGE says it’s $1,329 per taxpayer. But it’s also a far cry from Musk’s bold promises to save “at least $2 trillion,” which he reduced to $1 trillion, which was cut again to a fifth of that. It may be that the biggest cuts were of what could be cut.
“What did DOGE really accomplish?” Mark Alexander asked in June. He answered, in part, “Despite not hitting his number, Musk and DOGE shined a bright light on government waste, and Trump can keep that momentum going, though it will be a political balancing act ahead of the midterm elections next year.”
That’s not nothing. DOGE also succeeded in highlighting just how hard it is to cut one red cent from the behemoth federal budget.
Washington Democrat Senator Patty Murray summed up why her party makes cutting anything so hard, bemoaning DOGE as a catastrophic failure for “taking a wrecking ball to everything from cancer research to lifesaving humanitarian aid that will almost certainly lead to millions of preventable deaths.”
Give me a break.
Such hysterics elicit an eye roll around here, but the frustrating truth is that genuine cuts are very difficult to achieve because every federal dollar comes with a loud constituency clamoring for that dollar to become two, not zero. When everyone says you can cut anything but their program, nothing ends up getting cut. In fact, even reducing the growth rate is practically impossible.
When DOGE actually did make a cut, lawsuits followed, which may end up meaning that DOGE cost us money.
In our humble shop, the ideal is a return to constitutionally limited government that exercises only the powers enumerated by our charter document. A government spending $7 trillion of your hard-earned money per year on things far beyond its authority isn’t going to return to anything approaching its bounds overnight. That doesn’t mean it’s not the direction we should be going, and DOGE pushed as hard as anyone in the last generation.
