The liberal Democrats now ostensibly so outraged about unelected consultant Elon Musk cataloguing government waste under the auspices of D.O.G.E. (the Department Of Government Efficiency) weren’t so outraged a decade and a half ago when computer consultants cleaning up the messy, failed launch of Obamacare used essentially the same electronic infrastructure to start keeping better track of health outlays. The USDS sites that were then the U.S. Digital Service are now becoming the similarly-acronymed U.S. DOGE Service.
I was genuinely pleased back then by Obama and his Republican opponent in the presidential race, the since-deceased John McCain, both claiming they wanted to use accessible computer records to make government more “transparent” to all citizens and to make spending better accounted-for. That may have been the last time in my life I felt anything resembling bipartisan optimism. The victorious Obama said that open, online budget records would permit any citizen to track the expenditure of every government dollar all the way down to the locality and small-scale grant that finally used the money.
Realistically, today, D.O.G.E. mocking vast swathes of federal spending may be the closest thing to fiscal sanity we can hope for.
To the many liberals and leftists now screaming in pain as if basic accounting and accountability are sacrilege, as if only long-time federal employees can be trusted to spend wisely—and even to some conservatives and libertarians who are in a procedure-following huff because D.O.G.E. is purportedly not operating through normal channels—I must ask: how well was your preferred method for cutting government waste working?
Pick your favorite target, be it HUD or corporate subsidies or (the only part of government most liberals can imagine spending unwisely) the Pentagon. Has it gotten any smaller? If instead it’s been spending all this time and that’s supposedly helping, has it, say, even upgraded its desktop computers in a decade? Are you sure?
More likely, the average D.O.G.E.-hating, snotty online liberal has been systematically ignoring government’s errors since at least the aforementioned Obama administration—and likely cheered back then as the recent humanities graduates working at sites like Salon or thinktanks like Demos cranked out near-daily articles calling for government expansion and increased spending, all the while fancying themselves warm-hearted and caring people. Because, hey, at least they weren’t a bunch of no-good, heartless Republicans.
To reassure themselves they were the nice, soft-hearted ones, the liberals would take time away from taxing and regulating us all to giggle and applaud at our culture’s overwhelming left-leaning entertainment fare, things like The Daily Show. Yet now, as they sternly rally behind government bureaucracy to defend it from citizen inquiries and complaints, they sound like nothing so much as Biden’s Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks on CSPAN laughing with scorn at former Daily Show host (and, I think, genuine moderate at heart) Jon Stewart for trying to get her to admit that hundreds of billions of dollars in spending being unaccounted for is rightly suspected by us normal, non-expert folk of being an indicator of “waste.”
I guess liberals just want us to trust government blindly, the way religious fanatics do God. D.O.G.E. is the opposite of this monstrous, earthly God.
Even by hardcore pro-democracy standards, liberals denouncing Musk don’t have much cause for saying D.O.G.E. is a turn for the worse. According to a disgusted former staff member at the Democratic National Committee, the person who was really running the White House for the last several months of the Biden administration—thus arguably the most powerful person in the world for a short time—was none other than unelected, philandering, crack-smoking international criminal Hunter Biden, son of the nominal then-president.
Where were all the freaked-out experts with Ph.D.’s in political science during that troubling episode? If they were unaware of it, will they make up for lost time by complaining about it now that they know? Of course not. Then again, I admit the fast-living Hunter bears some resemblance to the right’s fast-living, irreverent tech bros, for good or ill.
And to those embarrassing anti-D.O.G.E. libertarians and conservatives, I say that while the Democrats give us things like five former treasury secretaries whining about Musk, Musk talks about using libertarian former Congressman Ron Paul to oversee an unprecedented and sorely needed audit of, yes, the Federal Reserve. If you’re against that, if you’d prefer to wait for the centrist establishment to get around to cleaning its own stable, it may be time to tweak your likely already-mushy political label from “moderate libertarian” or “classical liberal” or whatever you’ve been using to just plain “socialist.”
Nothing’s perfect—not D.O.G.E., not you, but certainly not the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the kind of cold-blooded, autocratic ignoramus in whose hands the Democrats and half of academia would happily leave our fiscal fate (really: she had lots of support in the academy).
Ron Paul understands both dog imagery and the need to “drain the swamp”—as you may recall from that inspiring presidential campaign ad of his from over a decade ago. After decades of the political right, almost as badly as the left, putting such audits and spending cuts on the back burner for an ever-changing list of higher but supposedly temporary priorities—war, drug-suppressing, drug-subsidizing, religion, maybe rural communitarianism next—give D.O.G.E. and its pals a chance to romp before we all go broke.
On some level, even Hunter Biden and Bo Obama may have wanted it this way.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
