Thiessen: Behind the DOGE outrage machine

Imagine if the president of the United States announced he was forming “a SWAT team” of private-sector tech experts and deploying them “across agencies … in some cases, for six months, in some cases for two years … fixing outdated systems.”

A decade ago, President Barack Obama did just that, creating the U.S. Digital Service, an agency inside the White House made up of tech talent from companies such as Facebook and Google - including young engineers who served as presidential innovation fellows, tasked to be “change-makers working at the highest levels of the federal government.”

“They’re having a great time,” Obama said of the private-sector IT experts he deployed. “What they’ll tell me is that as long as they feel that they’ve got a president … who’s providing some air cover, there’s no system that they can’t get in there and work and change.”

No one sued Obama to stop his self-described SWAT team from getting access to U.S. government data systems. No member of Congress introduced a Taxpayer Data Protection Act to prevent the president’s tech wunderkinds from doing their work.

Now, a decade later, Donald Trump has issued an executive order renaming Obama’s U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service (the initials stand for Department of Government Efficiency) — and tapped Elon Musk and a team of young technologists from the private sector to run it. Like Obama, Trump is deploying the USDS across government agencies, but with a new mission: to harness the power of technology and artificial intelligence to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

This time, public workers unions and state attorneys general are suing to stop Musk’s team from accessing U.S. data systems, and Democratic members of Congress are joining the effort to shut down their work. Perhaps that’s because Obama’s tech bros were working to help the government spend more tax dollars, while Trump’s tech bros are working to cut $2 trillion in wasteful spending - and in the process are looking under stones many in institutional Washington would prefer remain undisturbed.

It’s about time. For decades, American taxpayers have been getting fleeced. Don’t take Musk’s word for it. Last March, the Government Accountability Office issued a report in which it estimated that the federal government had spent a whopping $236 billion on “improper payments” during the previous fiscal year, including $175 billion in payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs, and $44.6 billion in “unknown payments” – meaning the government does not know where the money went.

To put that in perspective, $236 billion is nearly three times the entire budget of the Department of Homeland Security, nearly three times the budget of the Education Department, and nearly twice what the federal government spent on infrastructure projects that year. It is the equivalent of more than half of all corporate taxes the federal government took in that year - all wasted, lost or stolen through fraud.

Worse, the GAO reports that in some fiscal years, waste and fraud reached as high as $521 billion, and have cost taxpayers more than $2.4 trillion over the past two decades. And that is just an estimate made without the benefit of the AI-powered accounting efforts Musk’s revamped USDS is applying.

So why the uproar? No one on the left objected when President Joe Biden pledged to hire tens of thousands of new IRS agents and auditors to track down tax cheats. But Trump deploys a small team of technologists to track down wasted tax dollars, and suddenly, Democrats are outraged.

Granted, Musk is taking a jackhammer rather than a scalpel to federal institutions. Instead of presidential innovation fellows, he’s deploying “Big Balls.” And he’s rooting out waste and fraud.

For example, after learning that the National Institutes of Health was letting universities milk taxpayers, allowing them to add up to 69 percent on top of research grants to pay for administrative overhead, the USDS has capped those fees at 15 percent, which the NIH projects will save taxpayers more than $4 billion a year. (A judge has held up the change.) Across the government, the USDS is terminating leases for empty offices and buildings, cutting absurd DEI programs, eliminating unnecessary positions, and terminating wasteful contracts. In all, the USDS claims to be saving taxpayers $1 billion a day – and Musk is only getting started.

Democrats ask: Who elected Musk? The better question is: Who elected the bureaucrats at the U.S. Agency for International Development and other government agencies, who seem to think they constitute a walled-off fourth branch of government? Answer: No one. But Americans did elect Trump. Musk works for him. The USDS is a legitimate government entity, created by Obama and housed inside the Executive Office of the President. As chief executive, Trump has broad authority to deploy it to any agencies he wants, examine their books and prioritize spending.

Critics say the president doesn’t have the legal authority to cancel or retroactively change contracts, close programs created by statute or withhold money that has been appropriated by Congress. Trump obviously disagrees, and Musk has hired highly skilled lawyers – including two former clerks for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and a third who will clerk for Gorsuch in the 2025-2026 term – to make sure their actions are legally defensible. But if Musk exceeds the president’s legal authority, or takes actions that create a conflict with his business interests, we have a system of checks and balances to address that. Congress still has the power of the purse. And the courts – including the Supreme Court – will sort out any disputes. Trump said this week he will comply with all court orders, even if he disagrees with them.

But every dollar the federal government wastes comes from the sweat and toil of hardworking Americans – a waitress, a cop, a sanitation worker, a bus driver who pay their taxes by putting in long hours. The outrage is not what Musk and Trump are doing to stop the government from wasting their money; the outrage is that no one did it sooner.