Bull-DOGEing Government

To begin with, I have to wonder whether DOGE has the legal authority to be doing what it is doing. For starters, the Constitution gives the president veto authority over congressional bills, but that is not what is happening here. There is no constitutional veto over spending money that Congress has already lawfully appropriated. What Trump and Musk are arguing for is a back-door, extraconstitutional veto of congressional spending that the Administration does not agree with.

In fact, there is a statutory law, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, that backs up the absence of this constitutional authority to defy Congress by not spending appropriated funds. Likewise, there are civil service laws and collective bargaining agreements that ban the summary dismissals of federal employees without cause. DOGE apparently lacks constitutional and statutory and managerial authority to enact unilateral cuts across the federal government.

I also wonder why an organization that is supposedly targeting fraud and waste in government does not include forensic accountants and finance experts. While there are reports (or at least speculation) that DOGE is using AI to ferret out government waste, haven’t we seen enough evidence of the flaws in current AI models to be very skeptical of this approach?

If the the AI assumption is accurate, it might explain some of the more boneheaded moves by DOGE that we know of so far. For example, numerous outlets report that several hundred employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration were summarily fired, some reportedly losing access to email even before they were notified of their dismissals. The DOGE team apparently had no idea what these employees did and when it learned of their highly specialized and necessary skills in reassembling and securing nuclear weapons, it scrambled to hire them back.

There’s an old saying that before you knock down a fence, you should learn why it was erected in the first place. That seems like good advice for going through federal agencies with a HR buzzsaw as well. Personally, I think that nuclear security is a pretty important function, but DOGE apparently didn’t even stop to ask “What would you say you do here?” a la the hatchet duo from “Office Space.”

And then there are the recent reports of cuts at the FAA as well. It has only been a few weeks since the tragic midair collision at Washington National in which FAA short-staffing may have played a role. Now the DOGE cutters are targeting the aviation safety agency. While the cuts have reportedly exempted air traffic controllers, they have targeted “probationary” workers who maintain air navigation and radar systems.

We can speculate that DOGE fired the “probationary” employees because it thought they were new hires who might not be covered under civil service rules. As an air traffic controller explained on the platform formerly known as Twitter, that isn’t necessarily the case. FAA employees can be probationary in a new role, but still be longtime employees who would be covered by civil service laws.

The birds-eye view of federal programs by DOGE may also explain why the pseudo department cut funding for students with disabilites in public schools. The story from Spotsylvania County (Va.) Public Schools was that designed to help students “transition” from high school to adult life. Again, there is some speculation here, but it may be that DOGE cut the Charting My Path for Future Success program because it thought the program paid for sexual transitions.

Regardess of your position on sexual transitions, whether the federal government should be aiding disabled students, or even whether the Department of Education should exist, if this money has been appropriated by Congress, DOGE has no right or authority to terminate the program. That’s up to Congress.

Finally there are the claims of massive savings from DOGE. I think it’s safe to be skeptical of how much DOGE claims to be cutting, but even if we take the claims at face value, they won’t be anywhere near enough to save America from a debt bomb. Let’s do a little math.

By definition, DOGE can (theoretically) only cut discretionary spending, which is subject to annual appropriations. Mandatory spending, such as that for entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (yes, Virginia, they are entitlements) is automatic based on existing law.

But discretionary spending only accounts for about 27 percent of federal spending. Going further, discretionary spending includes things like defense spending, which at $806 billion in 2023, is the largest discretionary category. You don’t think Trump and Musk are going to cut the defense budget, do you? Me neither, especially with invasions of Gaza and Greenland on the calendar.

We could cut the entire non-defense discretionary budget (about $894 billion) and we still wouldn’t eliminate the federal deficit (about $1.8 trillion). In practice, such draconian cuts would be insane. We need things like air navigation, highways, and nuclear security.

Even progams like US AID and funding for disabled students aren’t something for nothing. Foreign aid, about one percent of the entire federal budget, not just discretionary spending, is a key component of soft power that both engenders goodwill and provides markets for American products. Helping disabled teens “transition” to independent life as adults may keep them off of federal entitlements and contribute to the greater economy.

The bottom line is that anyone who tells you that we can cut our way to solvency by only trimming nondefense discretionary spending without touching entitlements is lying to you. Neither party has the stomach for entitlement reform but that is where the fiscal crisis is.

