Tl;Dr: Who decides what’s waste? A: the program needs to be legitimate, fair, and governed or it’s just fraud.
Trump campaigned on a promise of reducing governmental wasteful spending and fraud. The appeal is obvious and universal: we pay taxes, we want those dollars to be spent well. This is called “Motherhood and Apple Pie” because it’s so blatantly good that anybody questioning it would seem to be an idiot.
Trump is fulfilling his promise by creating the ‘Department or Government Efficiency‘. I’m still learning about the legitimacy how this was done, but on the face of it the department is unfair and ungoverned, and it needs to be stopped.
It might be hard to understand why, bear with me while I make my case.
The Government spends tax money on many different things. In 2025 it plans to spend 7.3 Trillion dollars. When it spends that money, it goes into the hands of people. A huge purpose of the Government is to negotiate how to distribute that money fairly. For example: We (the people) could decide to spend money on NASA – an agency dedicated to exploring space in the interests of the United States, or we could decide to send that same money to a private company like Boeing, Blue Origin, or SpaceX. We have laws, committees, and shit tons of process to help make sure it’s actually spent well and wisely.
Imagine for a moment that, instead of government officials overseen by elected representatives, an unelected business man gets to decide. Imagine that he’s actually in the business of space exploration. And imagine that he decides all the Space money goes to his company. This is unfair – some guy is deciding how to spend our money, and he’s funneling it right into his pocket.
Government is the system we use to decide how to do things fairly. There are a lot of us, so the process of negotiating what’s fair and right is complicated and lengthy. It’s appealing to think: why don’t we just get somebody in there who can just go clean things up without having to go through all that oversight?
The answer is: When you arbitrarily appoint somebody you get:
- Unfair choices: the decide based on their judgement and biases
- Incompetent decisions: there is a certain amount of expertise needed to make good decisions
- Conflict of Interest: Judgements get made in the interests of the individual, not the nation
- Biased choices: decisions made on the ideology of the individual,
The list goes on and on.
Let’s make this more concrete: DOGE is being led by Elon Musk and run by a team of very young adults. They are illegitimate actors in this space: None of them have vetting, clearance, or oversight to be doing what they’re doing.
The decisions they are making are obviously driven by personal ideology rather than national interest. For example:
Elon Musk via DOGE is targeting ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs. These are designed to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability. Musk has a history of claiming ‘anti-white’ activities in South Africa – a country famous for segregation and its system of Apartheid. Musk is targeting DEI because of his personal ideology of white persecution, which is pretty rich coming from the wealthiest white guy on the planet. And the evidence for this ideology is quite strong for him personally and his organizations.
What’s wrong with appointing a governmental efficiency Czar? Giving control of the largest budget in the world to a biased, illegitimate tech-bro with zero oversight is the answer.
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