DOGE, D-O-N-E ? (Still eight months to go on its charter …)
We were treated to quite the show during the 2024 presidential campaign and the early days of the second Trump term. We were told about a federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that was going to take a scalpel and a sledgehammer to our bloated, out-of-control federal bureaucracy.
We soon learned that would be easier said than done — even with the GOP controlling all of the branches of government.
If you just look at the cold-hard facts in Washington, you can see that substantive, drastic steps are needed.
As of this writing, the national debt is at $38.3 TRILLION and rising. Gross Domestic Product is the total value of our economy. Right now, the ratio of our debt to GDP is 121.33 percent. That means you’d have to shell out an amount equal to 121.33 percent of the value of our national economy in order to get our nation out of debt. (That might work IF the folks in DC put the brakes on their borrowing. But THAT is not going to happen.)
So, what has the alleged conservative party in Washington done toward this endeavor? The Republican Senate can’t agree on a budget with the Republican-controlled House. There was a major battle in the Congress to just pass a bill codifying a paltry $9 billion in spending cuts.
So, we’re back to kicking the can down the road with continuing resolutions — keeping spending levels the same and hoping the voters stop paying attention. New drama and new renewal votes every month or two or three.
We actually got a budget passed through the Congress in 1996. Yes, it’s been that long. But we had a GOP Congress and a Democrat president. And it got done.
President Trump has gotten a lot done via executive orders. But the Congress has done nothing to translate those orders into law. A party control change in the Congress can reverse an awful lot of what Trump has done or tried to do.
President Trump can hardly get his picks for federal judges and US attorneys — who could do a lot to put a halt to leftist governance via jurisprudence — through the GOP-controlled Congress.
On top of all this, we’re getting reports that DOGE – rolled out and overseen by Elon Musk – is now officially D-O-N-E:
President Donald Trump’s initiative to eliminate government waste and fraud through a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has quietly disbanded with a full 8 months still left on its charter.
Earlier this month when Reuters asked Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor about the status of DOGE, Kupor replied, “That doesn’t exist.”
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) said that Elon Musk, who headed up the DOGE effort, was pushed out Washington D.C. because he was getting too close to exposing corrupt officials who are enriching themselves through dark money non-governmental organizations (NGOs). […]
DOGE had made dramatic impact on the federal government during the early months of Trump’s second term, shrinking the size of federal agencies and cutting their budgets or revealing astonishing amounts of questionable money flowing through NGO coffers.
In an email to Reuters, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston wrote, “President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment.”
On his first day in office, Trump forbid federal agencies from bringing on new employees, with some exceptions for positions that his team considered necessary to enforce immigration laws and to protect public safety.
Kupor told Reuters that the government-wide hiring freeze, once a DOGE hallmark, is now over, adding, “There is no target around reductions.”
DOGE is credited with exposing or eliminating tens of billions of dollars in questionable expenditures, although critics of the initiative say that verification of those numbers by outside financial experts has yet to take place.
The great irony of DOGE being eliminated as an apparent cost-cutting measure isn’t lost on casual observers.
The bigger question for many Americans is whether DOGE should ever have been shut down as the job of holding the federal government accountable for its expenditures has yet to be completed.
The Trump administration is claiming the spirit of DOGE is alive and well within the executive branch bureaucracy. But after looking at the debt clock and the deficit info referenced earlier in this post, WE just don’t see it.
We’ve seen the GOP cave on gay marriage and gender-segregated locker rooms and restrooms. They’re not doing anything to help Trump change the federal judiciary. If they’re going to cave on fiscal conservatism and controlling government spending, you have to ask: What will they STAND FOR?
