MAKING SENSE OF THE WAR OVER DOGE. Twice this week, President Donald Trump has publicly noted that he will impose constraints on Elon Musk, a special government employee and the world’s richest man, as Musk works to cut federal spending. Arriving Sunday evening in Washington, Trump told reporters on the tarmac that, “I think Elon’s doing a good job. He’s a big cost-cutter. Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job.”
In the Oval Office Monday, Trump said that Musk has “access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good if we agree with him, and it’s only if we agree with him.” The president added that Musk is “a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs. And we put him in charge of seeing what he can do with certain groups and certain numbers … and they’re finding tremendous waste, really, waste more than anything else. … They’re finding tremendous amounts of really bad things, bad spending.”
But “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” Trump stressed, “and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won’t. … He’s running, obviously, a big company … if there’s a conflict, then we won’t let him get near it. But he does have a good natural instinct. He’s got a team of very talented people. … Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it. But he has some very good ideas.”
Musk’s team is deep-diving into the U.S. Agency for International Development, an “independent” agency that provides all sorts of foreign aid. The “independent” part of USAID’s definition is questionable — it’s in the executive branch, it’s under the control of the president, and, indeed, its head reports to the secretary of state. But for decades, it appears its employees have thought of it as a nongovernmental organization, an independent group that just happens to have billions of taxpayer dollars to give away as it likes.
There’s also been some confusion in the reports of indefensible spending by USAID over the issue of which indefensible expenditure came from USAID and which came from the State Department. Some news reports have conflated the two. But the important thing to remember is that both State and USAID are engaging in indefensible expenditures on the foreign aid front. Musk and his crew appear to be focusing on USAID, but the problem goes beyond that, as Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been pointing out.
And the spending is indefensible. Three examples, from USAID and the State Department: In 2022, USAID awarded $1,500,000 to a Serbian organization called Grupa Izadji. The purpose of the grant was, in USAID’s words, “to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities, by promoting economic empowerment and opportunity for LGBTQI+ people in Serbia.”
Also in 2022, the State Department awarded $32,000 to a Peruvian group to “cover expenses to produce a tailored-made comic, featuring an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues.” And in 2021, the State Department awarded $25,000 to a university in Bogota, Colombia, to “raise awareness and increase the transgender representation through the opera.”
After investigating the spending, Mast wrote in a memorandum this week that, “What we found was the State Department and USAID had completely lost sight of their mission.” Money was going out the door to entirely inappropriate projects, including those listed above and more. It was also going to prop up what Mast called “an NGO industrial complex” that lives on U.S. taxpayer dollars. “Foreign aid should not be paying the brunch tabs of NGO executives at Le Diplomate in Washington, DC,” Mast wrote. “It should be feeding starving children in war-torn countries.”
Defenders point out that all U.S. foreign aid, around $40 billion per year, amounts to a tiny part of the roughly $7 trillion federal budget. But it doesn’t matter if it’s just $20 — the U.S. government should not be spending taxpayer money to produce LGBT comic books in Peru.
That’s a big part of the thinking behind DOGE. Another is addressing actual fraud in some spending areas. As Mast said, there is a place for U.S. foreign aid — feeding starving children in war-torn countries. The United States does a lot of that, along with providing medical aid to fight scourges such as malaria and parasites in poor and backward areas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has now been placed in charge of USAID in addition to State Department spending, has already issued a waiver for “life-saving humanitarian assistance” during the period in which DOGE is reviewing spending.
Democrats, meanwhile, have taken the position of defending everything, the crazy spending as well as the legitimate stuff. It’s a risky idea. Foreign aid, in general, is one of the least popular parts of the federal budget. Some people oppose all of it, and many, many others oppose the far-out projects. But Democrats have decided to throw their bodies in front of DOGE to protect the spending listed above and more.
In rallies across Washington, some Democrats have declared war on the effort to curb spending. “Shut down the city! We are at war!” Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) screamed at a rally. “We have to fight this in the courts, we have to fight this in the Congress, and we have to fight this in the streets,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said. And from Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL): “The same spirit that Elon Musk has coming from South Africa … we’re not going to have apartheid in America anymore!”
You get the idea. Will the public really side with Democrats on this? “Relaunching the Resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation,” Politico’s Rachael Bade wrote, “and some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back.”
“My heart is with the people out on the streets outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,'” former Obama aide David Axelrod told Politico. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
It’s important to note that, in many cases, Congress did not specifically authorize the wild expenditures. Rather, lawmakers gave money to the State Department or USAID and, in some cases, gave the various offices within those organizations discretion on how to spend it. According to sources, the Peruvian LGBT comic book was funded by the Fulbright Program inside the State Department. Congress gave the State Department money for the Fulbright Program but gave the program discretion on how to spend it. That’s how you got the comic book or the LGBT job program in Serbia.
It’s also important to recognize that Musk is not the first person to go after outrageous government spending and, in particular, outrageous foreign aid. Indeed, a lot of the messages Musk is sending out from inside USAID, highlighting this or that expenditure, echo what some members of Congress have been doing for years. Whether Musk makes more progress than they did remains to be seen.
And then it’s important to remember that cutting indefensible spending, while necessary, is not going to solve the nation’s deepening problem of spending and debt. A number of experienced budget hands have pointed out that Trump might cut a billion or two here and there, while at the same time adding hundreds of billions in debt through more spending and tax cuts. That’s not a solution to the problem. But still: Cutting outrageous spending is a good idea, no matter how inconsequential some say it is.
So what about Musk? One problem that besets some billionaires is that they think they can do anything they want because they mostly can. Musk, who has had extraordinary, historic success building rockets and cars and also owns X, has brought huge enthusiasm to the DOGE effort. But through it all, he has made public statements that grate on a lot of sensibilities — and not just those of Democrats. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted at 1:54 a.m. Monday. “Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
In a few words, Musk managed to diminish the seriousness of what he was trying to accomplish and then brag that he passed up some great parties to do it. It’s good that the spirit of sacrifice is alive within DOGE.
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But to go to the most important thing: This is not Musk’s effort. It is Trump’s effort. As powerful as he is, Musk has no authority inside the executive branch beyond what the president has temporarily granted him. This is Trump’s project, and a lot of his supporters see it as a very important way not just to stop wasting money but to reduce the powers of woke inside the federal government.
That’s why Trump has made clear that Musk is working within parameters set for him by the president. Trump will probably say it again and again as the effort goes on. When Democrats say, “Nobody elected Elon,” they’re right, and that is why the ultimate responsibility lies with the man in the Oval Office.