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Harder Than We Thought |
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By Jeffrey Tucker |
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Commentary
Did you see Elon Musk’s latest interview with Joe Rogan? It covered some details concerning what DOGE has discovered in the course of their work over the last month and ten days.
It is not pretty. He explained more about the early problem they had discovered at the U.S. Treasury. The outgoing payment systems had not been monitored, audited, or even looked at by an elected official or outside appointee since 1945 or possibly earlier. There were nearly $5 trillion in payments flying out without any tag linking to Congressional authorization or a source of authority.
Musk said that DOGE has changed this so that the systems now have to comply with normal accounting standards that prevail in the business world. He estimates that this one change will save $100 billion. He further explains that such a shabby system builds in a strange bias always to keep paying no matter what. That’s easier than having to deal with individuals, nonprofits, or companies and their protests against getting cut off.
In other words, if you have a system through which unlimited amounts of money flow, and no one is really incentivized to care that it is being used well, and no professionals in place tasked with the job of stopping leakage, it can continue forever until bankruptcy. And it would have too, but for the Trump administration’s demand for a change.
For the first time since the Second World War, the U.S. Department of Treasury now has a fiscal assistant secretary who was not chosen from within the ranks of the bureaucracy. There have only been 15 people in this position over 85 years, and they all came from within the system.
It’s going to take a long time for all of this to flesh itself out to become an accountable system. It does not help that federal judges are busy issuing panicked injunctions against DOGE, thwarting their access to many departments. Those interventions are being litigated now.
Musk said that taking on the waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government is a challenge beyond anything he has ever confronted. He is learning quickly but he also seemed rather frustrated and exhausted—not yet beaten but mostly just overwhelmed.
It’s truly hard to imagine the scale of what he has taken on here. We might as well get used to it. This is not going to be solved anytime soon. In the scheme of things, it appears that perhaps DOGE has dug into a tiny percentage of the problems, and is only in a position to make recommendations consistent with executive orders.
This whole plan mapped out over years before inauguration is brilliant beyond belief, especially when you consider the thick and nearly impenetrable walls that have separated elected leaders from the actual functioning of government. What they have achieved is without precedent in the postwar period, but the fallout from the changes will take a very long time to reveal itself.
When you consider the clouds of secrecy surrounding government finance—money going out and money coming in—it just makes the mind race with fear and dread about what might be going on behind the scenes. Given that trust in government is at an all-time low, it is highly likely that a substantial number of people are of the intuitive position that the whole thing is really a racket.
Musk further presented a revealing explanation of the rise of NGOs, or non-government organizations, which is the international name for what in the United States are called nonprofits. He explained that many are funded by government, which does not quite make sense. You cannot have a government-funded non-government organization but that is precisely the point. Elon explained that NGOs emerged as a means by which government can achieve objectives that would otherwise be circumscribed by law, such as censorship or election interference.
Looked at from this point of view, it is remarkable that this has gone on as long as it has.
Another issue concerns personnel. Last week, the Office of Personnel Management put out an email asking all federal workers to describe in five points what they did last week. A million people complied but another one million plus did not bother, or possibly did not check the email at all.
After a few days, we gained more insight into why they were doing this. They wanted to discover precisely how many people on the federal payroll are actually working for the government. DOGE had developed an intuition that vast numbers of these people either do not exist or just pretend to work.
Now another email has gone out to cross-check the second responses with the first responses. It’s a good guess that only half will reply, the same half as before. At this point, the administration will have a sense of how to begin cutting the payroll. Maybe it will be 10 percent or maybe it will be 50 percent. We just have to see.
It’s this way with many of the revelations that are being presented to us now. We find them shocking and wonder how the public could have tolerated this level of waste, fraud, and abuse for so long. Many of these revelations are not new. But consider that in the past, there was very little that anyone could do about it. The politicians and the voters had long ago given up hope of changing the system.
That is the real difference between then and now. It appears that we have some hope of actually seeing the system change. This hope had been pent up for decades, and only unleashed now given the counterrevolutionary times in which we live. The grand demand is that the government live by the same standards as the rest of us. That’s not too much to ask but most people long ago gave up asking.
The curtain is being pulled back on many features of statecraft today. The exchange between Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump, and J.D. Vance has garnered much commentary on the details. The big picture, however, is what makes the salient point.
Statecraft and diplomacy have existed under an obfuscating fog of mystery and secrecy for more than a century. This has been a deliberate strategy to lead the hoi polloi to believe that magical and unapproachable powers were at work—things you cannot possibly comprehend.
That ended in the Oval Office as we saw a very human drama play out in front of all the reporters, complete with raw emotion, ego, entitlement, anger, and a range of other motivations that are entirely normal to the conduct of regular life. It’s all been demystified and so suddenly. This was the most significant feature of the scene.
And this gets to a larger point about transparency in government. Whether it is the budget, the accounting systems, the payroll systems, the NGOs, the agencies, or the machinations of international political wrangling, the issue at this point is not really our different ideological or philosophical positions. Until we can see the books and hear the conversations, we cannot really begin to talk about the details of what kind of government we should have. Until we are certain that we really do live in democratic forms in which the people are ultimately in charge, our differences do not matter nearly as much as simply discovering what is going on behind the scenes.
So far, this is the biggest contribution of the Trump administration: simply to open up, reveal, disclose, and bring accountability to what has been shrouded in mystery for the whole of our lives. There is a very long way to go, and the process of getting from here to there is not going to be easy. Many people have a strong interest in keeping the affairs of state behind a protecting veil.
We’ve at least made some progress toward the goal. How much? It’s hard to say, it is probably less than 50 percent but more than 0.5 percent. We won’t really know for sure how far we have to go until we can comprehend the whole of it. That’s the job right now, just cleaning up the house and making it presentable for show. Trump has only four years to achieve it. If it works, it will be an achievement for the ages.
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Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. |
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