Yesterday Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head up an extra-government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and already the epic memes are flowing. Are you having fun yet? It’s important to Musk that you’re having fun.
To that end, he’s promised to make the fight against government waste, fraud, and abuse a form of public entertainment. “All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency,” Musk said in a post on X. “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know! We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining 🤣🤣.”
DOGE will not, technically, be a new department. Only Congress can create new federal agencies. In practice, that may not matter. “The Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large-scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before,” Trump said in a statement announcing the project.
What DOGE actually accomplishes will be anyone’s guess. The path to combating government waste is fraught and, despite what you might think from Musk’s promise to make it transparent, has been fought in the open for decades. At almost $7 trillion, the U.S. budget is enormous. The vast majority of that budget is spent on Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Health, and the Pentagon.
Conservatives have been crowing about cuts to public spending for a long time. It’s so frequent that it’s become a brand. Some NGOs publish yearly catalogs full of fun graphics and colorful language decrying perceived government cost overruns. Even politicians have gotten in on the act.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has been banging on about it for decades and sends out weekly missives about government waste. On style, Grassley can’t compete with Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) annual “Festivus” report. In his latest Festivus report, Paul identified $900 billion in waste he wanted to see cleaned up.
What’s in there? Paul called out South Carolina’s Monkey Island ($33.2 million). Yes, this is the same island from which more than 40 monkeys recently escaped. If only they’d had more funding to keep them locked down. He decried $6 million spent to promote tourism in Egypt, part of a larger aid package and a long-term diplomatic project between the U.S. and Egypt. Not all of Paul’s examples are frivolous. The Pentagon—one of America’s biggest spenders—is talented at wasting money, and Paul called it out three times in his report.
The U.S. also already has government agencies that catalog and fight wasteful spending. All three of Paul’s Pentagon waste examples come from Pentagon Inspector General reports, an agency that spends its time looking into DoD fuck ups. There’s a lot of them. And then there’s the Government Accountability Office.
Established in 1921, the Government Accountability Office investigates and reports on cost overruns and other Washington abuses. It recently called out the U.S. Navy and defense contractors for spending too much on nuclear submarines. For the past 14 years, it’s published a report identifying places where America could save money. “These efforts have resulted in approximately $667.5 billion in financial benefits, an increase of approximately $71 billion since our 2023 report,” it said in the most recent version of this report, published in May.
We have no idea how DOGE will run other than what Musk is posting about it online. The proposed interactive leaderboard is just the online evolution of what Grassley and Paul have been doing for years. It’s a dumbed-down version of the government reports published weekly by the DoD IG and GAO.
DOGE is also an early indicator of the 2008 Reddit-era meme nightmare that Musk will push into the Trump administration. According to reports from inside Mar-a-Lago, the billionaire is following Trump around like a lost dog.
Musk is sitting in on calls with world leaders, appearing in Trump family photos, and taking credit for Trump’s victory every chance he gets. “He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” a source told NBC News.
Trump met with a closed session of House Republicans today for the first time since his victory. Musk was right beside him. “He thanked Musk for everything he did in the election and said now he can’t get rid of him,” journalist Jake Sherman said in a post on X.
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