OPINION:
Rumors are swirling in Washington about the next targets of the Department of Government Efficiency. On Jan. 20, President Trump commissioned the agency to poke around federal finances in search of waste, fraud and abuse.
That stirred Uncle Sam’s beneficiaries into a frenzy. More than 1,000 idle government employees and activists rallied outside the Treasury Department on Tuesday to express outrage over the role of Elon Musk, the leader of DOGE.
Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, suggested that the world’s richest man was raiding the public coffers to enrich himself. “You want to use our money to go to Mars,” she claimed. “Nobody elected you. You think you’re the pope. … We’re going to stop you right now. … He is a low-down, dirty person.”
Other senators got even more personal by attacking the computer engineering whiz kids Mr. Musk hired. “We don’t pledge allegiance to the creepy 22-year-olds working for Elon Musk. … Every one of us has a duty to stand up to this fraud …,” Sen. Christopher Murphy shouted. “We have days to stop the destruction of our democracy.”
“We have to fight this in the streets,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat, threatened.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back by noting that Mr. Trump is doing exactly what he promised: “He campaigned across this country with Elon Musk vowing that Elon was going to head up the Department of Government Efficiency, and the two of them, with a great team around them, were going to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it’s accountable to American taxpayers.”
Democrats simultaneously swarmed the D.C. federal courthouse with lawsuits begging a judge to command Mr. Trump to resume spending the public’s money with abandon. One lawsuit says DOGE has failed to abide by open meeting rules. Another incorrectly states that DOGE can’t do what it’s doing because it’s not a government agency.
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s happening. DOGE isn’t new. It’s a rebranded version of an existing agency, the U.S. Digital Service. DOGE teams are a combination of special government employees and existing federal employees assigned to the task.
President Obama created the U.S. Digital Service to do what it’s doing now. The agency explained, “To improve these services, USDS hires mission-driven professionals into term-limited ‘tours of civic service.’ By working alongside civil servants, they help address some of the most critical needs.”
Under President Biden, the U.S. Digital Service went inside 31 government agencies, including the IRS and Social Security Administration, in 2024 to enhance the efficiency of their technical systems.
Because of this, Mr. Musk cheekily refers to himself as “White House tech support” and has assembled a remarkable squad of professionals to decipher our government’s impenetrable budgets. Democrats are ridiculing the young men involved, some as young as 19, suggesting they’re not qualified.
One team member, Luke Farritor, is best known for being the first man to read words written on a charred papyrus scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. In the 18th century, archaeologists discovered a trove of these ancient texts, most of which were fragile lumps of coal that turned to dust with any attempt to unroll and examine them.
Faced with what had been impossible for centuries, Mr. Farritor created an algorithm that revealed words concealed within the all-black images returned when the artifacts were X-rayed. Finding budgetary waste buried under a mountain of bloat is trivial by comparison.
Let’s hope this great team pays a visit to the Federal Reserve soon.
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