Elon Musk is scaling back his role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but the fight to slash government waste and fraud continues despite relentless resistance from Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy.
Despite cuts, DOGE hasn’t done enough. The United States deficit continues to spiral out of control, and President Donald Trump’s administration has shown no willingness to address the biggest areas of spending: Medicare, Medicaid, the military-industrial complex, and (unfortunately, yes) Social Security.
The billionaire entrepreneur, who famously brandished a chainsaw to symbolize his commitment to cutting federal spending, initially promised to slash “at least $2 trillion” from the bloated $7.3 trillion federal budget.
While DOGE claims to have achieved $170 billion in cuts—primarily by eliminating bureaucratic positions and canceling wasteful contracts—the initiative has faced an uphill battle against a system designed to resist reform.
“DOGE is not going away,” Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox News’ Martha McCallum. “This incredible initiative is moving forward.” The agency recently reported that “current year non-defense federal obligations are down 20.5% as compared to 2024,” with cash outlays expected to follow as obligations come due.
But the Washington establishment has thrown up roadblocks at every turn. Federal judges have repeatedly intervened to halt DOGE’s efforts, blocking access to critical data from Social Security, the Department of Education, the Treasury, and the Office of Personnel Management. The White House’s attempts to reduce the federal workforce have likewise been stymied by judicial rulings.
The mainstream media has piled on, with the Media Research Center reporting that an astonishing 96 percent of legacy media coverage of Musk has been negative—even worse than the 92 percent negative coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days. By contrast, 59 percent of former President Biden’s early coverage was positive.
“They were more interested in generating easy headlines by defunding small-ball costs like DEI contracts, Politico subscriptions, foreign aid, and government employees,” complained Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. But the truth is that DOGE’s efforts to address these wasteful programs triggered fierce resistance from Democrat-aligned interests benefiting from this government largesse.
Musk himself identified “tens of billions of dollars” flowing to what he called “fake” non-governmental organizations that are effectively engaged in “money laundering” taxpayer resources. On Fox News, he called for the arrest of these organizations’ leaders, noting they are “mostly Democrats” with “sometimes a little bit of Republican in there, because they sometimes throw the Republicans a bone to say, ‘Hey, be quiet about this.'”
When Musk announced in late March that DOGE would investigate how so many members of Congress became “strangely wealthy” on modest $174,000 salaries, the bipartisan resistance intensified. No wonder DOGE’s ambitious plans have encountered such fierce opposition from “the swamp.”
The real tragedy is that this resistance comes at a time when addressing government waste is more critical than ever. The Government Accountability Office estimates annual fraud, waste, and abuse at between $233 billion and $521 billion, with an additional $236 billion in “improper payments” during fiscal 2023 alone. Meanwhile, publicly held federal debt has ballooned to a staggering $29 trillion.
The greatest missed opportunity has been in entitlement spending.
“DOGE’s top priority should have been to target improper payments and fraud in entitlement programs—particularly Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare,” argued Veronique de Rugy, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center. Medicare and Medicaid improper payments totaled $101.4 billion in 2023, accounting for 40 percent of all improper payments across the entire government.
Trump campaigned on protecting Social Security and other entitlement programs, effectively taking 75 percent of federal spending off the table—a political calculation that severely limited DOGE’s potential impact.
It’s time to take a hard look at the difficult questions involving federal spending, critics say.
Despite these constraints, DOGE has made some significant strides. It has created a new online portal to replace the archaic paper-based system for federal employee retirement. Such technological upgrades, while less headline-grabbing than massive budget cuts, promise long-term efficiency improvements that will save taxpayers money for years to come.
Perhaps most importantly, DOGE has shifted the national conversation about government spending.
“Before the election last year, nobody was talking about cutting anything,” noted Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute. Now, more than 20 states have launched their own efficiency initiatives inspired by DOGE.
Musk and Trump are not the first to take on the federal leviathan. Former President Barack Obama promised to “trim federal fat” in 2009, while Ronald Reagan spoke in 1984 about reducing “waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government” that had been “permitted to grow and spread like an unchecked cancer.” Both efforts fell short, and the spending cancer continued to metastasize.
There’s still hope for bringing fiscal sanity to Washington — but we’re running out of time.
With the national debt spiraling out of control and interest payments consuming one in every seven federal dollars, it is essential that the White House continue its pursuit of a leaner, more efficient government—establishment resistance be damned. The future of our nation’s fiscal health depends on it.