The hysterical left is, predictably, becoming apoplectic over cuts in proposed spending by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
It's predictable because in the 50 years I've watched politics, the left has never voluntarily cut a single dime from the budget. When leftists are forced by circumstances to cut, they raise taxes and propose massive cuts to defense.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is whining that Trump and Musk aren't being careful enough in cutting spending. He says they're taking a "meat ax" approach to the problem. "Everyone knows there's waste in government and should be cut. But DOGE is using a meat ax and they're cutting things that are efficient and effective," said Schumer.
This is absolutely 100% true. I've been in the "use a scalpel to cut spending" camp for 50 years. It hasn't worked. In fact, the problem of massive overspending has only gotten worse.
There is going to be pain. Anyone who says otherwise knows nothing about the government, how it works, and who it helps. But this may be the very last moment in American history where it's possible to get federal spending under control. If not under control, then at least change the parameters of the debate over spending from "how much" to "should we"?
The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins writes of the disaster that Trump and Musk are trying to rectify.
Mr. Musk is said to be causing chaos but government programs are born in chaos—with congressional horse trading and payoffs to appease interest groups. That’s why government programs make so little organizational sense. Remember when we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it? (“Two thousand pages of nonsense,” said Warren Buffett at the time. “The problem is incentives.”)
Likewise the Biden and Obama administrations received no expert advice that subsidizing green energy would reduce emissions, but the opposite. It didn’t matter. And now perhaps $1 trillion has gone down the hole.
Social Security and Medicare could have been designed for the long haul (as savings programs). Instead, Congresses at the time knowingly gave us the demographic disasters both have become.
The is going to be confusion. Musk has already recommended cuts that are ill-advised, such as massive cuts in medical research. This has caused consternation as patients in the middle of trials have been forced to stop. But this is a consequence of 75 years of post-World War II budgeting that has gotten so out of control that, like a force of nature, it can't be stopped. You can only get out of its way.
Jenkins asks what to me is the question of the century:
Question: How else did our reactionary media imagine a reform movement might be kick-started (and that’s all Mr. Musk is doing) in a federal establishment no longer capable of prioritizing its own efforts and resources intelligently? That can’t control its debt and deficits? That labors in thrall to an administrative state that has steadily lost sight of the common good?
Musk has only lit the fuse. Congress has to set off the bomb by turning Musk's ideas into policy. They have the chance to do this with the reconciliation bill. Republicans will need to steel themselves against backsliding into the old mindset.
Indeed, for everyone (like me) who has asked for decades, "What can be done?" we've finally gotten an answer. Is it the right answer? Not 100%, that's for sure. Throwing out the baby, the bathwater, the dirty diapers, and perhaps even the baby sister at the same time is not the total answer.
Musk hasn't taken a meat ax to the government. He's using a wrecking ball. It's not the way I would have gone about it. And there's no guarantee that the courts will agree with Trump and Musk and enable most of the cutbacks and changes.
I can only hope that when the dust settles, reasonable reform sticks and the unreasonable agencies, departments, and programs are consigned to the ash heap.
