As is their wont, big left-wing media has echoed Democratic talking points from the get-go in playing gotcha with Elon Musk and his stewardship of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Proving afresh that no good deed goes unpunished, leftists have constantly attacked the DOGE process while refusing to defend any of the specific items on the chopping block. They have accused – without evidence – the nation’s wealthiest man of personally profiting from his seemingly tireless efforts to scale back palpably wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive expenditures of taxpayer funds. They have fomented the narrative that Musk became all too powerful, even insinuating early on that he had become the de facto president. They anxiously reported on the firebombing of Tesla dealers and the targeting of Tesla owners to advance the notion of widespread opposition to DOGE. And they have gleefully celebrated the fact that Musk has come up well short of his stated goal of cutting one trillion dollars from the bloated federal budget.
Given that the media’s credibility rating has descended to its lowest point in decades, or perhaps ever, you might have thought Americans would pay little attention to this Musk Derangement Syndrome (MDS), seemingly a contagious variant of the original TDS mind virus related to Trump. In fact, the media’s savaging of Musk has succeeded to a shocking degree. A poll conducted on May 16 by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports revealed that 54% of respondents categorized as likely voters would support a hypothetical law to send Musk to prison for his role in DOGE. It is relatively unsurprising that 71% of Democrats favor the imprisonment of Musk, but what is truly stunning is that 52% of respondents identifying as independent voters feel the same way.
But now, paraphrasing the words of Richard Nixon when he temporarily retired from politics, they won’t have Elon Musk to kick around anymore. Following his announcement that he will turn his full attention back to his many business interests – X, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink, among others – we are left to speculate on the future of a Musk-less DOGE. Will it go down in history as a transient and largely futile effort to scale back the role of the federal government? Or will it carry on and generate a permanently altered view of the relationship between the central state and the taxpaying citizenry?
The DOGE Scalpel and Chainsaw
Most stories about DOGE have focused on how much has been cut (some $150 billion in total is the latest estimate), but this narrative has been largely misguided. Attention should rightly be centered first on what has been slashed and, secondly, on what has been added. Indeed, the rooting out of transparently progressive boondoggles, particularly in USAID, has been significant, but lost in the shuffle are substantial upgrades to the government’s operational efficiency, which is, after all, the named purpose of the agency. Even as Musk criticizes the House of Representatives for negating hard-won DOGE savings in its “big beautiful” budget bill, it does not change the fact that the most egregious of line items in government spending – the worst of the worst, if you will – have been put on extinction. Nor does it change the fact that DOGE has brought long-since outdated operational systems into the 21st century.
Let’s review some of what DOGE has identified and cut off at the pass, just in the month of May. The Department of Defense (DoD) strategically canceled about $5 billion in consulting contracts, "converting consultants into combat power." The US Postal Service canceled or modified 1,076 contracts, with $188.5 million in savings. Millions of dollars were saved by slashing Biden-era funding for woke causes, such as $350,000 for interactive gay travel guides to better understand historical LGBTQ+ spaces; $247,000 to digitize stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest; $75,000 to examine the relationship between internet live streaming and LGBTQ+ communities; and $60,000 to research how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics in the 1980s & 1990s.
It is actually hard to keep track of all the ridiculous taxpayer-funded contracts that DOGE has canceled as it terminates all DEI programs institutionalized by Joe Biden, such as a $13.8 million marketing research DEI contract to provide “analytical and initiative support on building the case for health equity.” A total of $13.6 million in DEI grants were eliminated, including $716,000 for “DEIA materials, training modules, and support networks” and $398,000 for “gender equity awareness training.” Then there was $6 million for “collaborative planning to address safety concerns of women and gender non-conforming people,” and a $181,000 contract for a “technical climate advisor for central Africa.”
In fact, in one two-day period during May, federal agencies terminated 120 wasteful contracts, saving $908 million. And a DOGE task force, committed to what it calls “the biggest deregulatory push in modern history,” has repealed burdensome or obsolete regulations, saving American taxpayers $28.7 billion to date.
DOGE’s impact is hardly limited to Washington. For example, the DOGE team in Florida discovered that the University of West Florida is actively engaged in a grant that has utilized over $800,000 in federal funding from the National Science Foundation entitled “Educating Science and Mathematics Majors to Teach with Social Justice Models in High-Needs Schools.”
If you do the math, or even if you don’t, you will realize that all these expenditures add up to what might be called a rounding error in the mammoth $7 trillion federal budget. But it is the quality of the cuts, and not so much the quantity, which should serve to rebuild Americans’ bygone faith in a government that is supposed to be serving their interests.
DOGE and the Digital Age
While its cuts have generated the bulk of media coverage, what DOGE has added or transformed will undoubtedly modernize and streamline archaic government operations for generations to come. This will save taxpayers untold billions over the years in waste, fraud, and abuse while boosting confidence that the government is on the up and up. There will be no more 150-year-olds in the Social Security database, no more shuffling manually produced Social Security paperwork to a mine in Pennsylvania, or duplicative 20th-century computer systems in different agencies unable to communicate with each other.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has been fully digitized and has removed the incredible total of some 12.3 million individuals aged 120+ from its database. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has announced that, as of June 2, it's replacing an antiquated paper process with an all-digital alternative. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) has rolled out a new update to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to help eliminate voter fraud. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is introducing an enhanced and accelerated Medicare Advantage contract auditing strategy to catch any cases of fraud, waste, or abuse that have been hiding in the program. The work of streamlining and modernizing government systems to save money and root out fraud will continue unabated until at least July 4, 2026, when the agency is scheduled to shut down, or perhaps beyond.
It is impossible to overstate the degree of institutional reform that has taken place in the four months since DOGE was first established. While it will likely save taxpayers trillions of dollars over the next decade or two, there is nothing the DOGE establishment can do about the continuation of reckless spending by Congress. And while Musk has expressed frustration at the modest cuts in the GOP-proposed budget that is now in the Senate’s hands, he has undoubtedly initiated a way of thinking long absent in the DC corridors of power. No longer will taxpayers feel entirely helpless to understand or turn a blind eye to how the federal government is spending their hard-earned dollars.
