BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  APR 2, 2025 

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) says it has saved American taxpayers $130 billion, or $807 per taxpayer, since it started rummaging through Federal agencies for “waste, fraud, and abuse” two months ago.

I heard those numbers and much more during an interview with Elon Musk and his seven-member cabinet on Bret Baier’s Fox News program on March 27th. The DOGE cabinet is a group of experienced former senior executives with expertise in business, technology, and general entrepreneurship. This was the first time—at least for me—to hear Musk and his senior people explain what they are doing and what they expect to accomplish.

It was long overdue.

Baier didn’t conduct the kind of interview that most journalists and Musk antagonists would be happy with. There were no ‘gotcha’ questions or tense exchanges. Baier let his subjects speak their mind for nearly an hour.

“Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” Musk said. “We want to reduce the spending by eliminating waste and fraud, reduce the spending by 15 percent…so we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services. The sheer amount of waste and fraud in government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.”

There were antidotes a plenty. He cited a 10-question survey that would normally cost $10,000. “The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that,” he said.

This from Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia: “Now picture this. This giant cave (actual cavern in Pennsylvania) has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper. It’s a process that started in the 1950s and largely hasn’t changed…and so as we dug into it, we found retirement cases that had so much paper, they had to fit it on a shipping pallet.” He said, “the point is that retirements from the Federal government are still done on paper and takes many months and we’re going to make it just many days…”

Another example from Aram Moghaddassi, a software engineer: “By some estimates government IT costs about $100 billion, and its funding systems are over 50 years old in the case of Social Security or the IRS… They cost a lot of money to maintain…”

Baier interjected here citing Democrats who are highly critical of Musk’s messing with Social Security. “Elon Musk and President Trump have set their sights on cutting social security. Their goal is clear. Destroy Social Security from within” Baier quoted them as saying.

“Yeah, it doesn’t line up with my experience on the ground,” Moghaddassi responded. “And I’ll give you one example is at Social Security. One of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day from people trying to change their direct deposit information…We learned 40 percent of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.”

He repeated the allegation that over 15 million people who are over the age of 120 are marked as alive in the Social Security system. The oldest American is 114, according to Musk.

Two other executives cited waste and duplication at the National Institutes of Health of the Department of Health and Human Services—citing 27 different centers, 700 different IT systems, 27 chief information officers (CIOs), and 40 distinct communications offices, but apparently they can’t even communicate with each other because of outmoded and inefficient technology.

“When I say our job is tech support, I really mean it…We have to fix computers,” Musk said. “What we have here are a bunch of failing computer systems that are preventing people from receiving their benefits, that are preventing research, that are extremely vulnerable to fraud, and we are fixing it.” (You’ve got to wonder If computers are the problem, why the wholesale firing of tens of thousands of government workers?)

The interview may have been conducted with a velvet glove, but it was informative. It gave viewers what is regrettably rare exposure to some of the DOGE brain trust, what motivates them, a glimpse at what they say they’ve found, and how they intend to fix what’s broken. It was informative, as well, in what was left unsaid and unexplained.

It just goes to show how much more there is to dig into and think about, but first some historical context.

The DOGE’s blitzkrieg-style offensive, ironically, has been a long time in coming. Forty-five years ago, my mentor, Rep. Bob Michel, who was then ranking minority member of the old Labor-Health, Education and Welfare (Labor-HEW) appropriations subcommittee, would attempt to reduce the increases in spending for programs under its jurisdiction. The amendments were not only defeated, but Michel was accused of turning his back on orphans, elderly, and the indigent. He quit trying to reduce spending directly and offered amendments to reduce ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ in these programs by a single-digit percentage, well below the estimated amount of waste in those policy areas. Those amendments were defeated, too. The time for cutting excessive spending had not yet arrived.

