It seems that the Department of Government Efficiency is evil and bad for America.
Elon Musk, the godfather of DOGE, has celebrated cutting the federal government with a gold chainsaw. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., has described DOGE as “the Elon Musk chainsaw massacre.”
As DOGE moves through the federal government, workers have lost their jobs, federal contracts have been thrown into confusion, and it seems Washington, D.C., is in chaos. This sends the message that America is not stable or reliable.
On the contrary, DOGE is far overdue, and it represents an effort to restrain a bloated federal bureaucracy and restore it under the rightful authority of the elected president. Here are three reasons why the creative destruction that DOGE is bringing is just what Washington needs.
1. The Unaccountable Bureaucracy
Most Americans are familiar with the three branches of government: Congress—or the legislative branch—that makes laws; the president who oversees the executive branch that enforces the laws; and the Supreme Court that oversees the judicial branch that handles resolving legal disputes.
Fewer know about the effective fourth branch of government: the 438 agencies in the executive branch that technically report to the president but enjoy various perks and protections that insulate them from the president’s effective control.
Each year, this vast bureaucracy issues far more rules—dubbed “regulations”—than Congress passes laws. In 2023, for example, agencies issued 3,018 rules—which took up an astonishing 89,368 pages—while Congress enacted 68 laws. Those rules generally have the force of law.
Meanwhile, in the name of protecting the “civil service,” the government has special systems protecting federal bureaucrats. Federal employees receive pensions, many days off, health care, life insurance, child care subsidies, and many other benefits. After two years of service, they gain protections under the Merit Systems Protection Board, which adjudicates any claims they may have.
Private sector employers also provide many benefits and perks, but federal employees have a notorious reputation for doing little work and being extremely difficult to fire.
President Donald Trump’s first term and the COVID-19 pandemic also revealed that many bureaucrats have an entitlement mentality—they see themselves as intellectually and morally superior to the general public. Even though Americans elected Trump, many bureaucrats worked to undermine him from within. During COVID-19, the government’s medical establishment openly lied to the American people and urged Big Tech companies to censor opposition to its official narrative.
This mentality helps explain why 64% of Washington, D.C.-based federal workers who voted for Kamala Harris in the last election say they would not follow a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy. Bureaucrats planning a “deep state” effort against the president represent a threat to his rightful authority and the job the American people elected him to do.
DOGE represents a step toward holding these bureaucrats accountable and restoring the president’s authority over them.
So, why do these bureaucrats have such a great deal? Part of the answer is public sector unions.
2. The Infrastructure Gumming Up Reform
When Americans think of labor unions, we often conjure up the idea of factory workers banding together to lobby for improved work conditions—men and women who labor with their hands demanding a commonsense break to go to church on Sunday or asking for a raise to honor their hard work and keep up with inflation.
Today, labor unions represent a massive superstructure that sends workers’ union dues to bankroll political and ideological causes. America’s largest unions aren’t just left-leaning, they directly contribute funds to Democrats—and they funnel cash to the left-wing activist groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration (the influence campaign I describe in my book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government”). The labor movement has struggled in the private sector, but government workers flock to unions in the public sector.
Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the godfather of America’s administrative state, opposed the idea of public sector unions.
“The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations,” Roosevelt wrote in a 1937 letter. “The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”
Any negotiation with a public employee union would constitute a loss of the people’s authority, the founder of the New Deal said.
Roosevelt considered public union strikes “unthinkable and intolerable” because they cause “the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it.”
Yet today, the American Federation of Government Employees represents 600,000 federal workers in the U.S. and overseas. This union has filed multiple lawsuits to block Trump’s reforms.
The American Federation of Government Employees and other unions see DOGE as a threat because Trump wants to cut bureaucratic bloat, and the unions stand to benefit from larger and larger government.
DOGE is a step toward reining in the federal bureaucracy and undermining the public sector unions that even FDR opposed.
3. DOGE Is Restoring the Constitution
According to the Constitution, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.”
If a president cannot fire the bureaucrats who work in the executive branch, does executive power truly lie with him?
Trump has promised to root out the divisive ideologies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; gender ideology; and climate alarmism from the federal government, and these ideologies are deeply entrenched in the federal bureaucracy. Since the people elected Trump, efforts by bureaucrats to prevent his promise to return the government to sanity represent a threat to a “small-d” democratic transition of power.
As Trump attempts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, unions like the American Federation of Government Employees have been filing lawsuits to block him, and federal judges have issued injunctions preventing him from exercising his constitutional authority. Ultimately, many of these lawsuits may end up in the lap of the Supreme Court for it to decide.
The reforms Trump is pursuing through DOGE have revealed just how entrenched the federal bureaucracy is and how necessary it is for the Supreme Court to restore the president’s authority over the executive branch.
Response to Objections
Chainsaws, like any human tool, can be used for good or evil. Musk was not celebrating the idea of slicing up bureaucrats with a chainsaw, but taking a chainsaw to a bloated—and arguably often unconstitutional—administrative state.
Growing up in bone-dry Colorado, I used chainsaws to trim extra branches from trees, to protect my mountain home from wildfires. Sometimes a little trimming will protect your home from a worse calamity in the future.
Trump has moved very quickly with DOGE, closing the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development and freezing foreign aid for a time in order to examine where it goes. These moves have created some uncertainty, and some hardworking federal employees may fear for their jobs.
That said, private sector employees experience downsizing all the time, and a little creative destruction is long overdue in the federal government.
Conservatives should not celebrate when dedicated employees lose their jobs, but bureaucrats should consider how good they had it before complaining overmuch when they finally face the sort of job churn private sector employees experience on a regular basis.
This op-ed on DOGE is written in the style of Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica,” presenting arguments against the main point, making the main point, and then addressing the objections.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
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