As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cut government waste and abuse at record pace, Democrats have done everything in their power to stifle, stymie, and slander Elon Musk and his team. But for decades, it has been Democrats who have claimed to be the vanguard of increasing government efficiency.
In fact, every single Democrat president since 1976 has advocated for limiting the size of government and cutting waste – although those promises translated into precious little action once in office. This time-honored campaign pledge was only abandoned in 2020 by former President Joe Biden (it seems that by then even the pretense of limiting government power had lost its appeal in the Democrat establishment).
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced the “President’s Reorganization Project.” This initiative, which was explicitly aimed at reducing government waste and improving efficiency, was supposed to fundamentally reorganize the federal government – much as Trump and DOGE are trying to do now.
In his inaugural address, Carter stated, “We must streamline the government and make it work more efficiently… We can have an efficient government only if we reorganize it.” This project took the form of a federal committee focused on a top-to-bottom modernization of the executive bureaucracy. In 1978, Carter praised this approach. “The federal government has grown too complex, too costly, and too distant from the people it serves,” he said. “Reorganization is not a one-time effort but a continuing responsibility.”
The program had some laudable, if temporary, achievements. It resulted in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which increased accountability for federal employees. However, it ultimately failed to substantively reduce the size of the government. In fact, it actually led to the creation of both the Department of Education and Energy. Over time, these programs would significantly increase the government’s size.
Carter’s memoir later rationalized away this failure: “We made government less wasteful, even if we didn’t make it as small as some might have wanted.”
Then came Democrat President Bill Clinton. In his 1996 State of the Union Address, he proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” In 1993, he launched the National Performance Review, aimed at shrinking the federal bureaucracy. It envisioned the government as a company and American citizens as customers.
As a result, 377,000 jobs were eliminated from the federal workforce. This shrank the government to its smallest size since the 1960s. Under pressure from congressional Republicans, who won back the House in 1994 following former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s famous “Contract with America” campaign, Clinton also cut $137 billion from the federal budget, equivalent to roughly $330 billion today. As a result, the country had budget surpluses for fiscal years 1998-2001.
The strategies Clinton employed to implement these cuts were strikingly similar to those employed by DOGE. Federal employees are notoriously difficult to fire, even with cause. Thus, Clinton offered large buyouts and generous severance packages for career employees and made common-sense cuts to probationary employees – both methods DOGE has relied on.
In June 2011, President Barack Obama began a government efficiency campaign of his own, signing Executive Order 13576, “Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government.” Like the efforts of his Democrat predecessors, Obama’s program created a large bureaucratic committee that spent years reviewing improper payments and potential redundancies. In 2016, they proudly reported a “$20 billion” reduction from the budget.
“We’re going after fraud and waste with everything we’ve got,” Obama said at the time. Ultimately, however, the initiative amounted to little more than a convenient talking point for Obama during his 2012 re-election bid.
The biggest difference between DOGE and these initiatives led by former Democrat presidents is that DOGE and President Trump are following through on what they promised. Democrats are upset because DOGE is actually cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, not just talking about it.
But Democrats who make opposing DOGE their defining issuedo so at their own peril. While they bemoan that “nobody elected Elon Musk president,” voters did elect Donald Trump president. Trump explicitly promised multiple times that he would empower Musk and DOGE to take the exact actions they are taking now. In this sense, Americans voted for exactly what they are getting from DOGE.
Moreover, Democrats’ hysterical reaction to DOGE exposing Social Security fraud or cutting funding for transgender surgeries in Guatemala, DEI musicals in Ireland, and tourism programs in Egypt is unlikely to win them much sympathy with voters – something they desperately need following a shellacking last November.
Just last week, DOGE revealed that “the U.S. government currently has ~4.6M active credit cards/accounts, which processed ~90M unique transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24.” When Americans see Democrats protesting outside government agencies or calling Elon Musk a “threat to democracy,” they see politicians defending this sort of frivolous spending and enormous waste of taxpayer dollars.
Elected Democrats have for years claimed to want to create exactly the sorts of savings DOGE is now reporting. That they now turn around and cry foul shows that they were never truly committed to making the government more efficient in the first place.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
Here’s a reality check for the author of this article. None of the Democrats mentioned were ever interested in cutting anything when it came to government spending. That is aside from shutting down the DoD, so our enemies could overrun us easier. The entire Democrat Party’s ideology is built around the idea of a bigger, more powerful and all-encompassing federal bureaucracy from which to rule over the country.
The campaign promises, from virtually every Democrat politician, to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse are merely throwaway lines that the party routinely trots out to get their candidates in office. Once elected, those campaign promises are always quickly forgotten and its right back to tax and spend politics as usual.
