The DOGE-Republican Charade: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

DOGE is making it worse

A few weeks ago a photograph of Elon Musk holding a chainsaw above his head circulated widely on the Internet, standard media outlets, and both right-wing and left-wing echo chambers on Cable networks, podcasts, and the like. Right wingers cheered the image while left wingers stood horrified. A whole lot of the rest of us were asking: What the hell is going on?

The argument, of course, is that government is rampant with waste, fraud, and abuse. Taxpayer money is being frittered away at a time when we have enormous national debt. Something must be done. “There might be some pain,” the president said. And hence, the chainsaw began cutting the federal workforce.

Having seen this kind of thing play out in corporate organizations throughout my career, I had my doubts about its effectiveness. I wondered: Could this cutting of the workforce actually work? Could it really reduce waste, fraud and abuse? And, what is waste, fraud, and abuse anyway? What is really meant by those words?

What Is Waste?

Although Republicans talk about “waste,” they never seem to stop and think about what this means. “Waste” has two primary meanings. One is that of leftover material from a process, such as the packaging trash we throw away after receiving a package delivered to us, or the exhaust from a car or power plant. The other is that of wasted activity, which is to say, time, energy, or money used by people to do something that is not useful. Sitting in traffic is one example many people can relate to. Waiting in line is another. Neither of these meanings applies to our government.

A third way of understanding waste is the dedication of activity and resources to something that is not useful. This is a more active form of wastefulness, but here we must admit that waste is mostly in the eye of the beholder. For many people, space travel and going to the moon seems extraordinarily wasteful, whereas others see it as essential. Some people see subsidies to farmers as wasteful spending whereas others see it as essential to keeping food prices affordable for people of all stripes and beliefs. As it turns out, there is very little agreement on what this kind of wastefulness is because it is dependent on one’s values.

What Is Fraud?

Fraud is perpetrated upon a person, group, or organization by an outside player representing themselves as one thing when they are not that thing. It can be seen readily in the form of a person submitting financial information for a loan that is not true. Trump himself was a poster child for this kind of fraud, which led to him becoming the convicted felon that he is. More spectacularly, we can recall the fraud of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or Enron and it’s fake earnings. Fraud occurs through deceptions and lies. It is the presentation of oneself as something that you are not for the purpose of getting something you otherwise would not receive.

What Is Abuse?

Abuse is the use of a thing, organization, or system in ways it was not intended to get something that one otherwise would not receive. During the Reagan years, we were filled with the ideas of a so-called welfare queen as the symbol for the abuse of the welfare system. Doctors and hospitals that submit for reimbursement of one procedure because it is reimbursed at a higher level than a similar procedure is another example. In most cases, abuse occurs as a use of the rules in ways that they were not intended.

What Is the Charade?

No one believes there is no waste, fraud, or abuse in the government. The charade is not that. The charade DOGE-Republicans are playing is this: That wholesale cutting of jobs is the fix for waste, fraud and abuse. This proposition is so idiotic as to be a bad joke if it weren’t so pernicious and, actually, contrary to the stated goal.

Abusers of the system are not the employees of the federal government; they are people outside the government who abuse the rules. Eliminating the jobs of federal employees does absolutely nothing to reduce abuse. In fact, it enables more abuse. Many federal employees, after all, are dedicated to eliminating such abuse.

The same is true of fraud. Fraud is perpetrated by people and organizations outside of the federal government, not generally inside it. Although one may find a case of it here or there, those cases will not be eliminated by mass firings. Nor will the fraud of unscrupulous doctors, hospitals, individuals, suppliers, or others who seek to defraud the government. Again, the reality is that much of the federal workforce—IRS agents, social security administration claims processors, Medicare processors, DOD procurement, etc.—are dedicated precisely to the prevention of such fraud. Eliminating vast swaths of the federal workforce will do nothing to cut fraud. In fact, it makes the system ever more susceptible to the fraud DOGE-Republicans say they are opposed to.

Waste, as we have seen, is relative to the values of whoever is assessing it to be waste or not waste. While we can argue about these values and whether projects or programs are good or not, there is no amount of blind cutting of jobs that will cure this kind of waste. In fact, as anyone who has been through workforce reductions in companies knows, the opposite is true. Workforce reductions cause chaos in organizations, not efficiency. Processes have to be changed. People are worrying and jockeying for their jobs. Skilled talent is lost. As a result, the organization has to return to learning the lessons all over again because the knowledge that was in those people is lost. Customer service—in this case, service given to citizens—nearly always gets worse, not better.

Mass firings will do nothing to reduce waste. Mass firings will do nothing to reduce fraud. Mass firings will do nothing to reduce abuse. In fact, in all three cases, mass firings will inevitably make the problems worse. Fewer people means reduced ability to screen for waste, fraud, and abuse. It simply doesn’t make sense.

