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There's a new DOGE savings indicator on the real-time U.S. Debt Clock, and as I write these words, it just ticked off $90.3 billion in savings. DOGE chief Elon Musk wants to knock ONE TRILLION DOLLARS right out of the federal ballpark this year. To do that, his team needs to eliminate about $4 billion a day. If we don't count President Donald Trump's first day in office, mostly spent with the swearing-in and various well-earned inauguration parties, DOGE has averaged about $4.06 billion a day.
That's what winning feels like, but today, I'd like to talk about the losers and what they'll miss the most: other people's money.
You might have already read reports right here at PJ Media about the fraud and waste underlying so much of Washington's $7 trillion budget. The most notorious examples (so far — DOGE has hardly begun on Medicare or Defense) are probably from USAID, a $40 or $50 billion slush fund ostensibly for the benefit of the world's needy. Assuming, that is, that the world's neediest wear nice suits and live in the NOVA/D.C. area. It was just last week I learned that out of the $4 billion earmarked for Haitian relief, only 2% of it ever made it to Haiti.
An astounding 56% stayed right there in D.C. while the remaining 41% went to the mysterious and unaccountable "Other." Sally Struthers was brutally mocked for her Feed the Children ads in the 1980s and '90s, but at least the Christian Children’s Fund fed hungry kids in Africa instead of serving Wagyu beef and fine Cabernets to the well-connected at Washington's RARE Steakhouse & Tavern.
"I've covered this for years," Sharyl Attkisson posted on X this week. "It's mind-boggling even for a journalist who's seen a lot of Washington waste, fraud, and abuse. Particularly the nonchalance with which the system seems to accept it and factor it in as part of the program and expenses."
"Nonchalance" is the word I'd been searching for these last few weeks as the DOGE boys began making their data-nerds way through our rotten finances, starting at USAID. There was never any concern shown for the people whose taxes provide for Washington's largesse, just a presumption that the unelected are free to spend as they please while it's our duty to pay up.
Not even a new president, running on a platform of rooting out waste and corruption, was believed by the Left to have any authority over his own branch of government to do as promised. My RedState colleague Bonchie showed Wednesday what he called "one of the most mask-off moments to occur since the election."
"Scott Jennings gets CNN to say the quiet part out loud: That they believe their proclamations of qualification should override elections."
"CNN guest Nick Ackerman let the mask slip during a panel discussion on Wednesday evening," Virginia Kruta wrote for the Daily Wire, "making it clear that he had no problem with working to nullify the results of an election if he believed the person who ultimately won was unqualified."
Here's the clip.
This is one of the most mask-off moments to occur since the election.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) February 12, 2025
Scott Jennings gets CNN to say the quiet part out loud: That they believe their proclamations of qualification should override elections.
pic.twitter.com/pQfFORWrAz
Ackerman for-real argued that spending has "got nothing to do with elections."
"Entitlements" is supposed to refer to social welfare programs paid for with payroll taxes because you're (in theory) entitled to what you paid for. But in reality, "entitled" is the perfect word for how executive-branch Mandarins and their enablers in the legacy media feel about your money.
$2.7 trillion in fraudulent payments in the last 20 years? Who cares? It's just other people's money.
Some are desperate enough to hint strongly at violence if Trump and DOGE succeed in derailing the gravy train. "This will be a congressional fight, a constitutional fight, a legal fight, and on days like this a street fight, yes we will stand," Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) said this week.
There are trillions of dollars in other people's money at stake. We'll be lucky in the extreme if there isn't violence.
How'd our sleepy little federal government become such a ravenous beast?
FDR did more to permanently expand the size of the federal government than anyone before him and, most damaging to our Constitution, he changed our expectations of what the federal government could and ought to do — without ever bothering with any of that pesky amendment process.
Even so, FDR at least paid lip service to being a good steward of the taxpayers' money and was famously against public service unions. "One sure way to determine the social conscience of a Government is to examine the way taxes are collected and how they are spent," he said during a 1936 address at Worcester, Mass. In a 1937 letter to Luther C. Steward, President of the National Federation of Federal Employees, FDR wrote, "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service" and that public worker strikes were "unthinkable and intolerable."
FDR certainly lied during his first campaign for president when he promised to reduce federal spending by 25%. Every mistake he accused Herbert Hoover of making at the start of the Depression, FDR would quadruple down on — to disastrous results. We can argue over whether he was a good steward of tax dollars (he wasn't). I can only give him partial credit for his stance against public worker unions because he's the one who did so much to establish a large and permanent bureaucracy that would eventually demand and get unionization.
Also to blame is the civil service that was "professionalized" more than a century ago — which is to say, "entrenched." An early win for progressives — although they wouldn't call themselves that for a few more years — was the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act that morphed over time to give us what we now call the Deep State.
The intent in 1883 was to clean up the corruption of the old spoils system. What happened is that the progressives achieved their goal of establishing a permanent cadre of civil masters whose regulatory reach would eventually extend into every facet of American life.