We finally have a POTUS in Donald Trump, who actually walks the talk and is committed to delivering on what he campaigned on. DOGE, in the form of Musk and his personnel, is the means the President is using to go systematically through the departments and agencies of the federal government and identify the misuses or inefficiencies of taxpayer dollars by the embedded bureaucracy of D.C.
It is up to Congress to adjust the budgets of the various departments and agencies downward, so as to lock in those cost savings on a permanent basis going forward. That is my biggest concern on this whole process, as we are already seeing some squishiness on the part of certain Republican members of Congress to actually doing their part. Lots of talk, but little to no real action in that area.
Dems were never interested in anything except staying in power. The very fact that government has turned into a cesspool of wasteful spending is proof that it’s business as usual if no one is watching. Republicans don’t get a pass either, lifetime politicians and their bureaucrats are responsible for the wasteful mismanagement of American taxpayer’s money and a slap in the face for good measure. Decades of political promises and still it’s the same old story, until now. The current leftist outrage is just as fake as their promises of change, which of course has been exposed. The federal government is the largest employer in the nation and if corruption and mismanagement are not the exception, we’re in really big trouble.
The Credit Card Abuse has cost Tax Payers unknown amounts for decades. Every Department should put the burden of Proof Of Expense on the Employee. On the first of every month an employee submits a total based on receipts submitted to their department for reimbursement of their expenses. If the employee has skin in the game they may spend our Tax Dollars more wisely.
DOGE is the only effort I have seen in my over 7 decades of life that has what it takes to succeed. In my over 4 decades in business, much of which was as a senior executive, I have come to conclusions about what allows an organization to control its out-of-control growth.
1. Reorganization on its own will never achieve significant change. It is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
2. Plans that are based on personal opinion of involved managers alone will never achieve significant change. Few managers will ever admit that what they do is not important and that their employees are irrelevant.
3. It is crucial to examine what the hidden agendas within the organization might be. Much of the time being devoted to “work” may well be in pursuit of a personal agenda or enrichment. (DOGE is quantifying this in spades.)
4. Efforts to “right size” must be driven by a champion or champions who have no personal interest in a particular outcome other than a better functioning organization (Trump/Musk). It is the rare individual who can eliminate him or herself if that is part of the right answer.
5. A new organizational structure must be based on hard data since the needs of the market/world change over time and frequently our belief of what is true does not. We need to understand the truth of the current environment.
DOGE is an effort that has the key ingredients to be successful. That doesn’t mean that getting there will be without messiness, pain, or disagreement, but without this effort we will remain on the unsustainable, inefficient, corrupt path we have today.
Despite all the talk, democrats have never wanted to decrease the size of government. It flies in the face of everything they believe in. How can government be the solution to every problem if they make it smaller. Thank goodness the adults are back in the room.
Thanks for a great article. An eye opener for those in the dark.
I agree with Avoter that republicans are just as guilty as the democrats, especially the RINOs. President Trump has done so much in one month to trim the pork, and he’s eyeing the IRS now. Those hired 86,000 Biden voters need to go!!! And remember, if liberals are having a meltdown over DOGE, it means DOGE is doing its job finding the corruption democrats and RINOs have been hiding all these years. MAGA!!!!
The democrats are crying foul, because Trump gets things done and they haven’t produced anything in the past 4 years or under the 8 years of Obama. You can’t form a committee to reduce waste. They talk it to death, delay before making a decision. Trump was right to put Elon in charge. He finds it, tells it to the people and changes are made. Honesty and transparency gets it done. Social security checks going to 8.7 million people over 100 even one that is 300 years old. And 20 million they don’t even know if they are alive or not. And the dems are upset? No they don’t care that Elon found this. They are scared to death they will be found out their money laundering schemes. Throwing the gold bars off the Titanic as one govt employee said. Biden in the last months of his presidency was giving away billions of dollars. Why? So Trump couldn’t spend it. The taxpayers were punished because they hate Trump. Plus they destroyed America in the process. Just what the billionaires in Davos wanted. After all the dems were not in charge they were. Money is the root of all evil. And we have a president who doesn’t need any. And head of DOGE who could buy any of these Davos billionaires. Oh he is going to see your Soc Sec number. What about all the IRS bureaucrats that see them every day. Are they trustworthy? They were not elected either. What about the trans sex chat group in the NSA. Were they earning their salaries? Elon will discover so much abuse and that is why they are all running scared. Trump is getting too close to the truth. Trump is doing what he promised during the campaign and in a month time he has found so much abuse and corruption. The dems are bowled over. For their control and power is crumbling more every day. That is why they scream and demonstrate and tell lies on the senate floor, right Chuck?
