If you favor an ever-growing out-of-control federal government, with a voracious spending appetite and no checks on WFA (Waste, Fraud and Abuse), then go ahead and take a victory lap!
It’s a DOGE Eat DOGE World
Elon Musk and Donald Trump set out to shrink big government. They did not succeed.
By Jeffrey Tucker
Nov. 25, 2025 5:58 pm ET
The Department of Government Efficiency is officially disbanded - with eight months remaining in its mandate. Some DOGE employees are now staffing other agencies. The federal budget is still growing dramatically, exactly as we’ve come to expect, and bloat is still a problem.
The Trump administration assures us that the vision of DOGE lives on, but one does wonder. The story of DOGE reads like another failed attempt to restrain and contain that which is institutionally implacable.
Let us recall those exciting days in late 2024 when Donald Trump and Elon Musk teamed up with the intention to create DOGE, a clever homage to Mr. Musk’s favorite meme coin. Old-style analog government would be subject to the discipline and cold logic that drives the digitizing private sector.
Two years before Mr. Musk had freed Twitter from bloat and mismanagement by cutting nearly four-fifths of employees and creating something that worked better. Together with businessman Trump, the plan was to bring that spirit to government itself. Such a prospect eased the fears of many fiscal hawks who wanted to support Mr. Trump but worried that his first term was not a model of frugality.
The original vision of $2 trillion in cuts inspired awe. Enthralled, I personally commissioned David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s own legendary budget cutter, to map out how it could be done. The result was a book that we distributed to every sitting member of Congress.
Mr. Musk recruited for DOGE with a public call for tech-savvy nerds to work long hours at low pay. Many stepped forward, a young army of budget-slashers.
After the inauguration, the $2 trillion figure was replaced with $1 trillion. Still the team got to work immediately. They camped out in various bureaucracies, literally sleeping in the office and having food delivered. They cracked open the vaults of the U.S. Treasury for the first-ever outside audit. They began using modern AI tools to locate waste and order cuts.
DOGE agents had unprecedented access and were feared by legacy civil servants. Then came the daily announcements and receipts documenting scandalous spending outrages, not all of which lived up to their original billing. But they were posted to DOGE’s new website and on X, then shared with great enthusiasm by me and many others.
In line with the DOGE ethos, the White House ordered a hiring freeze. The Office of Personnel Management began sending emails to the entire civil service asking what it is they actually do. They offered incentives to bureaucrats to retire immediately.
An internal tension always threatened the plan. Article 1 of the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress. Over a century of legislation, Congress created some 400 or so agencies to spend the money. They are, however, technically classified as executive agencies. Article 2 gives the president the power to be the administrator of this branch.
How can Congress mandate the executive branch to carry out its spending ambitions in every detail even as Congress takes no responsibility for managing the process or outcome? And how can the chief executive bear responsibility for agency management without touching the spending itself?
The conflict directly affected DOGE’s work. They could not make real cuts without having them ratified by Congress, which requires another layer of politics. DOGE’s work triggered at least 20 significant court cases that are trying to thread the needles of authority.
We await final judgments on the legal status of the administrative state in general. Exactly who is in charge?
The director of OPM Scott Kupor says that perceptions of DOGE as defunct are wrong. “DOGE may not have centralized leadership,” he writes, but “the principles of DOGE remain alive and well.”
That might be so, but it is impossible not to be disappointed with the gap between the initial dreams and the results. In October, DOGE claimed to have saved American taxpayers $214 billion, or 5% to 10% of original estimates. Was it worth the effort? Certainly. The dream to clean up big government, however, awaits another opportunity.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/its-a-do...world-9d770b96