Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne

Still, this shouldn’t come across as too negative. It’s easy to nitpick and ignore the forest for the trees. While the drilling example, the FDA, and possible cuts to workers tasked with deregulating other sectors of the economy are negative, they are set against many other positive firings at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, USAID, and elsewhere. Regardless, the scale and scope of firings are consistent with a Musk-style restructuring that sometimes goes too far, and that can be later corrected with rehiring. This is primarily a theory of how DOGE cuts budgets in the agencies it targets.

  1. DOGE is the first step of a public relations campaign to build popular support for spending cuts.

Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse is an often repeated justification for DOGE. Its first target was unpopular foreign aid dispensed through USAID. DOGE’s early announcements highlighted a cut of $50 million for “condoms for Hamas” that turned out to be contraceptive aid for a province in Mozambique named Gaza. Condoms for Hamas would have certainly been ludicrous, actual contraceptive aid for Mozambique somewhat less so. Nevertheless, many Americans will rightly think that is not a priority use of their taxpayer dollars.

Still, DOGE has canceled several small-dollar projects that are just as silly, such as a Peruvian comic book about an education superhero that had to feature an LGBTQ+ character to address mental health issues. Often, the money was already spent, but at least it sends the signal there won’t be any more spending on these or similar initiatives. DOGE’s efforts to reduce spending on more popular programs like Social Security are stopped cold, such as its scrapped proposal to reduce phone services for program beneficiaries. The goal of reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is also inconsistent with the administration’s firing of Inspectors Generalwhose jobs were to monitor federal actions to reduce, among other things, waste, fraud, and abuse.