And if Trump, Musk and the Republicans are sincerely concerned about the national debt, why are they planning more tax cuts and an increase to the debt ceiling? (Remember that MAGA Republicans opposed raising the debt ceiling with a Democrat in the White House.) While a tax hike wouldn’t be popular (unless you’re talking tariffs which most Republicans don’t seem to understand are taxes), maybe more revenue cuts aren’t a good idea if you truly want to trim the deficit.

If nothing else makes you skeptical of DOGE and leery about the group’s competence, consider Musk’s claim that numerous 150-year-olds are collecting Social Security. Musk has yet to present evidence of even a single person who is or claims to be 150 years old on the SSI rolls, but the speculation is that Musk’s claim is rooted in a misunderstanding of COBOL, the computer language that the Social Security database uses. You’d think programmers and audit experts would be aware of such details. (I did see one Trump supporter online who unironically cheered the data, saying, “What a post-Covid rebound for American life expectancy rates! ANOTHER TRUMP WIN!!!”)

So if DOGE isn’t really about cutting waste and trimming the budget, what is it about? One of my best guesses is that it is about trimming programs that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t like. As one meme put it, “DOGE isn’t finding fraud, they are finding things they don’t like and calling them fraud.”

But there are going to be unintended consequences with this approach. The most obvious is that as DOGE happily rips down federal fences, it is going to rip apart things that we need. When flights start getting delayed because navigation facilities are inoperative or worse yet, the staffing cuts cause a crash, we may find out that we really did need those FAA workers. The consequences of leaving gaping holes in our nuclear security could be far worse, and who knows what else being cut that we don’t know about?

More mundane but no less important, Trump and Musk are destroying the foundation for congressional compromise. Why should opposition parties (and Republicans will one day again be the opposition party) cooperate to pass laws if they know that DOGE-like entities will cut out the minority’s programs with an ex post facto fiscal veto? They wouldn’t, and such unlawful, one-sided cutting makes it less likely that Congress will do its job and compromise on much-needed fixes.

The DOGE cuts are not about trimming the fat. They are about emasculating Congress and empowering the president. DOGE is another step towards an authoritarian executive.

An additional big question is what the relationship between Trump and Musk really is. Again, I can only speculate but in the video of the two DOGEbuddies in the Oval Office, Trump did not come across as an alpha male. The president mostly sat quietly with his hands folded as Musk monologued while his son with a name that looks like computer code told Trump, “I want you to shush your mouth.” (I think much of the nation identified strongly with little whoever.)

And then there is the question of DOGE’s access. A federal judge recently granted DOGE access to sensitive data at several federal agencies even though the group has been accused of posting classified data online. DOGE is also seeking access to an IRS database of personal tax information.

Again, we don’t know what DOGE is doing with this data and we don’t know if the DOGE staffers have had background checks or hold security clearances. We do know that a DOGE staffer was caught reposting white supremacist content. Republicans circled the wagons to bring him back after he was dismissed and now Gavin Kliger is the staffer who will have the keys to the IRS computers. That story does not inspire me with confidence.

Yes, I have questions about DOGE, but there is a definite oceanic odor to what I know about it already. No, DOGE doesn’t add up.

A great many lawsuits are already on the way as a result of DOGE’s activities. I think a lot of DOGE’s work will get undone because it lacks legal and constitutional authority to do what it is doing.

But even if the courts stand firm, it’s impossible to unbreak eggs. And needlessly breaking eggs is an expensive endeavor these days.

We may never know exactly what DOGE is up to. It may take years to discern what the not-accountants are doing under the hood of federal computer systems, and we will probably be discovering the unpleasant consequences of their rushed and ill-considered cuts for a very long time. I can guarantee, however, that it is about power, not about trimming fraud and waste.

A WORD TO THE OPPOSITION: It is a dark time for the Republic, but I am gratified that the opposition has remained peaceful and nonviolent. I hope it stays that way.

First, the courts are working. Trump has been in office for less than a month and it takes time for cases to wind their way through the legal system. In his first iteration, Trump had the worst record at the Supreme Court of any president in the last 100 years. I am certain that will continue, but it takes time.

Second, I think Trump wants the opposition to get violent. He wants to bust heads and invoke the Insurrection Act and crack down on the opposition.

Don’t give him what he wants. Work within the system.