It’s amazing to see how angry the Democrats are at Donald Trump’s efforts to curb wasteful spending. From regular cries of “Nobody voted for Elon Musk!” to “We’re in a constitutional crisis,” the message from the Democrats is clear.
They believe that neither Trump nor the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have the legal right to cut wasteful spending without congressional approval, citing the Constitution's allocation of the power of the purse to Congress. After Trump announced DOGE's formation, criticisms intensified, especially when it took actions like pausing foreign aid.
"An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government," declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Scary stuff right? And of course, we’ve seen an abundance of legal challenges from state attorneys general, who have no legal standing in this matter, suing the Trump administration and getting left-wing judges to go along with their argument.
Ironically, for all the doomsday predictions from the Democrats about what’s happening, the fact is that Trump isn’t doing anything that past Democrat administrations have previously asserted the authority to do.
Even Barack Obama.
On Nov. 9, 2011, Obama signed an executive order to cut waste and promote efficient spending throughout the federal government.
“Well, from the day I took office, one of the commitments that I made to the American people was that we would do a better job here in Washington in rooting out wasteful spending,” Obama said when he signed the executive order. “At a time when families have had to cut back, have had to make some tough decisions about getting rid of things that they don’t need in order to make the investments that they do, we thought that it was entirely appropriate for our governments and our agencies to try to root out waste, large and small, in a systematic way.”
Related: BOOM: DOGE Gets a Sweet Victory in Court
“Now, this does mean making some tough choices,” he continued. “It means cutting some programs that I think are worthy but we may not be able to afford right now. A lot of the action is in Congress and legislative and budget. I know the joint committee on trying to reduce our deficits are [sic] engaged in a very difficult conversation right now, and we want to encourage them to complete their work. But in the meantime, we don’t need to wait for Congress in order to do something about wasteful spending that’s out there.”
Obama even called out Congress for not doing more, necessitating his stepping in.
“Cutting waste, making government more efficient, is something that leaders in both parties have worked on,” he explained. “We haven’t seen as much action out of Congress as we’d like, and that’s why we launched, on our own initiative, the campaign to cut waste. Not just to cut spending but to make government work better for the American people.”
Sounds a lot like DOGE, doesn’t it? Obama technically created DOGE back in 2014.
"It was Barack Obama who founded DOGE," Marc Thiessen told Fox News earlier this week. "So DOGE is actually the U.S. DOGE service, which was under Obama the U.S. Digital Service, which brought in tech bros — kids from Google —as presidential innovation fellows and deployed them, in his words, as SWAT teams to the government agencies to innovate and change, cut spending. So this is Barack Obama's idea."
WATCH: Fox’s @marcthiessen: “It was Barack Obama who founded DOGE, the U.S. DOGE service, which under Obama was the U.S. digital service that brought in tech bro’s - kids from Google - as presidential innovation fellows and deployed them in his words as ‘swat teams’ to the… pic.twitter.com/19mpKfo5P0
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) February 14, 2025
Now, when a Democrat claims he or she wants to cut waste, that’s about as believable as someone from Planned Parenthood claiming she wants to reduce the number of abortions. Nevertheless, Obama did sign an executive order to reduce wasteful spending and to make government more efficient, yet curiously, not a single Democrat claimed that it caused a constitutional crisis.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member