Why DOGE Is The Key To Destroying Big Government

Usually when you don’t hear about a story, that’s because it’s not particularly relevant or important. But every now and then, there’s a story that’s such a dud — that no one remotely cares about — that it actually manages to circle back around and become relevant and important again. The very fact that no one cares about the story, in itself, is worth talking about.

Here’s one recent example of what I mean.

About a year ago, there was a massive strike in Canada’s federal public sector. It was one of the largest strikes in the country’s history. Roughly a third of Canada’s government bureaucracy — more than 150,000 employees — walked off the job, saying they deserved higher wages and the privilege of working from home.

The public-sector union in Canada expected that Trudeau’s government would immediately agree to their demands and end the strike. But that didn’t happen. For once in his political career, Trudeau hesitated before throwing taxpayers’ money away. And therefore, for nearly two weeks, Canada had to make-do without a huge portion of its federal workforce.

Keep in mind, Canada is our largest trading partner. Something like 40 million people live there. They allegedly have an army. And yet no one in Canada, much less the United States, felt any negative impacts whatsoever from this huge, unprecedented government strike. Everything functioned as smoothly as it did before. The economy was untouched. People went about their lives as they normally did. The strike of Canada’s government was neither relevant nor important to anyone.

Naturally, that led Canadians to ask some uncomfortable questions. They wondered, for example, whether they really needed to pay millions of dollars to the federal government, so that bureaucrats could write useless reports about, say, the precise size of all the hydrothermal vents that have been discovered in Canadian waters, or the specific number of non-binary vagrants in Vancouver who also identify as indigenous furries.

As one Canadian put it at the time, in a post that was widely shared on social media: 

“Other than delayed passport applications, who has actually noticed the effects of 155,000 federal servants that haven’t been working for a week? If you haven’t, perhaps there’s no need for them.”

Reports from CBC News, which is Canada’s state broadcaster, focused on alleged “hardships” that the federal workers were enduring on strike. They didn’t even mention “hardships” suffered by the public, because there weren’t any hardships that anyone suffered. 

Another Canadian outlet, CTV, tried its best to find a downside to what was happening. They ended up saying it was a terrible thing that Canada’s immigration system wasn’t able to allow as many foreign nationals into the country as they usually did. Watch:

It’s an amazing clip to watch, now that — just one year later — Canada’s government has implemented a moratorium on most new migration. They’re finally admitting that they shouldn’t have allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into their country every year. Housing has become more expensive, crime has gotten worse and people can’t find jobs. Now even Canada’s liberals acknowledge this.

But really, if they had allowed the strike to continue, they wouldn’t have needed the migration moratorium. The strike was already accomplishing that, in a roundabout way. And as you heard, it was apparently accomplishing other things, too. People weren’t getting taxed, either. It was a win-win for everyone. But of course, eventually, Trudeau caved. He had to pay the federal workers because they’re his base. As a result, Canadians are still being forced to employ a vast bureaucracy that clearly and unquestionably makes their lives worse.

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This is a burden that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now promising to eliminate in this country. They’ve already published a roadmap explaining how exactly their Department of Government Efficiency plans to gut the United States federal bureaucracy. And it’s worth taking a look at it, in part because this roadmap helps explain exactly how our government got completely out of control in the first place. And also, the reactions from the Left are already hysterical. They are losing their mind at the thought of a smaller, more efficient government, and it’s amazing to watch.

As Musk and Ramaswamy outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) has a very real chance of succeeding where other efforts to curb government expansion have failed. That’s because of two Supreme Court rulings that the conservative justices helped secure during Joe Biden’s presidency. One of those rulings overturned the so-called “Chevron doctrine.” That’s the doctrine that allowed unelected bureaucrats in government agencies to essentially make laws in certain areas, as long as Congress has given the agency some general authority to oversee those areas.

