DOGE-Style, Part II

I made an initial stab at DOGE here. I understated its future impact, because I overstated the willingness of Congress, Republicans included, to defend their own turf. A new report in the Wall Street Journal unpacks the doings of DOGE so far. Similar reports from the New York Times here. Needless to say, there is less there than meets the eye.

To restate a point I made earlier, there already was a Federal agency tasked with ferreting out waste called the Government Accountability Office, where I worked for a decade. It works at the behest of Congress and has no executive power. What it does is investigate and report. So right off the bat, DOGE, an agency devoted to finding waste, was a redundant entity. A serious DOGE would liquidate itself.

DOGE purports to support its claims with a so-called “Wall of Receipts.” The terminology is interesting since it derives from Twitter-like discourse. We are being regaled with misinformation by ignorant, malevolent children.

I recently had dinner with relatives who innocently repeated MAGA lies that had already been debunked in the press. The NY Times is starting to show some life on this front. It was distressing to sit down with people who think you are nuts, as I certainly did with respect to them. I lost sleep over it.

There is a way to find waste, exemplified by GAO. You set out a mission, organize a team of experts, and spend six or nine months looking into it objectively. Then you report your findings, all of which are documented and publicly available. GAO reports are internally vetted to a fare-thee-well, in my view to absurd lengths, but in the end they are bullet-proof. There is no comparison to any ignoramus with no credibility in the White House claiming this or that savings off the cuff.

The problem with GAO is that it can only blow the whistle. It’s up to the Congress to do something. That’s the law. The problem is our constitutional system, such as it is. Any waste, fraud, and abuse has a sponsor in Congress, the clowns the great American people send to represent them. It is comforting to imagine a dictator coming in and just swinging an axe. But that is completely illegal, and the dictator’s doings are likely to be deficient as well, as the WSJ and others report, which is why we have boring, flawed procedures and laws.

The harm from DOGE is real, but we should keep in mind that the Federal government is a vast enterprise. The likelihood of waste, fraud, and abuse somewhere is high. The Federal budget is mostly devoted to a limited number of objects: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and “defense.” In 2024, total spending was $6,750 billion. If you hear a hundred million dollars is saved, it sounds like a lot, but you can do the math to determine its overall significance. Federal employees and non-defense contracts, the chief victims of DOGE thus far, are a very small share of the total.

The expectation is that DOGE, or anybody, could find waste in defense spending. This has been a theme on the Left forever. GAO has reported for years that the defense department is “unauditable.” Its data is a mess. We could suspect this is willed ineptitude, since it aggrandizes somebody, or a lot of somebodies.

Even right-wing icon Milton Friedman was quoted as saying something like, we might be reconciled to defense spending being twice as much as needed, but three or four times is too much. My old libertarian friend Bill Niskanen, may he R.I.P., once described the defense department as the second largest planned economy in the world. It should give pause as to the ease of economic planning of any sort.

The idea of waste is reductionist when it comes to defense. The real bugbear is policy. What is the purpose of what has been called an “empire of bases,” including by right-winger Chalmers Johnson? Ironically this might be something Trump seriously tackles. But who knows? His appetite for theatrical displays of machismo could result in more defense spending, not less.

A few sensational DOGE findings have been debunked, but people out in the country still believe them. One was the “350 million Social Security numbers.” Another was the “150-year-olds receiving benefits.” Any fool with broadband can find the refutations of these absurd claims, so why bother to dissect them here? People seize on what they want to believe, absent a serious disruption in their own lives that compels them to think anew. We’re not there yet.