Why Democrats Hate DOGE and Love Waste

Stephen Moore on Apr 1, 2025

If you haven't watched the Bret Baier interviews on Fox News with Elon Musk and the other executives who have given their time and expertise to exposing the rampant fraud and inefficiency of our federal government, I urge you to do so.

It will infuriate you -- and that's what we need right now.

These Department of Government Efficiency volunteers are on a patriotic mission to repair our ship of state. They are hunting down the rats and scoundrels who have played us (we the taxpayers) for fools for so many years. It's the greatest robbery -- more than $1 trillion of fraud and corruption -- in world history.

Yet too many Democrats are reacting as though Musk himself is the scoundrel.

The "Musk-ateers" have marked nearly 10 million Social Security recipients over the age of 120 as deceased. (How many monthly checks were sent out?) How about $10 billion in rent for empty office buildings? Hundreds of millions of dollars for foreign aid programs that went to "nongovernmental government organizations" and then disappeared down a rabbit hole? Billions of dollars in fraudulent Medicaid spending? A federal workforce that has been MIA for three years?

In the wake of this epic failure of governance, nearly every leading Democrat in Washington has protested: "Elon Musk is going too far."

They say that they are against waste too. But former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama never lifted a finger to stop it. Washington hid behind a curtain of plausible deniability, even though we had scores of auditors and inspector general reports spotlighting the continuing raid on our federal fisc.

Ripping off taxpayers is one of the biggest businesses in America. It's so routine that it isn't seen as a criminal action anymore but rather the cost of doing business inside the Beltway. Like paying off the mob.

Why are Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not sharing in our collective outrage? Is it because they knew it was happening all along and feel guilty that they did nothing to stop it?

Or maybe the real answer is that THEY ARE IN ON THE SWINDLE. This could explain how so many politicians spent their careers in Congress and retired as multimillionaires.

In other words, what is most revealing about the Washington slime that we are waking up to in real time thanks to DOGE is that the waste and fraud is the currency of Washington. It pays the bills, and everyone in the swamp gets their cut. Remember: One third of $7 trillion is the stuff of fortunes.

How else does one explain the $2.7 million that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse allegedly directed/laundered to his wife via a nonprofit environmental group she worked for? This would clearly be graft, but it has gone unpunished.

We are living through the harrowing last scene in a Hollywood murder mystery in which you discover that the chief of police was in on it all along.

When confronted with the ocean of evidence of massive fraud In Washington, politicians reflexively change the subject to the rich "not paying their fair share of taxes." Their solution to the culture of waste is to feed the beast with more money.

In reality, perhaps the greatest public service of the Musk-ateers is that they have taught voters that Washington should never get another penny of our tax dollars until the sewer is completely drained and the tens of thousands of fraudsters inside and outside of government are put out of business and hopefully behind bars.

========

Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is "The Trump Economic Miracle."