Historians may someday describe the first seven days of Feb. 2025 as the week that Donald Trump, Elon Musk and a host of panic-stricken Democrats exposed beyond any further doubt the ultimate ugly, unavoidable and irredeemable corruption of Big Government.
To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to grasp the amazing preparedness demonstrated by the lightning-fast insertion of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cyber-assault teams into an initial handful of key agencies.
The insertions began with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees the biggest single workforce in America, the 2.3 million federal career civil servants, otherwise known as The Bureaucracy.
Starting at OPM enabled the Trump team to establish quickly a communication link with all of the bureaucrats that was insulated against the host of counter-mechanisms available to the The Bureaucracy, its employee unions, professional associations and academic and media allies.
Thus the first move was offering the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), the extremely generous retirement/buyout offer that immediately set The Bureaucracy and its allies off balance. They expected ham-handed Reductions-in-Force (RIF), which they, quite reasonably, assumed they could defeat, or delay so long that Trump would eventually give up.
Instead, federal employees, with some significant exceptions, were offered the prospect of leaving voluntarily. How many will ultimately accept the offer? It appears unofficially at this writing that perhaps as many as 80,000 will do so. However many it actually proves to be, the offer achieved its underlying purpose of throwing the opposition off balance.
Then, as the DRP bombshell impact spread, other DOGE cyber-assault teams were inside Treasury and USAID. Here's how one account describes the scene at Treasury:
"In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.
"'We're in,' Akash Bobba messaged the team. 'All of it.'
"Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades.
"This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption."
This was the unthinkable for The Bureaucracy and the Deep State. The deepest inner workings of cashflow streams, managerial end-runs, dummy corporations, contract amendments, deceptive administrative guidance and a host of other techniques used to conceal the operations of the federal Leviathan were suddenly exposed, or clearly in jeopardy of being washed in the disinfectant of sunlight.
At the same time, the USAID cyber-assault team exposed a second series of explosive revelations designed both to throw the opposition further off balance and into a panic, and to put undeniable muscle on the Trump narrative of a corrupt, wasteful, fraud-ridden federal establishment.
Here's the devastatingly precise way the Trump White House Press Office laid out the USAID revelations:
- $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”
- $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland
- $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
- $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia
- $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru
- $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala
- $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt
- Hundreds of thousands of dollars for a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations — even AFTER an inspector general launched an investigation
- Millions to EcoHealth Alliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab
- “Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria”
- Funding to print “personalized” contraceptives birth control devices in developing countries
- Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban
"The list literally goes on and on — and it has all been happening for decades."
That last line set the narrative, at least for the foreseeable near-future. Readers are advised to reach a bit further into the historical context of this narrative with an understanding of how long the rot has been ingrained in federal spending, and how some heroes of a previous conservative generation took actions against stifling opposition that set the stage for what we see happening today.
The left has responded as the Trump team expected — panic-stricken screams of incoherent protest, ridiculously empty threats of "resistance," and the revealing spectacle of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and a brigade of her similarly deranged colleagues threatening a lone heroic career bureaucrat at the Department of Education who barred their way.
What's next? The report quoted above about the Treasury cyber-assault puts it this way in a listing summarizing the transformation:
Real-time tracking replaced quarterly reports.
Algorithmic oversight replaced review boards.
Local solutions replaced federal mandates.
Results replaced process.
And this:
"The permanent bureaucracy had long operated on a simple assumption: presidents come and go, but they remain. That assumption now lay shattered, replaced by a new reality: when preparation meets presidential determination, nothing is permanent.
"'They thought we'd slow down,' [Vice-President JD] Vance said, studying real-time data flows across agencies. 'They thought we'd get bogged down in process. They thought we'd play by their rules.'
"He smiled. "Instead, we're just getting started.'"
Speaking as a veteran of the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, I must admit to being thrilled by these developments. The frustrating decades of Republican failure to consolidate hard-fought gains, and the GOP's lingering inability to counter the left's dominant narrative have been painful.
Maybe, just maybe, now things will be different, and our grandchildren will enjoy much the same individual liberty as we have. As Reagan said, we all have a "rendezvous with destiny."
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