Thanks to DOGE and four wunderkind coders in Treasury’s basement, Americans learned this week that their government sent millions to fund a “DEI musical” in Ireland, a “transgender comic book” in Peru, electric vehicles in Vietnam, and an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the NIH Museum.
Faster than Ludicrous+ mode on a Tesla, the Trump admin’s new code bros are sifting through the financial ledger of America’s spending. Just 20 days in office and the new administration has saved the American taxpayer billions of dollars — exactly what Trump promised on the campaign trail. And as the president’s third week unfolded, news worsened for Democrats and America’s permanent bureaucratic state.
It seems the permanent bureaucracy borrowed the U.S.S.R.’s media playbook, funneling millions to left-wing news organizations such as The New York Times, Politico and Reuters. Evidently it wasn’t enough that a Republican in the newsrooms of our state-run media outlets, PBS and NPR, is rarer than a cogent sentence from Kamala.
Democrats, meanwhile, have decided that this Deathstar boondoggle of government spending at its worst is the hill they want to die on. Conservatives watched with glee as Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Chuck Schumer, et al, led the Charge of the Lightweight Brigade to USAID’s former headquarters. Cue dopey chant: “wE Will wiN!” (2025 update—no, you didn’t).
Before all the spending porn (as the great Louisiana wag, Senator John Kennedy dubbed it), Democrats’ opinion polls were in the gutter, with a disapproval rating of 57%.
Do the Dems think rushing to the barricades to defend out-of-control spending will earn them the respect and admiration of the American public? Expect their approval ratings to continue to sink like the Hindentanic.
USAID is just the beginning.
Wait until DOGE bites into the Department of Defense, which has never passed an audit.
In 2019 while on reserve duty at the Pentagon, I was thrown into yet another meeting chockablock with PowerPoint slides, so beloved by our military. This particular meeting was to cover the results of a service-wide audit. To summarize about 187 slides and 2 hours: we failed.
All the top brass in the room somberly listened to the auditors describe $5 billion worth of missing aircraft engines, leases for buildings and land that did not exist, accounting systems closer in age to the abacus than a modern spreadsheet, and miles of missing debits and credits.
As the most junior officer in the room, I kept quiet but closely studied the faces of my superiors. They too, kept quiet, only murmuring “next slide” as disaster after financial disaster was flashed across the screens.
My inner fiscal hawk prayed that the service chief would flip the table over and channel Col. Nathan “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH” Jessep. But he remained impassive and the meeting dissolved with a whimper and no plans for reform.
That night leaving D.C., I happened to bump into a very senior republican senator at Reagan National Airport and thought it my civic duty to share the (unclassified) events of earlier in the day. I told the venerable appropriator that the audit had revealed billions in waste, fraud, and abuse, and even suggested he should make a request to see the failed audit for himself.
(In the hindsight afforded by three years working in the U.S. Senate, I now know how utterly naive this moment was).
He paused a moment, then said, “Well, you know how these things are. That’s Washington for you.”
I felt sick at the time, which is likely the same feeling many Americans are having this week as they see the grift laid bare in our nation’s capital.
But the good news is that Trump and his DOGE team have restored the hope that government might be right-sized and returned to solid financial footing.
On Friday, when he was asked about the job Elon Musk is doing, the President remarked, “I think we’re going to be very close to balancing budgets for the first time for many years.”
What a tantalizing prospect — a government that spends within its means may truly bring about the golden age of America promised in the president’s inaugural address.
Morgan Murphy is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense, and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.
America’s friends of limited government have had a rough go lately. Government bureaucrats and spenders of all stripes have been living it up.
Since 2001, the last time the federal budget was balanced, federal revenues have shown healthy growth of 3.9% annually, while inflation averaged only 2.5%. These figures would normally signify a sound, sustainable economy. But spending has grown at a rate of 5.5%, so instead we have a destabilizing gross federal debt of $36 trillion.
The response of the Biden/Harris administration to this looming catastrophe was to double down on spending. In an era of relative peace and prosperity, they kept mindlessly passing out money to win political points.
The hope now is that the Trump/Vance administration can reverse this madness. If so, the Department of Education (DOE) would be a good place to start. It is a prototype bureaucracy that has grown and prospered despite a complete lack of mission success.
The DOE was created in the 70s, ostensibly to improve the chronically ailing achievement scores in government schools. But in spite of the hundreds of billions spent, it has totally failed. Instead, it has provided steady employment for thousands of education bureaucrats who administer federal grants and programs, and write jargon-laden academic papers, yet have made no discernible difference in the quality of American education.