But over the next four decades, waste and fraud in Federal programs just kept growing, like Jack’s beanstalk, from hundreds of thousands spent on studying the sex life of ducks, millions spent on hundreds of conferences attended by government employees, and a massive growth in over-budget infrastructure projects, to billions lost in fraudulent stimulus loans, and hundreds of billions lost to fraud and inefficiencies in entitlement programs. And that doesn’t even account for waste in defense spending. These specific examples are just a few that were brought to light just over a decade ago.

Well, Americans have been thinking about that for all this time, getting angrier, more disillusioned, and distrustful of their own government with each passing budget cycle. The numbers became unfathomable, but little was done.

It is no wonder citizens were feeling exhausted, fearful, and desperate for change by 2024. So, is there any doubt why 80 million voters went with Donald Trump? Is it any wonder why there is a tolerance for the DOGE battering ram, consequences be damned?

But the consequences can’t be damned. The consequences, intended or unintended, could be devastating.

Musk told Baier they feel confident their goals can be achieved “without affecting any of the critical government services.”

Why should we believe that? It is a gargantuan boast that voters have heard many times before.

There is so much happening in so little time, probably deliberately, we have to suspend disbelief to feel any sense of confidence in the outcomes. We are swirling around in a tornado of change with no sense of where it’s going to spit us out.

Abolishing the Education Department (DOE) is a good example. What we’ve been told so far is confusing and contradictory. What happens to the critical work the department does? Musk can pull the name off the building but he can’t simply dispense with programs of consequence, such as chronicling educational excellence, ensuring equality of opportunity among poor and wealthy communities, promoting civics education, administering $80 billion in student loans and grants, or implementing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which is responsible for equal educational opportunities and assistance for the disabled.

We are told that these programs will be transferred to other agencies, but what agencies? Will the transition be disruptive? How much will transitions cost? Will the agencies be able to handle the new responsibilities? Who is going to be left out? Good questions. The huge student loan program, for example, which has been administered by DOE will supposedly be transferred to the Small Business Administration (SBA), but that agency, which is not large by Federal standards, has been targeted for a 40 percent staff reduction. The DOE workforce has already been slashed.

There are other questions not answered. How does the Administration expect to fire probationary new hires across the Administration without explaining whether and how legitimate services they perform, in some cases dealing with national security, will be protected? People are beginning to think the Administration is burning the bureaucracy down, with no plans to rebuild.

Other issues of concern? Will Congress and the courts make sure the Administration adheres to the rule of law? Will they protect the checks and balances? How long will we tolerate threats to our allies, vengeance against political enemies, conflicts of interest (which Mr. Musk has in abundance)? How much are we willing to risk on massive disruptions of international commerce? We will save annexing Canada, buying Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal and planting the American flag on Mars for later.

The time for drastic steps to eradicate waste and fraud is overdue, but I do not believe most voters wanted it done in a haphazard, dangerous, and destructive manner. Nor is this the time to “reimagine” the Federal Government, put the Executive Branch on steroids, bypass Congress or ignore court orders, or worse yet, rewrite the Constitution.

The framers of the Constitution were in good measure geniuses who had a vision for the future and took lessons from the accomplishments and failures of the budding European democracies. That genius is not self-evident today. In our book, Fixing Congress, Jerry Climer and I provide background information on what has happened to Congress and ideas about ways to restore its critical role.

Members of Congress are being tested on how well they meet their sworn constitutional duties to protect their institution and exercise independent thought and courage in ensuring that the balance of power remains balanced. Congress is the citizens’ fist line of defense against authoritarian, autocratic governance, now more than ever.

Musk would serve the country well if he would do what he said he would do and provide the Federal government with the tech support and innovation needed to reduce the debt and put the country on sound financial footing. He would be unwise to ensnarl DOGE in policy and political decisions that are not within his purview or his expertise.

By the same token, all of us would do the country a great service by being better informed, insisting that our representatives keep us better informed, asking questions and then giving voice to our concerns, not in anger, but with reasoned determination. Knowledge is power. Power in this Republic belongs to the people.