This is a principle that expanded the power of the federal government far beyond what anyone probably realizes. You might remember when the Biden administration came out and declared that 85 million private sector workers had to either get the COVID shot or wear a mask. There was no law authorizing that. There was no public referendum. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration — a federal agency staffed with unelected bureaucrats — just issued a rule one day. They said mask mandates and vaccine mandates fell under their mandate of a “workplace safety” agency, even though nothing like that had ever been tried before because it made no sense whatsoever. And incredibly, until the Supreme Court stepped in, some federal courts actually agreed with the Biden administration.

The Chevron Doctrine made unconstitutional mandates like that possible, along with tens of thousands of other irrational and onerous rules and regulations. Now the Chevron Doctrine is gone — but virtually all of those illegal administrative rules and regulations remain on the books. They’re not going to be removed unless the federal government (or a federal court) takes the initiative and strikes them down. And DOGE plans to strike them down.

Specifically, the DOGE plan involves placing “legal experts” inside government agencies, who are aided by “advanced technology” that will allow them to apply the Supreme Court’s rulings to federal regulations. DOGE will then turn over a list of regulations to Trump, who can cut them instantly with an executive order. There’s no need for Congress to get involved here. The administrative state has gained a lot of powers over the years. And now, DOGE is going to use those powers to destroy the administrative state.

That’s the first kind of reform that DOGE plans to put in place. It’s called “regulatory rescissions.” The second and third kinds of reform — the more prominent ones — are called “administrative reductions and cost savings.” This involves shutting down government agencies and firing government employees. As Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in their plan:

“The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.”

In interviews, Ramaswamy has made it clear that eliminating entire government departments is on the table. Watch:

Both Musk and Ramaswamy have previously signaled their explicit support for abolishing the Department of Education in particular, which I obviously support as well. This is a Department that has just failed its third audit in a row. (Which is almost as bad as the Pentagon, which just failed its seventh consecutive audit, for its budget of nearly a trillion dollars.)

No one can point to anything the Department of Education has achieved. Americans have become dumber and less educated by every metric since the Department of Education was reintroduced in this country back in 1979.

Even the defenders of the Department of Education inevitably end up making it look terrible. This is one of the better tweets you’ll see on the subject, from someone on the Left who’s opposed to gutting the education bureaucracy in this country.

See if you can follow the logic here: “Oh btw middle schoolers can’t read, high schoolers can’t write a proper essay, college students can’t differentiate a scholarly based article vs propaganda, and adults can’t tell when a picture is AI…But sure, get rid of the Department of Education. LOL.”

That person eventually deleted that tweet, after about ten million people pointed out that all of those failures have occurred under the watch of the Department of Education.

This is an agency that is not fixing any problems. It’s taking in billions of dollars and wasting it on administrative costs. Now, obviously, we don’t know yet whether DOGE will actually be able to eliminate this agency, or any other agency. A change that significant would require an act of Congress.

But it’s clear that DOGE will clearly push us in that direction. And they’ll go after other useless government departments, too. Recently Elon Musk reposted this video of the economist Milton Friedman from about 15 years ago, outlining all of the government departments he’d cut. It’s a pretty big clue into the agencies that can expect significant downsizing under DOGE. Watch:

Milton Friedman was the best
pic.twitter.com/CeLlQnNWHo

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2024

Whatever you think of Milton Friedman, it’s obviously true that if the U.S. government had listened to him a long time ago, we’d be better off than we are now. Friedman once stated that it’s impossible to have a welfare state and open borders at the same time. You can’t promise the entire world free stuff, and then allow them all to enter the country. But the government didn’t listen to him, and now we have states like California — which are completely out of money as they rush to pay the healthcare bills of millions of illegal aliens.

Later on in the video, Friedman outlined his guiding overall principle in determining whether an agency should be dismantled or retained. He explained why he thinks we still need a Defense Department, a Treasury Department, and a State Department, for example. And Freidman was using similar principles, we can assume, that Musk is going to adopt with DOGE.

Critics of DOGE point out that, even if you cut all of these departments, the government’s still going to be in the red. And that’s true. Two-thirds of our spending is on entitlements like Social Security, along with interest payments on the national debt. I’ve pointed out before that Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme that steals money from Americans. It would be far better to allow Americans to keep their paychecks, and invest their money however they want. But DOGE can’t get rid of Social Security without an act of Congress.