The real difference is that it is Trump doing it. They will fight tooth and nail anythjng he does, no matter how goos it is or how many Americans want it. Face it, so long as he continues to be an uncorrupted businessman President instead of a Democrat political puppet they will try to cross him (and America) at every turn.
So true, President Trump and his able cabinet, are the great new face of the republican party!! Neither of the Bush presidents did much, of course there were wars, but I never even knew the glut of the government personnel. Thanks to President Trump, he is doing our work, and should be given a third term, if he wants it. Biden, somehow got the vote, then his health was hidden from we the people, until it became obvious to even the village idiot, that someone else was our president. Someone that we did not ELECT. The dims hate Musk, but love SOROS, and Soros was not even appointed by any president. Just a thought
To be fair, many Republicans have promised the same thing and never followed through as well.
The Dem’s mantra (according to Peolsi) has always been… what ever the Repub’s want (right or wrong) we must do the opposite. Only in the case of DOGE, that’s a tuff pill to swallow without a “Joker” smile on your face. Hence the attack on Elon and 19 year old “BigBalls”. You could call Elon the anti-christ… its still not going to stop the best POTUS in my lifetime from his mission to MAGA!
Democrats are the embodiment of “Talk big, do little” in our government.
Multiple DIMMs have SAID in the past that they wanted to cut waste and corruption but none ever DID anything about it. Trump and Musk are rooting it out but the big question is: Will the GOP House and Senate actually CUT this excrement out of the budget?
This WAS the job of the IG’s. I’m assuming they got fired because they didn’t do their jobs. I’d actually like someone to do a report on exactly what the IG’s (with their 200K salaries) actually reported and WHY nothing was done. I also do not understand why DOGE cannot be made a separate department, under Commerce perhaps?, which would immediately STOP the complaining about unelected bureaucrats (like the hundreds of thousands of them literally running the government during Biden) doing things. Hire Elon’s geniuses to staff the departments. Every agency now has a DOGE staffer and lawyer assigned. We are only dealing with the very tip of a very large iceberg here, so much more to do. And I want to know WHY the government grew by 40% since COVID?
Anyone who thinks the Democrats have EVER been interested in government efficiency and cutting spending is an idiot. The phrase “Tax and Spend Democrat” didn’t just come out of nowhere.
The more we find out it seems like the “Democrats” have been running an Organized Crime Syndicate inside Our Government!!! As Justice Lewis Brandeis said. “The Best Disinfectant is,…SUNSHINE!”
NOY just the Democrats, but ALL OF CONGRESS. They have, for decades been shirking their their budgetary and oversight responsibilities. It starting with “baseline budgeting” and has continued ever since
Ninety-nine out of one-hundred Spend-o-holic Democrats and worthless RONOs, have NEVER EVER had an interest in balancing, staying within, or reducing ANY BUDGET. They LOVE spending taxpayer money, WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS, and they NEVER proposed or came across a TAX they didn’t absolutely LOVE and WORSHIP. They are the Party of TAX and SPEND. Then they SPEND and TAX. And when they’re done doing that, they TAX and SPEND A WHOLE LOT MORE. UP TO AND WELL BEYOND 36-TRILLION.
Thank God somebody is finally doing something that actually makes sense. The waste and fraud in the government has been worse than most of us realized. Time for the RINO’s to to put their big boy pants on and help President Trump clean up this mess.
This government is like malignant cancer growing and metastasizing. Radical intervention is absolutely necessary to save the nation. No competition in any area of life will produce the disaster like this. As Biden told 14,000 laid off Keystone pipeline workers when he killed it “ learn coding”, maybe these talented hard working government workers can do the same. Our Constitution doesn’t guarantee anyone government job for life.
The MSM keeps referring to murdered hostages as “deceased”, so too is thus government theft referred to as “waste”! The one standout among many is a green company associated to Stacy Abrams which declared holdings worth $100, granted a $2B dollar subsidy by Biden in his last days. An $800 Pentagon toilet seat is a “waste”… this is GRAFT!
The “savings” are highly inflated. So far the only success is great chaos. Similar to haphazard trimming of a hedge. One day you are fired and the next day you get hired back because you were hired for high priority project (e.g. bird flu).
I’d really like for people, including the President, to stop saying the there are thousands or even millions of people over the age of 100 who are receiving Social Security benefits. Here’s the truth about that claim: “A July 2023 Social Security OIG report states that ‘almost none of the number holders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.’ And, as of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.”
It really looks bad to continue to repeat a claim that isn’t true.