On the day Presidentish Joe Biden was sworn into office four years ago, I published a piece with the tongue-in-cheek headline, "Two Cheers for Corruption." I stole it from Irving Kristol's "Two Cheers for Capitalism." His premise was that only the divine could be worth three cheers, but he could give a really solid two for free markets.
My premise was that, humans still not being angels, we could either cope with the petty corruption of having a small bureaucracy that got swept out every four or eight years under the presidential spoils system, or we could saddle ourselves with the far worse corruption of an untouchable Mandarin class.
We’d have been better off with the petty corruption of patronage, kept small because Washington was small.
Presidents come and go, some even promising to drain the uniparty swamp.
But Washington’s supposedly uncorrupted army of bureaucrats soldiers on, largely untouched and untouchable.
So, if you’ll allow me to corrupt the famous phrase: Two cheers for corruption!
We chose poorly, and here's where we've been for decades: with a two-million-strong federal behemoth enjoying zero accountability and no respect or concern for the American public. The trend accelerated under Barack Obama, the first president since Woodrow Wilson to fully weaponize the federal government against his political enemies. By the time the Biden Cabal took power, Obama's comparative moderation in weaponization was replaced by YOLO.
It's probably because Obama was pulling the strings and figured he wouldn't take the blame from behind the scenes.
Then came Trump 2.0, the DGAF Edition.
Maybe most dispiriting to our over-privileged and overconfident Permanent Mandarin Class is that they no longer enjoy air superiority over us rubes. "Air superiority" in this context is an old joke — not a funny joke — about how the left owned the airwaves. Tens of millions of people tuned into one of the Big Three network news programs each night and saw what they were supposed to see. Cable fractured the Big Three in the Big Several, but the internet changed everything. (Please slap me with a dead carp the next time you see me leaning on that cliche.)
Slowly, at first, with the advent of blogs and then rapidly (not to mention thoroughly) with the rising popularity of long-form podcasts and the return (if incomplete) of free speech to Twitter/X. Nothing makes the Left's loss of air superiority clearer than new Rasmussen data shared yesterday with the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard.
Rasmussen found that "55% of voters believe Democrats should work with Trump," while only 36% said Democrats should resist “in every way possible.” Translation: cutting waste is a winning issue — and one that Dems used to be able to manipulate to their advantage with help from the legacy media showing how every cut would starve a child or kick a retiree out on the street.
Going further, Rasmussen "found that the image of the party has sunk further since Trump returned to the White House," with only 15% of voters agreeing that Democrats have "gotten better" since the election, while "42% believe Democrats have gotten worse since losing last November."
Bedard also reported that "55% of likely voters said that they approve of Musk heading DOGE," and 52% have a favorable impression of Musk, "while an overwhelming 86% said it is important to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in government." For the first time in my memory, real savings are being found, and there's broad approval of them.
That's a game-changer. Here's another: Trump's approval rating has never been higher, despite being impeached twice, brought up on phony civil and criminal charges, and 10 solid years of demonization. Musk's approval is right up there with Trump's, even after a week's worth of "HE DID THE NAZI SALUTE!" accusations flooding the zone.
How are Democrats taking the news? They wake up in the morning and down 100 milligrams of Copium ("Ask your doctor if Copium is right for you.") with a double shot of warm vodka.
When you've just been rejected by voters for, in part, weaponizing mental illness and the rest of the Woke nonsense, and then you find you're on the wrong side of an 86/14 issue like eliminating government waste, you might hide your craziest party members in the attic and get on board the DOGE train, if only long enough to try and derail it from the inside.
But no.
THIS is the Democrat response:
A Democrat rep just claimed "manufacturing" is a sexist term because it has "man" in it.
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) February 12, 2025
We just might win the next few elections if they keep this dumb sht up. pic.twitter.com/mqoeow1FYj
And this:
This is the person Congressional Democrats just put in charge of their rapid response task force.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) February 12, 2025
No, I'm not kidding. pic.twitter.com/eFb9qj1uDo
And so is this:
#MassRecap from yesterday includes: #Worcester becoming a sanctuary city for trans they/thems, and the arrest of yet another illegal immigrant animal on multiple counts of child r*ape. #Massachusetts has a brand. Waking up yet folks? pic.twitter.com/64BwhpA7Q4
— Edward Coyle (@SirEdwardCoyle) February 13, 2025
Democrats in 2025 are the French Bourbon dynasty in 1816, about whom Tallyrand said, "They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing" after having been out of power for almost a quarter of a century, including a few beheadings.
The difference is that the Bourbons had just been restored to power while the Democrats, if they don't change their ways, look to be out of power — and out of other people's money — for a good, long while.
It's a good thing, too, because we are the other people, and we've been tapped out.
Recommended: The Left's Endgame: Are You Not Entertained?
