The moment that Elon Musk’s most ardent critics have been waiting for has finally arrived as he exits the Trump administration and hands over control of the Department of Government Efficiency. They will assure us that the results have been an embarrassing failure, but they could not be more wrong.
Musk has forever changed how Americans look at federal spending, and that is a wonderful thing.
First of all, DOGE estimates that it has saved taxpayers $160 billion. A sneering NPR claims that there is only data to prove $63 billion, but even if that is true, that’s an enormous amount of waste being cut.
Was Musk shooting for a higher number? Sure. This is, after all, a guy who is literally trying to get to Mars. But the savings DOGE has already found and will continue to find until it sunsets in July of next year are nothing to sneeze at.
The impact of Musk and DOGE also goes well beyond the mere grand total dollar figure. It is the speed with which they identified wasteful spending and the absurdity of many of the programs they uncovered and cut that has proven to be a game-changer.
Who can forget the discovery that we gave a former Taliban member $132,000 to promote peace, or $20 million for Sesame Street to be broadcast in Iraq, along with boatloads of dollars for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs throughout our government and around the globe?
Over the first 60 days of the Trump administration, it seemed like every hour some new and ridiculous spending was being identified. What Americans had felt as a vague sense that the federal government is wasteful became one concrete example after another of blatant and frivolous waste.
These revelations have moved the Overton window in American discourse around spending. We will no longer accept blue-ribbon commissions with no power studying the problem for years on end, only to do nothing. We want action now.
And while DOGE still requires approval from cabinet secretaries to finalize its cuts, they have generally been willing and able to do so.
Musk and DOGE have also shown that it is OK to make mistakes when zealously safeguarding the taxpayer’s dime, because errors can be quickly fixed.
For example, when funding for the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Md., was cut early in the administration, officials appealed to Homeland Security Secretary Kristie Noem, who recognized the importance of the program which trains100,000 firefighters a year. Funding was restored.
Slashing federal spending is not like a haircut. You can put back things that are wrongly cut, so there is no reason to be paralyzed by fear when trimming.
Perhaps more than anything else, what Musk has succeeded in doing with DOGE is to open up the hood of federal spending and give us all a sobering look at the engine.
This is very similar to what he did when he bought Twitter and allowed journalists to produce the Twitter Files, revealing many shady secrets that proved the platform had been harshly censoring conservative viewpoints.
This kind of radical transparency is anathema to a deep state that demands to be like a black box, where our money flows in, never comes out, and we don’t get to look inside.
Bureaucrats have clearly been treating the federal budget like a slush fund for all manner of pet projects and silly endeavors, and boy do they hate having any light exposed on their massive contracts to export condoms everywhere or study trans animals.
For decades, federal spending has been like a giant Rock of Gibraltar that nobody could get their arms or heads around. But now, instead of focusing on the gigantic forest of spending, Musk has found ways to identify the dying trees.
It is natural that Musk and his supporters feel some measure of disappointment that more could not have been cut, and that some Republicans in Congress don’t seem eager to codify cuts to what has been found. But politics is, as they say, the art of the possible.
Today, thanks to Musk, there are far more possibilities out there, far more programs that bring little value to be exposed, far more opportunity for the American people to see the senseless spending in black and white.
Finally, and it’s an important point, federal bureaucrats, the people who spend our money, suddenly have to look over their shoulder and be prepared to justify that spending, and when they glance up to see who is peeking at their work, it’s not just Musk, it’s not just DOGE, it is the American people.