The Department of Government Efficiency recently blew the whistle on the federal government’s plans to spend taxpayer dollars on male circumcisions in Mozambique, housing illegal immigrants in New York hotels, and grants to environmental activists promising that “climate justice travels through a Free Palestine.”
According to DOGE’s website, the advisory group has identified $55 billion in savings by eliminating fraud, canceling federal contracts and cutting the size of the federal workforce. The website features a “Wall of Receipts” detailing savings from canceled federal contracts and real estate leases, and it has a breakdown of the federal workforce and federal regulations by agency.
“The people voted for major reform,” the website said.
DOGE’s identified savings include:
• $373 million in Department of Education diversity, equity and inclusion grants, including one that trained teachers to “help students understand/interrogate the complex histories involved in oppression, and help students recognize areas of privilege and power on an individual and collective basis.”
• $10 million for “Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision.”
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• $59 million for housing illegal immigrants in New York City.
• $50 million to the Climate Justice Alliance.
• $1.9 billion in misplaced Department of Housing and Urban Development money.
• $522,000 for Politico Pro subscriptions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• $405,000 at the Department of Homeland Security for “resilience, energy and sustainability management program support services.”
• $168,000 for an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the National Institutes of Health museum.
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• $47 million for “improving learning outcomes in Asia.”
• $29 million for a “strengthening political landscape in Bangladesh.”
• $32 million for the Prague Civil Society Center.
The fiscal fat shaming has rattled Democrats, who are struggling to respond to the Trump administration’s success in highlighting head-scratching spending examples to get the public to ask why it took so long to turn off the spigot.
“Democrats are now on the record in support of advocating for fraud, waste and abuse of your tax dollars,” said Hogan Gidley, a Republican strategist who worked in the first Trump administration. “It’s the most bizarre, politically stupid thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
Mr. Gidley said the Trump administration is also winning the public relations battle because “truth is on their side, and the receipts show how insane the government abuses your hard-earned money.”
“That is jarring for a lot of people,” he said.
DOGE recently started focusing on the IRS and the Department of Defense.
The group’s influence was felt once the Trump administration offered buyouts to all federal employees late last month as part of an effort to shrink the size of the civilian workforce.
The focus on the group intensified after the White House targeted diversity, equity and inclusion programs and then sought to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and fold it into the State Department.
The push to shutter USAID, which has a $40 billion budget, left thousands of federal USAID employees and nonprofit organizations that worked with international agencies in limbo.
Democrats rallied with workers and union members outside USAID’s Washington headquarters. They also sounded the alarm on the DOGE team’s push to gain access to internal data at several federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Small Business Administration.
Trying to slow the effort, Democrats have been fighting in the courts and test-driving various rebuttals.
They warn that Mr. Trump is pursuing spending cuts that will hurt working-class Americans and veterans working in the federal government to offset tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations.
They charge that Mr. Trump has turned a blind eye to Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest and sparked a constitutional crisis by allowing unelected DOGE members to gain access to agency systems that hold extensive data, including the medical and service records of military veterans.
Democrats and their allies also have raised concerns that DOGE is gaining access to the personal financial information of political rivals and plans to use it against them.
“Elon Musk is an unelected, unaccountable billionaire with unprecedented conflicts of interest,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “He is using his influence over his co-president, Donald Trump, to wield unchecked power in the executive branch, steering federal dollars toward his business ventures, dismantling agencies that regulate his businesses, and pushing for tax breaks worth hundreds of billions of dollars for him and his billionaire friends.”
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington backed the administration’s position that Mr. Musk is not running DOGE but instead serving as a “special government employee” and senior adviser to the president.
“Like other senior White House advisers, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” Joshua Fisher, director of the Office of Administration, told the court.
In agreeing with the administration, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan shot down a challenge to DOGE by a coalition of Democratic-run states, which argued that Mr. Musk was running amok and “unraveling agencies, accessing sensitive data, and causing mass chaos and confusion for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people.”
Some Democrats have sold their Tesla vehicles in protest, and others have bought bumper stickers reading, “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy.”
The Democrats’ attacks have amused Mr. Musk.
“I used to be adored by the left — less so these days,” he said on Fox News. “I was at a friend’s birthday party, and I mentioned the president’s name, and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like meth and rabies.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.