Elon Musk can’t steal a job no one’s doing. But Democrats disagree, angrily griping that the tech mogul’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is somehow a hostile takeover, a “shadow government” blowtorching the Constitution. That’s absurd, the billionaire has fired back. “The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get. That’s what democracy is all about.” Of course, neither party would know. They haven’t had the stomach for deep cuts in decades.

And it isn’t just Democrats who hate to say goodbye to pet projects and back-home interests. Republicans are white-knuckling through this winnowing process too, the AP notes. “The problem’s in that room,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said, pointing to the House chamber. “These guys, they talk real tough,” but they don’t vote that tough, he lamented. “We’ve got to get some guts, and people have got to hold us accountable,” the Tennessean leveled with reporters. Yes, “we need the waste-cutting,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) agreed, but more importantly, “we need Congress to grow a spine.”

Until then, Trump is relying on Musk’s. After years of watching Congress pledge, but fail, to make sweeping changes, his DOGE is more than ready to slash and burn. “It’s not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses,” the billionaire said. “It’s essential for America to remain solvent as a country.” He’s right, Rep. Pete Sauber (R-Minn.) added. “If there’s anybody who doesn’t believe we can find efficiencies in government, they’ve got to be blind.”

From trans comic books in Peru to supplying al-Qaeda, DOGE is storming through government receipts, shocking plenty of Americans along the way. While taxpayers cheer, Democrats have become almost hysterical, unable to keep up with the rapid-fire pace of the president’s overhauls. Fourteen state attorneys general even resorted to filing a lawsuit, a last-ditch effort to stop the seismic federal downsizing.

“Mr. Musk’s seemingly limitless and unchecked power to strip the government of its workforce and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse would have been shocking to those who won this country’s independence,” the chief law enforcers of Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Vermont wrote.

“There is no office of the United States, other than the President, with the full power of the Executive Branch, and the sweeping authority now vested in a single unelected and unconfirmed individual is antithetical to the nation’s entire constitutional structure,” they claimed.

Democrats, who seem to have Olympic-level skill at misreading the room since the election, haven’t stopped to think that maybe this is exactly what the country wants. As The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Hennessey points out, “The left’s DOGE-inspired hysteria is silly — a political blunder. Donald Trump’s campaign promise in 2024 was explicit: Elect me and I’ll hand Mr. Musk a broom to clean out the Augean stables of the administrative state. Voters said, ‘OK boys, get after it.’ I’m no political scientist, but I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of a coup.”

What’s more, he went on, “If Democrats had any brains, they’d sit back and let it happen. At some point they’ll regain the White House. If DOGE is even moderately successful, the next Democratic president will inherit a leaner bureaucracy, less plagued by waste, fraud and abuse.” Frankly, Hennessey said, unironically, “Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to defend drag shows in developing countries as an essential tool of American soft power?”

To true conservatives, who’ve been fighting this war on waste for years without a real partner in leadership, watching Elon expose hundreds of billions of dollars in outrageous programs has been cathartic. “The reason this has been happening,” House Freedom Caucus Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) argued, “is because Congress has been asleep at the switch.” He and others outlined dozens of these projects — including the embarrassment that is USAID — but when they’ve put up amendments to carve out the most egregious spending, “a majority of Republicans voted against [it].”

But, he emphasized, “It’s a new day in town. The president and Elon are exposing it. Now we can demonstrate that those of us who have been fighting this, we’re on the right side.” And if the GOP knows what’s good for it, they’ll “get on board and to work together in Congress and in the administration to support slashing this waste,” Roy said.

From his perch at the top of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), another conservative who fought this in the rank-and-file, is enjoying the show. “It’s really something,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “The deep state is in full panic mode because Elon Musk and the DOGE team is right over the target, which is why they’re catching so much flak. I tell you, what they’re doing is truly transformational,” he underscored.

“I met with Elon for an hour on Monday night in his office,” Johnson said. “He’s working out of the Eisenhower building, which is right across … from the White House in the old Secretary of War room. And we laughed about how appropriate that is, because he’s effectively declaring war on the big bureaucracy, because he’s seeking efficiencies. And that’s exactly what the American people want, need, and deserve.”

The speaker says that the big question he’s getting is: “Why didn’t Congress know about all of these abuses?” His answer is the same as Roy’s. “We’ve tried. I’ve been in Congress for eight years. We have a really important oversight responsibility that we’re given in the Constitution … and we’ve tried to dig out and find all these abuses. But surprise, surprise, the agencies of the federal government have been hiding all this. They don’t do full disclosure. They don’t want to show us what’s under the rug. And now Elon is finding it. And it is really getting a lot of attention because it’s absolutely crazy stuff.”

Unfortunately for the Left and its big bureaucratic spenders, not only is Musk great at exposing this garbage, “he has a pretty big megaphone with X” to broadcast it, Perkins chimed in. To Johnson, “That is actually the magic of the formula, because Elon has this giant platform on which he can explain this step by step. And that’s what’s gotten the deep state so alarmed because they know that the game is up. … But what’s different about this is it’s not just members of Congress trying to grasp what we can find out of certain pieces of paper that are turned over to us. Elon has algorithms running through the actual programs of the government that have never been done before. And [as he says], the data is impossible to fake or to hide.”

At the end of the day, the Louisianan said proudly, “It’s going to be a massive transformational paradigm shift for how the government operates. It’s really exciting stuff.”

As for the Democrats’ beef that Elon is operating outside the boundaries of executive authority, Johnson says baloney. “It’s exactly the opposite. When Congress allocates money, when Congress appropriates funds for the executive branch agencies, it builds in two things: a lot of broad discretion, of course, for the executive to be able to determine how exactly it’s spent and where and when. And also there is a presupposition that the executive branch is going to use the money as a good steward,” he pointed out. “We don’t have to write that into every piece of legislation. It is presumed. But when that is not happening,” the speaker continued, “it is entirely appropriate for the executive branch of the government and a new commander in chief to go through and scrub the programs and assess where the money is being wasted or stolen. That’s something every single American should applaud. And I can’t believe that the courts are trying to intervene in this.”

Perkins compared it to the Middle East where one civilization or time period would be built on top of another. Eventually, you end up with a big mountain, where one generation built on the ruins of another. “That’s what our federal government has become. It’s just one layer on top of another, and it appears that what Elon Musk is doing is taking a bulldozer and doing some archaeological digs.”

Absolutely, Johnson nodded. “And [he’s] doing it in a way that Congress has not been able to do, because this was, in a literal sense, hidden from us. And so, that bulldozer was a long time coming. I told Elon I was so excited after our meeting this week. I said, ‘Elon, I’m sure you realize this, [but] I think of it in terms [of] a constitutional law attorney.’ He thinks of it as a scientist and a data analyst. But I said, ‘What you’re doing at the end of the day is restoring the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution.’ They wanted a limited federal government that had very careful oversight by the duly elected representatives of the people. And now this effort is empowering us, the elected representatives, to do that once again. It’s really, really incredible stuff.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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