One of the older cliches in politics, dating at least to Jimmy Carter’s presidency, is the promise to cut spending by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal budget. It’s effective because nobody favors waste, fraud, and abuse. There is no waste, fraud, and abuse lobby. Waste, fraud, and abuse does not command the loyalty of some key voting constituency. Fraud is, by definition, illegal. It’s a meaningless promise, offending no one because it says nothing.
Yet this White House, in the course of six weeks, has done the seemingly impossible: They have found the waste, the fraud, and the abuse. And they are promising to get rid of it.
Even more improbably, President Trump is doing this with the help of Elon Musk, a longtime beneficiary of federal funding himself, such as the money given to SpaceX and Tesla. And they’re doing it through a federal quasi-agency collectively known as DOGE, staffed by young, disagreeable eccentrics who go by names like “Big Balls.”
Anyone who has ever had the experience of waiting in line at a DMV knows that the government doesn’t work the way it ought to. And yet the extent of the waste so far revealed has astonished even the staunchest libertarian.