REUTERS
Bret Baier’s interview with Elon Musk and DOGE leadership was so good you wonder why they waited so long to speak to the American people directly.
The conversation not only let taxpayers put names and faces behind the effort, it helped DOGE clarify the agency’s mission.
Democrats like to portray DOGE as a gang of extremists armed with hatchets recklessly hacking away at critical government services.
What we saw was not only an impressive group, but thoughtful about the government’s critical functions.
We shouldn’t overstate DOGE’s capacity to fix our extravagant spending problem — that’s Congress’ job.
Still, Musk’s goal of reducing the deficit by a trillion dollars, dropping federal spending from $7 trillion to $6 trillion — a 14% cut — would be a bigger cut than any in government history.
If DOGE fulfills its goal within the 130-day time frame Elon promised, it may well become the first government agency in history to do a job on time.
And the job is vital.
Everyone understands on a theoretical level that the government is especially inefficient and wasteful.
Hearing DOGE engineers and experts explain how those billions are misused, and how they plan on fixing the problem, makes it more real.
Musk told Baier, for instance, about a National Parks Service survey system that cost $800 million.
Now, that’s bad enough, right?
It turns out, the survey had no feedback loop, meaning the answers went into the abyss.
Why does the federal government have 4 million credit cards for 2 million employees?
Why does the IRS employ 1,400 people whose only job it is to hand out laptops and cellphones?
Then again, it’s not just about money.
It’s about changing the reckless culture of DC.
DOGE’s Tom Krause noted that the Treasury Department uses “one bank account” to make trillions in federal payments.
If the government were a corporation, it would not only be “impossible” for it to pass an audit, but the leadership would likely be in jail.
One of themes that kept popping during Baier’s interview with DOGE was federal government usage, despite its massive budget, of precariously antiquated technology.
DOGE’s Brad Smith told Baier that the National Institute for Health has 700 separate IT systems.
The agency, which has grown to house an incredible 27 different sub-centers, can’t communicate about fiscal issues or share scientific data.
Then again, the NIH has 27 Chief Information Officers to explain it all, all of them making a nice salary and pension, no doubt.
Aram Moghaddassi, a computer engineer working for DOGE, pointed out that the government spends $100 billion each year funding outmoded systems, some of which have been around for 50 years.
The retirement papers of federal workers are still filled out by hand and sent to a giant mine in Pennsylvania for storage. DOGE is going to digitize them.
Democrats like to attack DOGE by saying it’s trying to destroy Social Security from the inside.
To me, it sounds like it is helping save it by cutting down fraud.
Moghaddassi estimates that somewhere around 40% of calls made to the Social Security Administration regarding banking changes for payments are fraudulent.
Over 15 million people over the age of 120 are marked as alive in the system.
And because systems can’t speak to each other, fraudsters use Social Security numbers — including those of toddlers — to take out things like small business loans.
Sure, DOGE has made some mistakes, as Elon admitted.
It quickly corrected them.
That’s to be expected of any program.
Considering the government’s lack of spending transparency — and the sheer size of the project — it must be extraordinarily difficult not to make more of them.
Democrats often dismiss these cuts as drops in the bucket.
It’s true.
The only way to change the spending trajectory is to cut one billion at a time.
What’s really mind boggling is that anyone who genuinely cares about the future of the country opposes the mission of DOGE.