Did you see Elon Musk’s latest interview with Joe Rogan? It covered some details concerning what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has discovered in the course of its work over the past month and 10 days.
It is not pretty. Musk explained more about the early problem DOGE had discovered at the U.S. Treasury. The outgoing payment systems had not been monitored, audited, or even looked at by an elected official or outside appointee since 1945 or possibly earlier. There were nearly $5 trillion in payments flying out without any tag linking to congressional authorization or a source of authority.
Musk said DOGE has changed this so that the systems now have to comply with normal accounting standards that prevail in the business world. He estimated that this one change will save $100 billion. He further explained that such a shabby system builds in a strange bias always to keep paying no matter what. That’s easier than having to deal with individuals, nonprofits, or companies and their protests against getting cut off.
In other words, if you have a system through which unlimited amounts of money flow, and no one is really incentivized to care that it is being used well, and no professionals are tasked with the job of stopping leakage, it can continue forever until bankruptcy. And it would have, too, but for the Trump administration’s demand for a change.
For the first time since World War II, the U.S. Department of the Treasury now has a fiscal assistant secretary who was not chosen from within the ranks of the bureaucracy. There were only 15 people in this position over 85 years, and they all came from within the system.
It’s going to take a long time for all of this to flesh itself out to become an accountable system. It does not help that federal judges are busy issuing panicked injunctions against DOGE, thwarting its access to many departments. Those interventions are being litigated now.
Musk told Rogan that taking on the waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government is a challenge beyond anything he has ever confronted. He said he is learning quickly, but he also seemed rather frustrated and exhausted—not yet beaten, but mostly just overwhelmed.
It’s truly hard to imagine the scale of what he has taken on here. We might as well get used to it. This is not going to be solved anytime soon. In the scheme of things, it appears that perhaps DOGE has dug into a tiny percentage of the problems and is only in a position to make recommendations consistent with executive orders.
This whole plan, mapped out over years before the inauguration, is brilliant beyond belief, especially when you consider the thick and nearly impenetrable walls that have separated elected leaders from the actual functioning of government. What DOGE has achieved is without precedent in the postwar period, but the fallout from the changes will take a very long time to reveal itself.
When you consider the clouds of secrecy surrounding government finance—money going out and money coming in—it just makes the mind race with fear and dread about what might be going on behind the scenes. Given that trust in government is at an all-time low, it is highly likely that a substantial number of people are of the intuitive position that the whole thing is really a racket.
Musk further presented a revealing explanation of the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which is the international name for what in the United States are called nonprofits. He explained that many are funded by government, which does not quite make sense. You cannot have a government-funded nongovernmental organization, but that is precisely the point. Musk said NGOs emerged as a means by which government can achieve objectives that would otherwise be circumscribed by law, such as censorship or election interference.
Looked at from this point of view, it is remarkable that this has gone on as long as it has.
Another issue concerns personnel. The Office of Personnel Management recently put out an email asking all federal workers to describe in five points what they did the previous week. A million people complied, but more than 1 million people did not bother, or possibly did not check the email at all.
After a few days, we gained more insight into why the agency was doing this. It wanted to discover precisely how many people on the federal payroll are actually working for the government. DOGE had developed an intuition that vast numbers of these people either do not exist or just pretend to work.
Now another email has gone out to cross-check the second responses with the first responses. It’s a good guess that only half will reply, the same half as before. At this point, the administration will have a sense of how to begin cutting the payroll. Maybe it will be 10 percent or maybe it will be 50 percent. We just have to see.
It’s this way with many of the revelations that are being presented to us now. We find them shocking and wonder how the public could have tolerated this level of waste, fraud, and abuse for so long. Many of these revelations are not new. But consider that in the past, there was very little that anyone could do about it. The politicians and the voters had long ago given up hope of changing the system.
That is the real difference between then and now. It appears that we have some hope of actually seeing the system change. This hope was pent up for decades and is only unleashed now given the counterrevolutionary times in which we live. The grand demand is that the government live by the same standards as the rest of us. That’s not too much to ask, but most people long ago gave up asking.
The curtain is being pulled back on many features of statecraft today. The exchange between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump, and Vice President JD Vance has garnered much commentary on the details. However, the big picture is what makes the salient point.
Statecraft and diplomacy have existed under an obfuscating fog of mystery and secrecy for more than a century. This has been a deliberate strategy to lead the hoi polloi to believe that magical and unapproachable powers were at work—things you cannot possibly comprehend.
That ended in the Oval Office as we saw a very human drama play out in front of all the reporters, complete with raw emotion, ego, entitlement, anger, and a range of other motivations that are entirely normal to the conduct of regular life. It’s all been demystified and so suddenly. This was the most significant feature of the scene.
And this gets to a larger point about transparency in government. Whether it is the budget, the accounting systems, the payroll systems, the NGOs, the agencies, or the machinations of international political wrangling, the issue at this point is not really our different ideological or philosophical positions. Until we can see the books and hear the conversations, we cannot really begin to talk about the details of what kind of government we should have. Until we are certain that we really do live in democratic forms in which the people are ultimately in charge, our differences do not matter nearly as much as simply discovering what is going on behind the scenes.
So far, this is the biggest contribution of the Trump administration: simply to open up, reveal, disclose, and bring accountability to what has been shrouded in mystery for the whole of our lives. There is a very long way to go, and the process of getting from here to there is not going to be easy. Many people have a strong interest in keeping the affairs of state behind a protecting veil.
We’ve at least made some progress toward the goal. How much? It’s hard to say. It is probably less than 50 percent but more than 0.5 percent. We won’t really know for sure how far we have to go until we can comprehend the whole of it. That’s the job right now, just cleaning up the house and making it presentable for show. Trump has only four years to achieve it. If it works, it will be an achievement for the ages.