But even given that DOGE can’t get rid of all government spending, it can still reduce a huge amount. It can make people’s lives a lot less burdensome in the process. And on top of that, some of this spending is evil. So eliminating it is good for its own sake, even if the relative savings aren’t that big, in terms of the entire U.S. budget.

For example, this is from the Wall Street Journal op-ed that Musk and Ramaswamy wrote:

“DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”

So we’re spending billions of dollars to fund propaganda on stations like NPR. And we’re also paying Planned Parenthood to murder of children. This is spending that has persisted for a lot of administrations — both Democrat and Republican — even though the vast majority of Republican voters don’t support it. It’s well past time to end it. And if DOGE can do that, just by itself, that would be a major victory.

You can tell the Left realizes that. They’re melting down over the new DOGE blueprint already. Here for example was the reaction from a guy named Brian Allen, who’s apparently been featured in MSN and Yahoo Finance:

“I’m not exaggerating when I say this could collapse the government within a year. Musk and Ramaswamy just dropped their first DOGE roadmap, and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Here’s how they plan to dismantle the federal government step by step: … Plant DOGE loyalists in every U.S. agency, then use ‘advanced technology’ (probably AI) to identify thousands of regulations to slash across the board. Hand Trump this hit list of regulations and let him rubber-stamp their elimination. Gut federal agencies by finding ‘the minimum number of employees’ needed to function after gutting regulations. Think Musk’s 80% staff cuts at X but scaled up to the entire government.”

Yes, he’s presenting the Twitter layoffs as a negative. Apparently this is something of a common perspective on the Left, even though it boggles the mind that anyone would think this. Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter employees, and everyone on the Left said Twitter would collapse as a result. A lot of software engineers said the same thing on MSNBC. And none of it was true. Twitter is now a lot better than it used to be. By getting rid of all the bureaucrats and the censorship commissars at Twitter, it’s about a million times more functional and useful.

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If a top Silicon Valley company has that much bloat, then you can imagine how much bloat the federal government has. It’s staggering. And it needs to be cut. Even a lot of critics of Donald Trump understand that.

Here for example is John Bolton praising the idea of DOGE — although he then says that we should spend all of the savings on bombing foreign countries. Watch:

John Bolton on @DOGE: "If we can save a couple hundred billion dollars, I'd be delighted. We can spend it on the defense budget, which desperately needs an increase." pic.twitter.com/C8rx3imWXH

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 21, 2024

So this is something we need to look out for, obviously. It’s not very productive if we save a ton of money, and then use that money to start World War III. The point is to cut the spending, and let Americans keep more of their own money. And along the way, we need to eliminate funding for merchants of death like Planned Parenthood.

In Argentina, they’ve implemented similar wide-scale cuts in government. As a result, their GDP is expected to grow by nearly 10% next year, according to JP Morgan. That’s one of the highest rates of growth in the world. This is the kind of growth you get when you destroy needless regulations and government agencies.

Like Argentina, we weren’t always this bloated and inefficient. As aerospace CEO Jared Isaacman put it recently:

“Take the Gerald Ford-class aircraft carriers. The first carrier was awarded in 2008, construction began in 2009, it was commissioned in 2017 and it didn’t deploy until 2022—at a cost of $18 billion (including R&D). The next carrier in the class, the JFK, will take at least 10 years from construction to commissioning and cost $12.5 billion. These timelines are staggering. During World War II, the USA built over 155 carriers in a handful of years. Or, for another perspective, these projects run longer than the time from Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight to Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.”

Getting us back to mid-20th century levels of government efficiency is a goal that Republicans have had for decades. And now there’s a very realistic chance it will finally happen. It’s only been two weeks since the election, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have already gotten to work hiring employees for DOGE, and outlining their agenda in very clear and direct terms.

If and when they succeed, it’ll be a lot like the situation in Canada last year. Tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats will stop going to work, because they won’t have jobs anymore. And — other than saving a lot of money and having more freedom — Americans won’t notice a thing.