Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)  has been hard at work since January 20.  Surprising no one, the Democrats are screaming bloody murder.  The purpose of DOGE is to ferret out government waste, fraud and abuse in order to reduce the cost of a federal government which has ballooned to an extent never envisioned by our Founders.  You would have thought that our government officials would be working toward that goal anyway, but they’re not.

I mean, they always talked a good game.  Thomas Jefferson said, “The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”  But that was a long time ago, and anyway, he owned slaves, so that must be wrong.   Grover Cleveland said, “Public service is a public trust.”  But now, nobody trusts the government.  More recently, President Eisenhower promised an administration “clean as a hound’s tooth.”  But that’s hard to do when every other elected official is a horse’s ass.

Democrats are against any attempt to improve the system.  Their counterpoint to the DOGE actions is their go-to tactic – lying.  According to NPR, one of the agencies on the DOGE hit list, “So far, the Trump administration has not shown clear evidence of fraud.”  Democrat politicians have attacked Elon Musk as “incompetent.”  Attorneys General from 14 states are suing to block DOGE from accessing federal data.  If there’s no fraud, and the DOGE boys are incompetent anyway, why would they do that?

It turns out they’re doing that because the entirety of the federal government IS A FRAUD.  The federal government, which currently is spending some $7 trillion a year is a model of inefficiency.  580 federal agencies are spending your tax dollars.  And DOGE revealed that all the money they’re spending comes out of one Treasury bank account.  Isn’t that efficient?  No.  You see, all the agencies do is tell Treasury to pay, and Treasury pays, no questions asked, and no verification required.  For everything.  Payroll, Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicade payments, contracts, grants, you name it.

But the agencies must be verifying the legitimacy of the claims before telling Treasury to pay, right?  Ah, it turns out they’re not.  Are they corrupt?  Possibly.  Lazy?  Some might be.  But here’s the latest news from DOGE.  Even if these bureaucrats all are perfectly honest public servants, they can’t verify the claims even it they want to.

The Feds are paying $100 million a year for internet technology, to keep 50 year old computer systems running.  Crazy right?  But it gets worse.  They’re running 700 different antiquated IT systems that are incapable of communicating with one another.

Maybe that’s how, in a country where 310 million people are eligible for benefits, 398 million people are receiving checks.  Not evidence of fraud?  Maybe that’s how we could have Social Security payments being made to 16 million people between with reported ages of between 110 and 369.  Social Security personnel reported this in 2008.  Nothing ever was done about it.  At the average Social Security level, that’s $380 billion a year, but not evidence of fraud?  Maybe that’s why 75% of illegal aliens are receiving Social Security benefits.  But nothing to see here, right?

And hey, you know what?  Maybe that’s why the SBA made loans totaling $300 million to children under age 11, and another $300 million to people supposedly over age 115.  You see, once presented with a loan application bearing a supposedly “active” Social Security number, SBA couldn’t find out that one borrower was 9 months old, and another was going into business at 115.  But I’m sure there must be an innocent explanation for all this, right?

The DOGE boys found out that 40% of the calls to Social Security offices to change the direct deposit accounts of recipients were fraudulent.  Social Security employees told them this fact, but I guess that’s really not evidence, right?

And some agencies don’t even have computers.  Federal pension records are kept in 22,000 file cabinets inside a limestone mine in Pennsylvania.  When the Trump Administration offered early retirements to thousands of employees, it was told that no more than 8,000 retirements could be processed per month.  The government has been planning to do something about this for years.  Members of DOGE are digitizing decades of records in a matter of months.

The goal of DOGE is to cut spending by a trillion dollars by eliminating fraud, waste and abuse.  Democrats object.  Once again they have selective amnesia.  President Clinton fired 426,000 employees.  No one complained.  To date, DOGE is responsible for firing 0.015% of 2 million employees, and we’re told the government has been “gutted.”

Then there’s duplication of effort.  The NIH has 27 Chief Information Officers at 27 centers.  But the researchers don’t have the capability of sharing their findings with other scientists.  The IRS has 14,000 employees whose only job is to issue laptops and phones to IRS employees.  If each issued 2 a day, they could service the entire agency in a month.  There are 4.6 million active credit cards for the 2 million employees.  The cards rang up $40 billion in charges last year.  No one can say for sure where all the cards are.

The sad state in which the Trump Administration found our federal government was one in which a government that takes it upon itself to audit the financial practices of private industry cannot pass an audit of its own finances.  Without the improvements being implemented by DOGE, our government will become insolvent and no legitimate employee, recipient or creditor will be paid.

The current system is unsustainable, but Democrats object to any cuts, modernization, or transparency.  They don’t want the poor taxpayers to be able to look behind the curtain.  I wonder why?  And it’s really not just the Democrats.  Republicans are equally to blame.  A large majority of our elected officials prefer to run the government under the trip to Disney World philosophy.  They figure that the reason they’re going to Washington is not to save money, but to spend money.

This idiocy cannot continue, however changing the system will be a daunting problem.  For too long, our elected officials have regarded the federal treasury as their own bottomless piggy bank.  They’re addicted to spending.

I made that observation nearly 25 years ago.  In the very first installment of FRANK ON FRIDAY, on August 11, 2014, I wrote about The Junkie State.  The piece quoted a former drug addict who described the conduct of addicts.  “They always ask you for money.”  “They always lie.”  “They promise to go to rehab, but the drug makes them feel too good.”

Those observations are equally applicable to our government.  It constantly asks you for money.  “The rich need to pay their fair share.”  It lies constantly.  “The Affordable Care Act.”  “The Inflation Reduction Act.”  “Elect us or democracy ends.”  And it always promises you it will reform.  “The era of big government is over.”  But it never changes.

Addicts rarely change unless they’re forced to do so.  Over the years, I’ve listened to countless addicts, facing the prospect of prison, swear to judges that this time they’ll change, if you give them only one more chance.

In 2014, I wrote that our government needs an intervention.  Maybe DOGE is that intervention.  But I’m not hopeful because I’m not naive.  The drug addict is at the mercy of the court.  The Congressional addicts can ignore the DOGE improvements and go back on the road to ruin.  I hope I’m wrong.