Elon Musk’s crusade to root out fraud in government is piling up evidence that, in fact, federal workers are overwhelmingly clean and useful. Musk’s Doge team keeps trumpeting discoveries of “fraud”, then quietly removing them from its Wall of Receipts, as it learns what government actually does. At one point, Doge “deleted from the website all five of the biggest savings it had claimed”, reports Reuters. Donald Trump told Congress that Doge has found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud”, but the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute estimates Doge’s true saving is “closer to $2bn, or 0.03 per cent of federal budget”.
Cutting 100,000 plus federal workers may have downsides. Even libertarians might want government to do its unseen work of averting catastrophe, such as preventing sabotage of the electrical grid or nuclear weapon leakage. Doge’s initial mass firing of nuclear staffers removed, among others, the “acting chief of defence nuclear safety and other emergency personnel”. Waste and fraud indeed.
Doge is an extreme iteration of the Anglo-American tradition of bureaucrat-bashing pioneered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Russell Vought, who heads the Office of Management and Budget, has said in private: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” This “villain” fantasy misunderstands why most people enter public service.