As Elon Musk steps back from his role at the Department of Government Efficiency, making the savings his team found stick is now in Congress’s hands.
A dynamic group of predominantly young tech enthusiasts from DOGE exposed astonishing cases of fraud and wastefulness—from a physical location where all federal government employee resignations are manually processed to the filing of millions in fraudulent unemployment claims with birth dates set 15 years in the future.
Despite the excitement, uproar, and sheer panic over DOGE’s allegedly extreme actions, the department’s real authority was largely confined to the termination of grants and contracts. This limitation significantly restricted the potential amount of savings that could be achieved.
Much of the discretionary spending it lined up for the chopping block was approved by Congress, and Congress alone can decide its fate.
Republicans make sure that DOGE’s efforts aren’t fruitless, and should, as quickly as possible.
Initially, the plan is to pass the $9.4 billion “rescissions package” scheduled for delivery to the House by the White House on Tuesday, intending to retract $8.3 billion in foreign aid from the African Development Foundation and the US Agency for International Development.
USAID, which Team Trump has near-totally dismantled, absolutely deserves such a slash: It bankrolled a mess of beyond-parody projects, like sending terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki to college and improving LGBT workplace inclusion in Serbia.
The package will also yank $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees PBS and NPR.
NPR and PBS long ago abandoned their role as nonpartisan public resources; both should have to rely on the non-government funding they insist dwarfs what the feds now provide.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to bring the package to the floor pronto and get it passed; the Senate should follow suit.
But $9.4 billion is barely a drop in the bucket of the $1.9 trillion deficit, and far below the $175 billion in savings that DOGE touts on its website — a figure that represents more than $1,000 per US taxpayer if Congress can keep following up.
That means the recessions package can only be the start: The next round of federal budgeting must aim to translate the majority of the DOGE savings into law, over the screams of special interests and other feeders at the federal trough, Democratic distortions amplified by the lefty media, and the fears of weaker-willed Republicans.
Once agencies get used to their bloated budgets, wrenching money (no matter how ill-spent) back is an exercise in teeth-pulling; expect a lot of kicking and screaming.
Though Musk won’t be as hands-on at DOGE, the department’s work isn’t over; much of the team he hired will stick around, battling the fund-sucking bureaucracy.
Some DOGE employees have been embedded into permanent roles at other agencies to keep on cutting waste, such as Jeremy Lewin at the State Department, and Stephanie Holmes and Tyler Hassen at the Interior.
Musk didn’t hit the (always unlikely) $2 trillion-in-savings goal he had on Day 1 of DOGE, but the effort drew crucial attention to Uncle Sam’s incomparable talent for misspending taxpayer money.
The cat is out of the bag; as voters long suspected, the feds are taking way more money than they need.
DOGE started the war on waste; now it’s up to Republicans in Congress to finish the job.
