Any serious attempt at reducing the deficit would mean confronting one of the largest sectors of the American economy. All of the stuff you mentioned - pointless tests, upcoding fraud, etc - is part of that.
It is not irrational to cut millions in wasteful spending. It is irrational for a department of government efficiency to spend all of its energy cutting random million dollar contracts instead of figuring out how to plan the attack for the confrontation above.
DOGE did not fail because its a hard problem. They failed because they thought it was easy. Taking over a company with a thousand employees is categorically different than revamping the spending of the United States.
DOGE "failed" because cutting the budget wasn't their real goal.
Here are a few outcomes they were able to achieve:
(1) Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk.
(2) Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them.
(3) Copying information from multiple government databases.
(1) had immediate benefits to Musk. (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service. (3) provides numerous long term benefits to Musk and anyone else with access to that data.
> Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk.
Which doesn't make any sense because you don't need to cut their funding when it's your buddies in office. They just don't investigate you anymore regardless of their funding level.
> Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them.
It's obvious why fossil fuel companies (and therefore Trump) would want to do this, but Musk is the guy who does electric cars and grid storage batteries. His financial incentive would be to play up the dangers of climate change.
And this is the same as the first one. If your guy is in office then you don't need to cut the funding of some agency under your own control, you just have them stop doing whatever it is you don't want them to do anymore.
> Copying information from multiple government databases.
The only reason DOGE could copy them to begin with is that they were already in control of the government and therefore already had access to the databases. If you want to complain about something, how about why does the government keep all of this sensitive information instead of encouraging systems that use decentralized identity or don't imply or require mass surveillance in order to operate? Every administration has access to that when they get elected, including the ones you don't like, so let's not have it to begin with.
> (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service.
If this was actually a profitable market then there would be no reason for it to be a government service to begin with. But it isn't, because collecting the data is expensive and there aren't a lot of buyers. If anything getting rid of NOAA would cost SpaceX money because NOAA pays SpaceX to launch satellites, and nobody else is going to do it.
Republicans want to cut NOAA because they publish climate data and the fossil fuel industry is a Republican constituency. But you don't need DOGE for that when the Republicans control Congress.
They were completely feckless at finding the right things to cut but this stuff is conspiracy theories.
> Any serious attempt at reducing the deficit would mean confronting one of the largest sectors of the American economy. All of the stuff you mentioned - pointless tests, upcoding fraud, etc - is part of that.
Which is exactly what they should have been doing. It's blatantly obvious that they failed -- federal spending went up year over year.
But that means the problem remains and someone's going to have to take another go at it.
The budget is determined by what's written on a piece of paper that Congress eventually passes. You don't have to be a member of Congress to be the one drafting it or making recommendations.
I believe their argument was that the Impoundment Act is unconstitutional because Congress can appropriate money for something, and the executive branch can't take that and use it for something else, but Congress doesn't have the power to make them do something with it instead of just not spending it at all. It's basically a checks and balances argument; to get the government to do something you need Congress to appropriate money for it and the President to implement it and if either of them says no then it's not happening.
The executive can't unilaterally declare something is unconstitutional. The impoundment act was passed to prevent exactly this because that's exactly what Nixon did. The executive doesn't make the laws and congress literally already litigated this. If you want it to be unconstitutional then take it up with the supreme court, otherwise you're just indulging in lawlessness. This is a ridiculous argument.
> The executive can't unilaterally declare something is unconstitutional.
Any of the branches can do that. The courts don't need the permission of Congress or the President to strike down a law. Congress doesn't need anyone's permission to refuse to pass something because they think it's unconstitutional.
Consider what prosecutorial discretion is.
> The impoundment act was passed to prevent exactly this because that's exactly what Nixon did.
Congress passed it, but Congress frequently does unconstitutional things and then one of the other branches has to put a stop to it because that's how checks and balances work.
What do you suppose would happen if Congress passed a First Amendment-violating censorship law, the courts struck it down and then Congress passed a second law saying the courts have to uphold the first one?
It is not irrational to cut millions in wasteful spending. It is irrational for a department of government efficiency to spend all of its energy cutting random million dollar contracts instead of figuring out how to plan the attack for the confrontation above.
DOGE did not fail because its a hard problem. They failed because they thought it was easy. Taking over a company with a thousand employees is categorically different than revamping the spending of the United States.