Remember Goals 2000, Every Student Succeeds, or No Child Left Behind? What about the Office of Safe and Healthy Students, the Education Facilities Clearinghouse, or offices dedicated to American-Asians, Native Hawaiians, American Indians, Hispanics, African-Americans, and other hyphenated groups singled out for special treatment? Of course you don’t, unless you are one of the lucky recipients of their largess.
But DOE has been worse than useless. It provides a platform for the teachers’ unions, by far the most influential protector of the status quo and obstruction to school choice. The damaging COVID shutdown was the latest blow to union-run public schools delivered by the DOE/unions dynamic duo.
Most private schools and charters, with access to the same medical information, kept their schools mostly open. Their students didn’t suffer the crippling learning loss that the unfortunate wards of the DOE did.
Ronald Reagan was the first of many leaders to advocate for the DOE’s elimination. But like bureaucracies everywhere, DOE is dedicated above all else to its own preservation, which is the one goal in which it has succeeded. It won’t be easy, but returning education policy to the states would be a great service to future generations of students.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has a similar failed history. When it was created in 1964, the U.S. homeownership rate was 64%. After six decades of HUD stewardship, the homeownership rate is still 64%.
It’s not like they haven’t tried. HUD’s mortgage companies – Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae manage multiple housing programs with federal finance agencies, all with the goal of controlling costs and boosting home ownership.
Yet under HUD’s “leadership,” home prices have far outstripped inflation. When HUD was created in 1967, the average home price was $22,000, about three times the average family income. Today the average home costs $500,000, seven times income. Meanwhile, European households without a comparable bureaucracy average 69% home ownership.
HUD has spent about $4 trillion since its inception with little to show for it. The housing market would function at least as well if the government simply got out of the way.
As these and other bureaucracies have grown and prospered, we have developed a very centralized form of government. In the land of the free, we have grown comfortable sending our tax money to Washington for faceless bureaucrats to return to us, always with strings attached.
We get the healthcare, the education, the roads and other goodies that government decrees. Government buys or subsidizes everything from unpopular electric cars and trains, state and local government public safety departments, “climate initiatives,” and much more.
Reforming an entrenched bureaucracy, much less eliminating it, is extraordinarily difficult. Yet the present could be a rare opportunity to repair this destruction to our way of life. We must be fearless and strategic in reducing government excess and providing a successful economic future for our descendants.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
More than 700 residents, many of whom are children, have been waiting for months for government officials to find a reliable and affordable water source for Rio Verde Foothills after the City of Scottsdale shut off the taps which had supplied water to the residents for years.
But with city and Maricopa County players failing to come to a quick rescue, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) is now slated to try its hand at resolving the problem, adding yet another layer of bureaucracy that worries residents as temperatures continue to increase.
The problem dates back to Jan. 1 when Scottsdale announced its water would no longer be sold to private companies that haul water to the unincorporated Rio Verde Foothills community located north of the city. The homes are part of a wildcat development.
Scottsdale’s public explanation for ending the longtime arrangement was that it was necessary for the city’s drought management response. A variety of proposed solutions have been put forth since then, one being to leave it up to individual residents to arrange their own water purchases.
The majority of the other solutions have involved Maricopa County in some capacity. And therein lies the problem, according to many property owners and residents who believe the county board has not taken the public health situation seriously enough.
An early solution introduced in the Arizona Legislature on an emergency basis would have permitted Maricopa County to enter into an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) with Scottsdale to allow water from the city to once again be used by Rio Verde Foothills residents for payment.
County supervisors rejected the IGA plan, causing the legislation to be put on the back burner while long-term political interests took priority over getting residents immediate help.
What the county supervisors proposed was to wash their hands of the problem by having Scottsdale city officials work out a deal with Canada-based EPCOR, a private utility company whose U.S. headquarters is located in Phoenix.
The Maricopa County supervisors issued a resolution to that effect in early March.
Supervisor Tom Galvin, whose District 2 encompasses Rio Verde Foothills and Scottsdale, was vocal about keeping a hands-off approach while leaving desperate residents at the mercy of a major conglomerate.
Some homeowners are also encountering problems trying to sell their property due to the lack of water service.
And with the highly bureaucratic ACC now involved, residents can only wait and see what happens. Some state lawmakers, including Rep. Alex Kolodin and Sen. John Kavanagh, continue to look into legislative options.
In the meantime, Galvin and the other county supervisors have not put forth any alternatives in the event an EPCOR solution is rejected.
Terri Jo Neff is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or send her news tips here.
