President Trump’s Elon Musk/DOGE experiment would seem to be headed for some rough sledding. Not only are long-embedded, powerful economic and political interests being seriously threatened, and major apple carts slated to be upset, but the same implacable wall of Democratic opposition that greeted President Trump when he entered office on January 20 is already attaching directly to Musk’s efforts.
Thus, last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led the charge, stating: “DOGE is not a real government agency… DOGE has no authority to make spending decision. DOGE has no authority to shut down programs or to ignore federal law,” he said on the Senate floor last week. And he was echoed in this by the lately emergent and increasingly annoying Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who said at a recent protest, “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk.”
Schumer also led an anti-DOGE demonstration outside the Treasury Department building in Washington protesting Musk’s efforts to check agency books to identify waste and fraud.
While this was probably inevitable given the nature of today’s politics, we believe that Musk’s work is not just another political issue. In a very real sense this may be the last chance we have to get control of our economy and avoid fiscal, and likely geo-political, disaster.
Unfortunately, we have for too long acted as if open-ended profligate spending was ultimately manageable, and indulging in ideological environmental and social frolics while our adversaries realistically went about their business would not mortally wound us. Hopefully those false notions end with the Trump era.
So, whether Musk/DOGE will be able to persevere and succeed in the face of fierce Democratic opposition – what has already happened is surely just a taste of what is to come – is not just an academic concern or a matter of political one-upmanship.
Whatever one’s political affiliation, Elon Musk is a phenomenon and perhaps the one person who can actually get his head around the astronomical U.S. spending numbers and not be intimated by talk of trillions of dollars. And he has already made some progress.
According to the Wall Street Journal, in its first three weeks DOGE has identified and cut more than $1 billion in unnecessary spending. To be sure, this is a mere fraction of the $2 trillion goal Musk has set. But it is a promising start. Keep in mind that the federal government is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to spend $7 trillion in the fiscal year that ends September 30 and tackling the goliath defense, social service, educational, housing and transportation agencies is still to come.
We hope that Democrats and the left generally will choose the national interest over political partisanship. This is not a time for political business as usual.
