The Morning Briefing: Shutdowns Are Great Reminders of How Little Government We Need

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Clozenrelph enjoyed the occasional cheese Danish and a beer to get ready for a busy day of cataloguing Bea Arthur memorabilia.

Those of us who are firmly in the small-government camp have had a rough go of it seemingly forever. No matter who we elect or what activist organizations we get behind, the federal behemoth grows like a cancer that spreads through abuse of the American taxpayer. It's easy to blame the Democrats and the fact that government is their god, but Republicans haven't been much use when it comes to federal belt-tightening.

That changed when President Donald Trump returned for his second stint in the Oval Office, the one with the decidedly scorched-earth vibe. His mercurial friendship with Elon Musk led to the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was given a mandate to take a machete to the federal bureaucratic bloat.

Despite the very public breakup between President Trump and Elon Musk, DOGE has been chugging along, trimming financial fat wherever it can. The work hasn't been grabbing a lot of headlines — accounting isn't very sexy and sensational — but it's more important news than any of the No Kings diaper-filling. This is from something that Catherine wrote yesterday:

Your taxpayer dollars and mine were paying for a special makeup artist at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — that is, until DOGE got involved.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut contracts with a ceiling value of around $17 billion altogether over the last three weeks. It seems as if the waste and fraud in our federal government is endless, and DOGE has to wade through an absolute mountain of corrupt insanity as it tries to restore fiscal responsibility to the government.
DOGE usually releases a contract update at the end of every week. On Oct. 18, DOGE shared the results of its work from the previous four days. During that time, DOGE helped agencies end 150 wasteful contracts that altogether possessed a ceiling value of $3.2 billion and will represent a savings of $240 million.

Talking about saving millions from a multi-trillion dollar budget can seem like talking about ounces when one needs to lose 300 pounds, but as the old saying goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. (That was quite the variety of measurement units in one sentence.)

For years, I've semi-jokingly said that if I ran the federal government, it could all be done from a small office building in the District of Columbia or Virginia. After the military, my list of things that the federal government needs to do is rather brief. Unfortunately, I don't live in my perfect world; if I did, beer wouldn't make me fat. It would be great if there were some functional middle ground between my version of the federal government and what the Democrats want, but that seems like a rather naive hope.

We're now three weeks into the latest government shutdown, and I feel like my version of how things should be is validated more every day. The supposedly tragic consequences of a shutdown that Congressional Democrats wail about never manifest themselves out here in the real world. Sure, there are some rough times for the Virginia counties that have gotten wealthy from fleecing American taxpayers, but beyond that, most of the country is proceeding apace with life as usual.

The reality is this — a vast majority of the federal bureaucracy could disappear overnight and most of us wouldn't notice. As I wrote in my classic book Don't Let the Hippies Shower, the federal bureaucracy exists solely to bloat and perpetuate itself." It seeks to forever redefine "unnecessary."

A point that Republicans need to learn how to make when arguing with Democrats is that the government is not inherently good. It shouldn't have any sacred place in any discussion.

Oh, yeah, and the Democrats' vision of "the government" is grotesque.

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