DOGE Makes Math Great Again

President Trump is slapping America in the face. If we’re lucky, it will revive our sleepwalking nation.

While cramming more action into a few hundred hours than FDR could in 100 days, he has diverted our somnambulant gaze from the shiny objects both parties have used to distract us from their failure to address our nation’s aching challenges. As he awakens us to fundamental problems of governance, Trump has even managed to make math great again.

The last few weeks have made clear that we’ve spent far too long talking about the wrong things in the wrong way. Instead of seeing the federal government for what it chiefly is – the world’s largest business, spending more than $6 trillion every year – we have turned it into a debating society for emotionally charged claims about woke culture and populism. Both parties have been happy to expend much of their energy demonizing the other because they saw partisan anger as a pathway to power – and because it is much easier to grandstand on inflammatory talking points than to make the hard choices required to smoothly operate such a massive entity. As a result, we became like farmers arguing over the best use of their land while their crops were withering.

That is how our unsustainable national debt has reached $36.5 trillion, gravely threatening our future. The current convulsions in Europe are offering a preview of what happens when nations run out of money.

What Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are making clear is that as much as our perilous financial situation has been bandied about, we have spent little time actually digging into the numbers behind it.

Old habits die hard, and Trump and Musk have continued to play the culture war card because that still seems the best way to get people’s attention. So their recent focus on USAID spending has highlighted the multi-million-dollar grants to LGBTQ+ groups in Guatemala and Serbia and the $47,000 earmarked for a transgender opera in Colombia. Such line-by-line scrutiny is important, but DOGE’s more meaningful work is exposing the shocking lack of oversight and accountability regarding far larger piles of government spending. On Saturday, for example, Musk sent out this Tweet:

“To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:

• Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
• All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!”

Heads would roll and prison terms contemplated if this were happening in the private sector. But it’s government, so it’s been met with a shrug. How else to explain the fact that the Pentagon, which has a budget of $824 billion, has failed seven consecutive audits – though its leaders promise it will achieve its first clean audit by 2028. Try telling that to the IRS agent auditing your personal return.

Or consider the recent finding from Open the Books that “Congress allocated at least $516 billion for federal programs with expired authorizations in fiscal year 2024.” The watchdog group reported that this may only be the tip of the iceberg: “Congress funded 1,264 ‘zombie’ programs this year, the CBO found. Half of them expired at least 10 years ago, and one has not been authorized since 1980. Analysts were only able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, totaling $516 billion. It is unknown how much funding the other 773 programs received.”

No doubt many of these programs – such as the $38.4 billion Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which expired in 2003 – would be reauthorized if Congress did its job. But the laxity surrounding the budget-making process is scandalous. Along those lines, the National Institutes of Health recently placed a 15% cap on “indirects,” which is the amount of grant money that could be spent for any purpose apart from the funded work. Last year, $9 billion of the $35 billion the agency awarded for research went to such overhead expenses, mostly at universities. At some leading institutions – including Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins – more than 60% of research funding appears to have gone to such costs. NIH says its new policy will save $4 billion per year.

Here’s the kicker: All of this has been going on in plain sight. Almost nobody thought to pay any attention to it. Journalists share much of the blame for this failure. Like the politicians we cover, we found it a lot easier to seize on hot-button social issues; it’s hard to make numbers sound sexy. We’ve long believed that readers know these issues are important, but they aren’t too interested in reading about them. We’ve viewed government inefficiency as the antithesis of news, a classic dog-bites-man story.

Trump and Musk have upended all of that. Their relentless pursuit of transparency and accountability has made math sexy again. The steady stream of figures being released on X through accounts such as @DOGE and @DataRepublican (small r) is the greatest show on earth right now as they lift the veil on massive problems. Their work evokes the old hymn, I once “was blind, but now I see.”

This story is only beginning to unfold. Finally figuring out what we are spending our money on is only the start of a difficult conversation. While many conservatives are broad-brushing government outlays as examples of fraud, waste, and abuse, the truth is that most of it simply reflects priorities they don’t share. What’s more, for all the good they are doing, Trump and Musk are still ignoring the fundamental fiscal challenge hiding in plain sight: the cost of entitlements that are devouring most of the federal budget.

Still, as they rouse Washington and the American people from a long slumber in which we ignored the failure of our leaders to run the government with a modicum of efficiency, we can be thankful that they have made being “woke” great again.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.