The Free Press
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.
We’ll start with a scandal just revealed by Free Press reporter Madeleine Rowley. A $27 billion fund aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions was intended to address the climate crisis while revitalizing communities that it considered “historically left behind.”
But it appears little of that $27 billion revitalized anything—except the coffers of a range of environmental nonprofits associated with former Obama and Biden administration officials in the waning hours of the Biden administration. As the EPA’s new chief, Lee Zeldin, told our reporter: “The Biden administration used so-called ‘climate equity’ to justify handouts of billions of dollars to their far-left friends. It is my utmost priority to get a handle on every dollar that went out the door in this scheme and once again restore oversight and accountability over these funds.”
You don’t need to be a fan of Trump to be baffled that tens of billions of dollars—inside one fund in one agency—went to progressive nonprofits established, it seems, simply to take in the government money.
This is one of hundreds of examples. With the caveat that much of this information comes from the White House and DOGE itself, here are some of our favorites:
The limestone mine in Pennsylvania that DOGE is shutting down. That’s the place where over 700 workers process thousands of federal employee retirement applications—by hand, using paper—230 feet underground. Closing that operation will save Americans some $200 million a year.
The USAID money that flowed to terror-tied Palestinian groups, as reported by The Free Beacon.
The $59 million to house undocumented immigrants at New York City’s absurdly expensive hotels.
The millions that flowed to American colleges to promote concepts like “white privilege” and “linguistic supremacy.”
The $20 million for an Iraqi version of Sesame Street, a nice idea in theory that could certainly cost less.
The $10 million for male medical circumcision in Mozambique.
The $14 million to improve public procurement in Serbia.
The $1.5 million for voter confidence in Liberia.
The $47 million for improving learning outcomes in Asia. (Asia is already “doing very well with learning,” as Trump noted in his address to Congress on Tuesday.)
All those millions sent abroad. And yet a domestic concern, the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, received only $10,000 for their “cabaret show on ice skates focused on climate change.” Speaking of domestic spending, what to make of the $3 million the Education Department spent on a report about how its previous reports were ignored?
Everyone in Washington knows someone who has been fired by Musk & Co. at this point. Also, everyone in Washington is a Democrat. So DOGE has been criticized at length by the Washington press, which (predictably) questions Musk’s claims about how much taxpayer money he’s saved. And there’s been some (understandable) angst about DOGE’s shuttering of USAID, its single biggest cost-saving endeavor.
Speaking of USAID, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the administration must release nearly $2 billion in frozen foreign aid. And in an indication that even some conservatives have misgivings about DOGE’s approach, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett—a Trump appointee—sided with their liberal colleagues in the decision.
Meanwhile, some entities are pushing back. As The Free Press’s Eli Lake reported Wednesday, the National Endowment for Democracy is taking the administration to court. They argue that the executive branch has no authority to cut off their funding, and say they have resorted to the measure because NED is nearing complete collapse.
So DOGE’s decision to go after federal spending with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel is having its foreseeable hiccups. The federal government is not the Trust and Safety Board at Twitter, as Musk is hopefully learning, because many federal workers actually do important things. The National Nuclear Security Administration, which was briefly gutted by the Muskrats before they realized that maintaining our nuclear stockpile is a worthwhile endeavor, is a valuable case in point. Moving fast and breaking things is not always the ideal approach.
And yet: DOGE now claims to have saved the American taxpayer $105 billion, and while it’s appropriate to be skeptical of such a claim, if DOGE has achieved just half of that number then it’s already been a wild success. And this gets us beyond the economics and the savings and the occasional hilarity of what our government spends money on: It’s just not right to waste other people’s money like this. It’s immoral. We should all be glad an era of fiscal recklessness is hopefully coming to an end.
Perhaps the biggest issue with DOGE is what it’s not cutting. Dancing onstage with a chainsaw can, in theory at least, make for decent entertainment, although Musk lacks Trump’s ability to actually land a joke. But it’s time America had a serious discussion about what to do about our essentially untouchable entitlement programs, namely Medicare and Social Security.
These and other “mandatory programs,” like veterans’ benefits, make up the vast majority of what the government spends money on. And that number is set to skyrocket as more Baby Boomers and Gen Xers age out of the workforce. As in the rest of the West, we are becoming a society where elderly beneficiaries will outnumber young taxpayers; in the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office projects federal spending to balloon by 53 percent, with mandatory spending on Social Security and Medicare making up about half of that increase.
Since the beginning of his political career, Trump has promised to leave Social Security and Medicare untouched. This was politically savvy but economically untenable. Barring a miracle, like curing Alzheimer’s, we will soon have to make hard choices about raising taxes and cutting programs that Americans depend on.
In the meantime, however, DOGE and Musk have begun a process that culminates in something more serious. Fingers crossed that this is the start of a discussion that better grounds Americans in fiscal reality.
Once upon a time, honorable men went to the gulags for refusing to repeat the Kremlin’s lies; now an American president is telling them for free. This week on Breaking History, Eli Lake takes us back to the Cold War and President Reagan’s support of dissidents.