Last night in Charleston, S.C., I spoke to an excellent group of right-minded people, and offered some praise for the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Credit where it is due: President Donald Trump, who never really seemed like that much of a fiscal hawk in his first term, established DOGE and has actually made cutting wasteful spending a priority – or at least for the first 81 days of his presidency. As we’ve learned, you never know what Trump is going to do. Maybe this won’t last.

But – at least as of this moment — with the establishment of DOGE, and putting a larger-than-life obsessively-driven figure like Elon Musk in charge of it, we are now actually getting a thorough review of federal government spending and the cancellation of contracts that do not serve the right purposes.

There’s a lot to cheer for with DOGE. According to their data, they have identified an estimated $150 billion in savings across 22 agencies. That adds up to  $931.68 per taxpayer. They say they have eliminated 17,238 initiatives.

But DOGE isn’t perfect. Some of the data they’ve released has had errors. I was looking on the DOGE site yesterday, they listed five contracts with USAID that were canceled, totaling up to $1.1 billion dollars – each one was from $200 million to $283 million.

The name of the vendor is “UNAVAILABLE” and the description of the contract is “UNAVAILABLE FOR LEGAL REASONS.” That lack of detail is, er, less than ideal. Also… why is USAID signing contracts with anyone where the description of the program is withheld from the public for “legal reasons”?

I don’t like all of the cuts. I’d like to keep looking for Ebola in people traveling through airports in Africa. If English is the official language of the United States, then I think it makes sense to have programs designed to teach kids English when it isn’t their first language or spoken in the home.

And ultimately, DOGE is an advisory commission. It’s an influential one, but the ultimate decision of what the U.S. government spends money on rests with elected officials, and in particular with Congress. Anything that the executive branch is required to spend by statute, it must spend. Check out Dan McLaughlin’s examination of the legal challenges to DOGE.)

I closed with a cautionary note that despite all of DOGE’s efforts, we’re probably going to see a bigger deficit this fiscal year than last fiscal year. And as much as President Trump and his administration will likely get blamed, it has very little to do with any decisions they’ve made so far –although a tariff-triggered recession would likely reduce U.S. tax revenues. The last of the Baby Boomers are retiring, meaning we’re paying out more in Social Security checks and spending more on Medicare. We’re also spending more on Medicaid. And when the national debt gets bigger, we have to pay more each year in interest. As I noted last month, “outlays for net interest on the public debt increased by $44 billion (or 12 percent) primarily because the debt was larger than it was in the first five months of fiscal year 2024.”

So we’re going to see news coverage pointing out that despite DOGE’s cuts, the deficit is even bigger than last year, and asking what the point of DOGE is. (As I said last night, if the annual deficit was just 20 bucks, and the entire debt was a Benjamin, getting rid of a wasteful or unnecessary federal program would still be worthwhile!)

This morning, in the Wall Street Journal: “See How Government Spending Is Up Even as Musk Touts Savings.”

If you really want to do something about the deficit and the debt, you have to do something about entitlement programs. There is no other way.