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I've predicted that the DOGE would be highly effective. So far it's exceeded my already high expectations.
Every day, there is the steady drip, drip, drip of taxpayer money being saved. People might scoff at the value of cutting small programs that "only" cost $20 million. But if the average taxpayer pays $500k in taxes over their lifetime, that's 40 people working for their entire lives to give the government that statue of Fauci or whatever else they are doing. Wasting money destroys societal trust.
Not that every fraud and waste is small potatoes. Just today the NIH cut the "tax" that schools like Harvard and Yale are allowed to charge to run their government research. Previously, for example, Harvard grants on average charged 69% above the cost of doing research for institutional overhead. (I think we can all imagine where that ends up). NIH just capped that tax at 15%. This will save $4 billion per year. That's $53 for every one of the 75 million Americans who paid federal income tax last year.
Savings like this are happening every day. So far DOGE has saved $69 billion according to U.S. Debt clock.
But of course they haven't gotten to the biggest sectors of the government yet. They will, and I predict the fraud and waste will be shocking. How much social security is going to dead people, to disability fraudsters, to illegal immigrants, etc...? My guess is a lot. The fraud and waste at USAID was just sitting there for anyone to see, but no one did. Why should other segments of the government be any different?
It's going to get crazy.
At least until some judge reverses it all.
There is a genuine "they have made their ruling, now let them enforce it" aspect here.
Okay so a judge says you can't fire them without process. Doesn't stop you from disposing of their work equipment, repurposing their buildings, and basically proceeding along as if they've already been fired.
Okay so the judge doesn't let you freeze their funds. But you can slow walk the distributions, or turn them over to friendly elements within the departments, or earmark them for long term spending goals so they're still sitting there.
For better or worse, Judges have a limited toolbox to impose their will on other branches, and it is thus sort of easy to guess which ones they'll use and route around those.
IF the legislature decides to play along (big IF) then they can also start defunding courts or reshuffling them and making Judges themselves decide its a good time to retire.
The judge right now is saying they can't even put them on paid administrative leave. I'm not sure exactly what that means; if they don't put them on leave but also don't assign them any work nor give them access to any government systems, how is that any different? But if it isn't different, can they hold the administration in contempt?
Sounds like the Japanese method of pressuring workers to quit: stick them in a room with nothing to do, wait for them to quit out of boredom.
I am fairly sure this would not work with the modal federal government worker. But I'm pretty sure a lot of these people have been "working" from home since COVID anyway.
Can't you just assign people to work in Alaska or somewhere they don't want to work instead of firing them.
SDNY judge would say no to reassigning them to Alaska.
Why does only one of your sides not hesitate to show up at the houses of judges with a crowbar and zipties?
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