In an iconic episode of SpongeBob SquarePants with the city burning in the background, SpongeBob tells his friend, “We did it, Patrick! We saved the city!” President Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick, Elon Musk, claim to be saving our government by reducing wasteful spending and eliminating inefficiencies when, in fact, they are a waste-making machine, and, like SpongeBob and Patrick, burning it all down.
There is no doubt our government could be more effective, but Trump and Musk’s ill-named Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) is taking us in the wrong direction.
Though the administration’s list of counterproductive actions putatively designed to save money is quite long, three stand out: the firing of independent inspectors general whose actual job it is to address government waste, fraud, and abuse; the decimation of the IRS, the primary means of bringing revenue into the government; and the purging of the government’s most vital resource, our nonpartisan civil servants.
