By: Gerard Baker – wsj.com – February 10, 2025

Whose idea was it to have Chuck Schumer lead a protest outside the Treasury?

You couldn’t invent a scene that better explains our current politics than the one last week outside the Treasury in Washington. Some genius in the Democratic Party evidently thought it a good idea to put some of the party’s most prominent faces, most notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in front of the cameras to protest Elon Musk’s efforts to get inside the books of the federal government in his presidentially mandated campaign to root out inefficiency.

It was a tableau for the ages, one example of the many strange battle lines the Democratic Party has chosen to defend these past few years: illegal migrantsover citizens, teachers unions over parents and children, criminals over victims, men-turned-women over girls. Good luck with that, Democrats. You might want to fire your pollsters.

Choosing to die on the hill of the right of permanent government officials to spend money without hindrance from the president’s delegates is an especially odd decision. I’m trying to picture the voter who is currently sitting at home rooting for the employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Internal Revenue Service.

Expecting to make the government efficient is a tall order for anyone, even an abrasive tech billionaire, but like all the best entrepreneurial activities, it may be outcomes other than the principal objective that end up the best justification for Mr. Musk’s endeavors.

So far at least, the Department of Government Efficiency looks like something of a misnomer. It’s early days but it seems less DOGE and more DOGA, a Department of Government Accountability. Since that acronym doesn’t really work, perhaps it could be called Making American Government Accountable—and you could even save a few hundred thousand dollars by repurposing some red hats.

The savings we were promised don’t add up to much so far. It’s all very satisfying denying government employees the insight to be had from a Politico Pro subscription, or depriving the people of Colombia the opportunity to have their awareness of transgender representation raised through opera, but in a total federal budget of $6.75 trillion, these add up to small ball.

Even some of the apparently big-money scandals haven’t turned out to be all that scandalous. Be honest, who among us didn’t get a little shiver of excitement up the leg when we learned that the DOGEniks had identified and then snipped off the supply of $50 million worth of taxpayer-financed condoms to Gaza, adding to the inconveniences the Hamasniks have had to endure these past 16 months. But it turned out that no such funding had been approved and that the prophylactics might actually have been for another Gaza, a province in Mozambique that benefits from U.S. support for AIDS prevention.

It’s early, and it’s still possible that Mr. Musk and his band of teenage budget-slashers will hit paydirt somewhere in the $800 billion defense or $1.8 trillion health and human services budget. But even if they ultimately fall a few trillion short in the pursuit of savings that will eliminate our vast budget deficit, the work they are doing represents a vital contribution to the reform of government.

(A word about those teenagers: Funny how the left is so outraged about kids barely out of college marching into buildings along Constitution Avenue to investigate the misuse of government budgets. They cheered as hordes of little Maoists straight out of Ivy League schools took over tech companies, media organizations and the entire marketing departments of corporate America in the past decade to subject the rest of us to the iron rule of woke ideology.)

Whether or not it succeeds in dramatically reducing the size of government, the paramount virtue of this exercise is the exposure of the hegemony in our system of a political class that sees itself as immune from popular accountability. Government is supposed to exist for the people, but the DOGE process has laid bare what we have long suspected—that at scale, it exists first and foremost to further the interests of the permanent bureaucracy and their like-minded friends who dominate almost all our major institutions. That’s why Democrats are so upset about the exercise: It is the most serious challenge to the control their people have long exercised, irrespective of election results and the popular will.

Whether in the ideologically driven distribution of foreign aid or the convergence of education policies with the interests of public-sector unions, too much of government has been unresponsive either to actual results or the public will.

The accountability DOGE can bring needs to be emulated in other areas of public life where these interests have long dominated, immune from responsibility: radicalized higher education, failing city governments, intellectually corrupt media and entertainment companies.

Even Elon Musk can’t do all that. But the rest of us can start.

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Source: Democrats Stand Up for the Bureaucrats Against DOGE – WSJ