Here’s What You Need to Know About the DOGE

What’s up with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, which will be helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” and drive “drastic change”? (WSJ)

Why we might need it: Per the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. government wasted $247 billion in taxpayer money in 2022.

• A GAO analysis from April found that fraud costs the U.S. government between $233 billion and $521 billion a year.

Some of the more absurd government spending examples:

• Over 20 years, the NIH granted more than $3 million to study aggression in hamsters, with $306,000 spent in 2015 alone.

• The government funded a study costing $518,000 to research how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese quails.

• The NIH spent $5 million on a campaign targeting "hipsters" to encourage quitting smoking, including funding for parties and $100 payments to hipsters to promote the anti-smoking message.

Zoom out: While waste is certainly a problem in government, much of the federal government’s current $6.75 trillion budget is eaten up by spending in areas like healthcare and Social Security, which Trump has pledged to protect.

Perspective: Even if DOGE were to somehow wave a magic wand and completely eliminate Social Security, which costs $1.45 trillion a year, it would only get us 75% of the way to Musk's stated goal of trimming $2 trillion off the budget.

Bubba’s Two Cents

If you’re a regular Bubba News reader, you know we’re constantly beating the drum on the skyrocketing national debt and shining a light on how wasteful and inefficient the government can be. So it goes without saying that we’re rooting for DOGE here. But there are some big challenges the commission faces, and it might not be as simple as firing a broad swathe of the government workforce (as Ramaswamy has suggested he wants to do). To reiterate: the kind of “drastic change” DOGE promises is likely to require slashing entitlements, a practically challenging and politically dicey prospect.

On the other hand, GOP politicians have been harping on the need for meaningful reforms to government bloat for years, and arguably very little progress has been made. The value of having two media, business and (now) politics giants like Elon and Vivek backing the issue is huge. Nor should we underestimate Musk and his ability to defy the experts to get seemingly impossible goals accomplished.