An Example: USAID

A good example of this distortion is the debate on USAID. By Republican reckoning, USAID is a vast agency that is wasting taxpayer dollars. Here are common examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at USAID cited by Republicans and MAGA supporters:

• $50 million for condoms sent to Hamas in Gaza that were used to make floating bombs

• $4.8 million to fund social media influencers in Ukraine

• $2.1 million to protect Paraguay border

• $2 million on transgender surgeries in Guatemala

• $25,000 for transgender opera in Columbia

• $32,000 to create a comic featuring a trans hero in Peru

• $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street

• $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes

• $27 mill to give gift bags to illegals before we deport them

One would think from this list that USAID is an obvious cesspool of waste. Yet, many of these items are completely debatable as to whether or not they even happened. In fact, the condoms in Gaza claim was debunked by reporters and admitted to be false by Elon Musk himself. Condoms were purchased and distributed in a province called Gaza in Mozambique in order to help prevent AIDS there—as part of a program that has been very successful in helping reduce AIDS, especially congenital AIDS in newborns. There were no floating condom bombs.

But let’s give the argument its due. Let’s assume that these things are true, except for the demonstrably false claim about the condom bombs. If you add the total waste from all these favored bogeymen up, you get a total of $58 million. That’s a lot of money. What is conveniently left out, however, is that before the destruction, USAID provided food to over 25 million children around the world as their only way to avoid malnutrition. It treats 5 million children every year for pneumonia. It has been a lynchpin in reducing the incidence of AIDS in countries where it was prevalent, which has meant a huge reduction in the number of children being born with AIDS.

Now consider this: USAID’s total budget is $40 billion. The sum total of all the egregious waste or abuse outlined by right-wing MAGA media is $58 million. That is total “waste” of 1.45% of the budget. On that basis, USAID staff and budget was reduced by 87%. Even an overzealous waste cutter doesn’t ax an agency by 87% to remove 1.45% of wasted dollars. Clearly, this is not about waste. Something else is going on.

So, what are they up to?

This begs a question then: What are the DOGE-Republicans up to? “Waste, fraud, and abuse” is a rallying cry reiterated across the country, in bars, and around kitchen tables. It gets people on board. Who isn’t against waste, fraud, and abuse? No one. We all want to see that go away. But when the methods used contribute nothing to solving those problems, and when they are most likely to make those same problems worse, and when the impact of those decisions is so impactful not only on the workers but on the service levels the government will provide its citizens, we have to wonder what is going on? Why are they doing this? It obviously is not to stop waste, fraud, or abuse.

I don’t care to speculate on intentions, but we can readily see impacts.

First, the firings open the government to more fraud and abuse by eliminating the people who watch for it. From the IRS agents getting people to pay their fair share of taxes to watching over Medicare payments, we will lose more, not less, by eliminating these jobs.

Second, the elimination of non-partisan civil servants reduces the ability of such people to be in place to watch and see corruption. Whether by design or not, these firings make the government extremely susceptible to such corruption. As remaining civil servants are replaced by political appointees, the susceptibility of the government to corruption by a party in power increases exponentially. The checks on such activity are being eliminated in these staff cuts.

Third, as staff levels are reduced, you disempower the units of government that are cut, which is to say, the so-called “deep state.” But “deep state” has never been anything but a euphemism for the institutions of government and the rules by which they operate. All of the rhetoric of the current government and its media megaphones express a contempt for those institutions, which is readily observable just in the term of the deep state. This contempt is palpable in nearly every conversation about government you have with the right wingers, whether they use the term deep state or not. The contempt for government is always there. They appreciate the disempowerment of governmental units as a good thing. Although I do not fully understand the source of such contempt, I can see it, as can any other citizen connected in these times.

Fourth, the firings appear to be a start on much bigger reductions in workforce for the purpose, it seems from Elon Musk’s statements, of opening the space for AI to take over. Whether this is a plan or not, it is certainly an effect—the work will not go away. All of the techno-utopians titans are now in the pockets of DOGE-Republicans, and one is led to wonder if this is why. The elimination of jobs means you can replace these people with the new AI agents—or at least experiment with them in government positions and with unlimited funding. In this way, we could be looking at a first imposition of AI into the creation of a jobless, postcapitalist world, as I have written about in my book What Is Postcapitalism?

Fifth, these mass firings will reduce service levels to people the government serves. When lines to enter national parks are an hour long with four rangers moving people through, it isn’t hard to see that when you reduce to two rangers, the wait in line will double. When a social security application for retirement benefits you have earned by paying into the system for decades takes four months to process with current staffing and that staffing is reduced substantially, it isn’t had to see that processing the same claim will now take six months or eight months. When the processing of logging contracts in the national forests is held up by the reduction in workforce, the implications for an entire industry are substantial—from loggers to truckers, to processing plants, to prices at the home improvement stores, to finished homes. The implications are massive and unseen. This applies to any industry requiring processing by the government.

How this all plays out exactly is unknown, but we can expect even more specious calls about waste, fraud, and abuse being the driving force behind the DOGE-Republican assault. It is good propaganda, but there is nothing in what they are doing that will actually reduce waste, fraud, or abuse. In fact, it will lead to more waste, more fraud, and more abuse because there won’t be the people who stop those things from happening. And, the DOGE staff-cutting program will open the government to something even worse—corruption. The DOGE-Republican program is a bogus charade. Don’t be fooled.

Anthony Signorelli