OPINION:
U.S. employers added 177,000 jobs in April, even though the federal government had shed 9,000 jobs. Since President Trump took office in January, 26,000 jobs have been slashed from the federal workforce.
Although mainstream media decry the loss of these jobs (“Left in limbo: How federal workers still on the job are coping with chaos,” a CNN headline reads. “Fear, chaos and missing paperwork: DOGE stories from federal workers,” The Washington Post reports), these are the results Mr. Trump promised on the campaign trail that 77 million Americans voted for.
During President Biden’s tenure, the federal workforce grew by nearly 6%, with nearly every major agency adding hires and new departments. In Mr. Biden’s final two years, only 74% of jobs came from the private sector. One out of every four were created by the federal government.
The federal bureaucracy now employs more than 3 million people, making it the nation’s 15th largest workforce. That doesn’t even include active-duty military personnel (1.3 million) and the U.S. Postal Service, with 600,000 or more employees. Last year, the government spent $1.06 trillion more than it collected, and with $36 trillion in national debt, a fiscal diet is long overdue.
Enter Elon Musk.
His Department of Government Efficiency has exposed the rot of federal excess. Yes, that includes some federal employees who, on average, get paid $51.18 an hour, or $106,462 annually, to work from home with little to no oversight.
On Wednesday, a former State Department budget analyst pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $650,000 via her signature authority over a common QuickBooks checking account. She wrote five dozen checks to herself and another three to an individual with whom she had a personal relationship. She then changed the payee in the QuickBooks system to an actual State Department vendor, giving the appearance that everything was on the up and up.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that taxpayers lose as much as $521 billion annually because of federal workers and contractors embezzling or committing fraud. The government has more than 2,000 QuickBooks accounts, all ripe for federal audit.
In March, the Daily Wire reported about a now DOGE-shuttered federal agency where employees lived “like reigning kings,” spending taxpayer money on exotic vacations and offices with “luxury suites with full bathrooms.” These employees used agency credit cards to order champagne and $200 coasters for their offices and commissioned paintings for the agency’s top employees.
“It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity,” the Daily Wire reported.
The Internal Revenue Service, the agency Mr. Biden tried to beef up to harass hardworking Americans, found that almost 150,000 federal workers in fiscal year 2021 owed about $1.5 billion in unpaid taxes. More than 5,000 of them were working at the IRS. Only 20 of those IRS employees have been terminated.
Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, 11,000 IRS employees have been booted, with more to come.
Then there’s the U.S. Institute of Peace, a taxpayer-funded think tank that enacted an insurrection against DOGE reforms. Its leadership barricaded itself on the fifth floor of the headquarters building, disabled its telephone lines and internet connections, and refused access to DOGE officials. It deleted financial information and had loaded guns on the premises.
Mr. Musk’s team said the think tank approved congressionally allocated funds for private jets and had a $130,000 contract with a former Taliban member. The think tank has been referred to the Department of Justice and the FBI, and a DOGE official has been installed to oversee it.
“I mean, any given company, any given organizational name is going to kind of be the opposite of the title,” Mr. Musk told Fox News’ Jesse Watters in an interview last week.
“I think it’s a great example, because most Americans don’t know what’s going on at a lot of these smaller agencies,” a DOGE employee told Fox News of the U.S. Institute of Peace. “And this is, I think, the most extreme case of some of the wasteful spending that we’re finding.”
Thanks to Mr. Musk, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its 10,000 employees have been gutted. They were doing important work, such as handing out $2 million in taxpayer money for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt, and $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.”
Mr. Musk’s DOGE team is looking to close the 1,700-member Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and cut the bureaucracy within the Pentagon to the Education Department.
Mr. Musk will reduce his DOGE activities at the end of the month, but his team will remain in place and soldier on.
Then it will be up to Congress to decide whether the era of big government is indeed over by codifying the cuts Mr. Musk has made into law.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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