The degree to which progressivism has confused technocracy with democracy in popular consciousness is impressive. Now progressives are just embarrassing themselves. Victims of their own design. Support the brave federal employees resisting the fascist dictator! But did the President do this? Congress was not involved.
The goal of DOGE, and USDS before it, is to modernize and streamline government services, making them more efficient and effective—to reduce the size of government and save the taxpayer money.
This good idea hardly begins with Obama who had few good ideas, frankly, and a lot of bad ones. Progressives were panicking about DOGE then, so we knew what was coming. I did a little math and determined that, today, the US would save half a trillion dollars using the same approach. If DOGE is more aggressive, it could save a lot more than that. I guess if you are progressive and want big, intrusive government to enlarge the number of those dependent on your power see my recent essay Make Our Republic Great Again.
Despite the name, DOGE is not a federal executive department. It is well within the power of the president to reorganize existing agencies, combine existing functions, or create new offices within agencies through executive orders. We should want to see our government agencies run efficiently—or eliminated when detrimental or no longer useful. Do readers know how big the federal government is today? The present deficit is closing in on two trillion dollars annually. The government is adding trillions to the debt—which now exceeds 36 trillion dollars—every year.
Once again, we confront the technocratic problem: agencies resisting directives of the executive. Answer: ignore their directives. The idea is that if an executive enters office whose policies are seen by bureaucrats as detrimental to practices that they have deemed appropriate, then they are right to resist the executive.
