I’m just sorry that P.T. Barnum isn’t alive to see this.
The Greatest Show on Earth is the new Department of Government Efficiency. If it started as a joke (DOGE was an internet meme of a dog and then a sardonically named crypto coin), it’s no joke now. An elected billionaire and an appointed billionaire are demonstrating that any enterprise running a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit could use an audit.
Years ago, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, Charlie Peters, coined a phrase, “Fire the firemen first,” to describe how the bureaucracy reacts when a fresh crop of elected officials proposes budget-cutting.
Immediately the bureaucrats would announce that the cuts inevitably mean death and suffering, because every dollar in their department was spent so well and efficiently that there was not one single thing that could be cut before the blade sliced into essential life-support services.
Every budget item had its constituency and its congressional defenders, all giving interviews and posing for photos. News coverage would alarm the public with a drumbeat of the horrors that would be unleashed by the first dollar of budget cuts.
By the time a government efficiency task force was appointed, hired its teams of staffers and settled into its new office space, the next congressional election campaign was beginning and that was the end. Only the 750-page report a year later remained to mark the final resting place.
Not this time.
If you followed the saga of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, you’ll remember that he promptly fired about 80% of the employees, called the company a “crime scene,” invited reporters to view internal company communications, battled a shadowy effort to incite advertiser boycotts, and publicly told the people trying to “blackmail” him with advertising to “go (expletive) yourself.”
Twitter, renamed X, is thriving.
The reporting from the Twitter files revealed a government-wide effort to control and manipulate social media platforms and news organizations. Emails from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, even from the White House, documented pressure, threats and secret censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Musk made it transparent.
And the Biden administration came at him with a vengeance, launching multiple investigations of his companies from multiple agencies.
That’s the backstory for what you’re seeing now. DOGE is marching through government buildings like U.S. troops in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
“We are going line-by-line when it comes to the federal government’s books,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday.
What’s different this time is the technique. Musk’s team is made up of code-writing software geniuses legally authorized to get inside the government’s information technology. They seem to be creating search engines to hunt for wasteful government contracts and spending. For example, they discovered that the federal government was spending $8 million on subscriptions to Politico, a Democrat-friendly political news publication.
“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now,” Leavitt said.
DOGE is subjecting the bureaucracy to death by humiliation. Did you hear that USAID spent $1.5 million of your hard-earned money on DEI programs in Serbia? Or $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia?
They haven’t even reached the longstanding problem of “improper payments,” money the government sends out due to error or fraud.
Last month, the General Accounting Office issued one of its occasional reports on Improper Payments: Agency Reporting of Payment Integrity Information. “Since fiscal year 2003,” it begins, “federal agencies have made $2.8 trillion in improper payments — i.e., payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in incorrect amounts.” The GAO estimates $161 billion in improper payments in FY 2024 alone.
One major source of improper payments is the welfare-through-the-IRS program of income tax refunds paid to people who didn’t owe or pay income taxes. These come from “refundable” tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional/Advance Child Tax Credit, which in FY 2023 cost taxpayers $64.3 billion and $131.4 billion, respectively. According to the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration, the “improper payment” rate was 33.5% for the EITC and 14.5% for the ACTC.
The circus is coming. Enjoy the show.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley