DOGE Is About So Much More Than Cutting Waste, Fraud and Abuse – It's About Returning Our Government To The Model Of The Founding Fathers

In 2025, the federal government has become so bloated and weighed down with bureaucratic morass as to be grossly inefficient, if not functionally inoperable.

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Over the last month, the Department of Government Efficiency (or “DOGE” for short) has worked tirelessly to expose cases of “waste, fraud and abuse” within the Executive Branch. The overarching principle of the Elon Musk-led effort is simple enough: shine a light, for the American people, on how their taxpayer money is being spent, identify the source of the corruption, and shut down the program or agency if necessary.

So far, DOGE self-reports having saved tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. This money comes from programs as wide-ranging as the scandalous USAID subscriptions (and other federal expenditures) for mainstream news outfits like Politico, the Associate Press, and the NY Times, and bloated grants to other global news organizations – such as the condemnable BBC.

USAID, which DOGE has effectively gutted to oblivion, also helped fuel the pernicious spread of woke and transgender ideologies globally: millions of dollars were spent in grants to organizations, like the “Asociación Lambda” in Guatemala, that financed transgender surgeries in Latin America and other places. Other grants helped fund DC non-profits, like the National Democratic Institute, Norm Eisen’s organization, that bankrolled lawfare efforts against President Trump and his supporters in recent years (Eisen is one of the intellectual architects of the lawfare against President Trump – he offered the strategic firepower, through amicus briefs filed, to assist Fani Willis’s racketeering case against President Trump. Eisen also helped devise legal strategies in both the Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith cases against President Trump. More recently, he has focused his energies on (what turned out to be a failed effort to) derailing the Senate confirmation of Kash Patel, the President’s nominee for FBI director, and has attempted to further undermine the President’s DOJ and FBI by representing FBI agents now suing the agency for being terminated for investigating January 6^th.)

Though significant progress has been made already, DOGE is still only in the nascent stages of a two-year countdown clock, with a final goal to excise as much as $2 trillion – or 2% of the national debt — out of the federal government. While the goal may be ambitious, the animating principle is quite noble – tapping into a deep, and for many, forgotten reservoir that is the Founding Fathers’ mandate to have a government of “defined and limited” powers, to quote John Marshall’s seminal opinion from Marbury v. Madison.

In 2025, the federal government has become so bloated and weighed down with bureaucratic morass as to be grossly inefficient, if not functionally inoperable. As both Musk and the President have opined in recent joint interviews together, the federal government – and particularly the Executive Branch – is no longer representative or accountable to the American people. Although the President of the United States is the only legislator in the federal government that is selected by the entire electorate, and thus, most representative (assuming fair elections) of the people’s will during a particular snapshot in time, often his will is subverted by the will of the bureaucracy or administrative or “deep” state. The problem with this situation, as Musk himself has acknowledged, is that a government run by bureaucrats, not elected officials, cannot possibly be a representative democracy, as devised under the Constitution, but a bureaucratic technocracy: led by unelected administrators, who in many cases – and sometimes unwittingly – see fit to implement their own agendas, over and above the will of the people.

What this leads to is something other than constitutional government: it is administrative politics decoupled from the democratic realities or dynamics of the constitutional process. Over time, this has established what might be described as an “unwritten” constitution, a covert or subversive shadow-constitution that is the creation of unelected bureaucrats and activist judges, which have over the course of decades (if not centuries) gradually imposed their own will on the national government, replacing the original with the counterfeit, even if their agendas are at odds with that of the American people. In recent decades – and turbocharged in recent years under the Biden regime – the will of bureaucrats and the will of the general public have diverged in completely opposite directions, to the point where now many bureaucrats promulgate a Constitution that is diametrically opposed to the mandate granted to President Trump by the American people at large.

The waters have gotten even more muddied by the fact that activist judges in their opinions, under an erroneously construed pretext of separation of powers principles, routinely blur the lines between the administrative state and the greater Executive Branch, of which the administrative state is constitutionally subordinate. There is no fourth branch of government, no matter how much these judges may want you to think otherwise. As it stands, the Constitution outlines three, not four, separate and coequal branches of government, partitioned by three main Articles. And yet, despite this insuperable fact, many liberal or Democrat-appointed judges — and a handful of milquetoast Republican ones — regularly speak of the bureaucracy as an entirely independent or fourth branch of government. Or worse, they confuse things needlessly by taking seriously ridiculous arguments that the bureaucracy occupies some purgatorial middle ground between Executive and Legislative — and thus (implied in that logic) is accountable to neither.

This is reflected in the point made earlier about USAID’s financing of mainstream news outfits, like Politico, which are supposed to operate independently of government opinion (after all, that is the very purpose of the First Amendment, which instantiates a free press whose purpose or intent is to hold government officials accountable). How on earth, one might ask, can any news organization ever purport to be objective or neutral — which are bedrock principles that make a free press possible — if they themselves are being financed by the very same government that they are supposed to question and interrogate? This dilemma poses an inexorable conflict.

Even worse, how might a society allegedly wedded to democratic principles ever make good on its mandate to freedom and democracy if its government, via grants and other surreptitious federally-driven channels, is allegedly funding the lawfare efforts against a national party’s presidential nominee – as USAID plausibly did, indirectly, in financing the lawfare against President Trump via Norm Eisen-affiliated (and surely other) entities — like the Brookings Institute, the States United Democracy Center, and/or the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), all of which are swarming in allegations that they received USAID funding as the Trump-directed lawfare was in full steam? A constitutional government abandons its founding charter once it begins actively funding groups that have perpetuated lawfare against the President of the United States, the chosen nominee of a majority of People – and Supermajorities of Electors and States – setting a dangerous precedent that, in turn, threatens the civil liberties of every single American.

The fact that these conditions have come to pass in America today, as proven by the many scandalous revelations thus far disinterred at countless agencies by President Trump and Elon Musk’s mighty DOGE warriors – is indicative of a republic that has largely abandoned its constitutional system; it is further proof of a shadow constitution that has usurped the original, replacing the democratic handiwork of James Madison with a bureaucratic counterfeit designed by hundreds of thousands of anonymous government workers with nebulous loyalties.

As it stands, at upwards of 3 million people, our federal government currently has more people in total than the entire population of the United States at the time of its founding. The sheer size of the federal government – really, of any organization composed of millions of people – means that it will naturally hew to inertia and inefficiency. Among those who compose it, they will generally adopt an attitude of entitlement, of deserving to be there, even if they have no discernible talents or value-enhancing contributions to meaningfully offer.

All the worst elements of human nature – arrogance and ego, combined with laziness and stupidity – become magnified in a bureaucratic government system. The inefficiencies yield slowness; the workers themselves acclimate to doing little of anything of substance, always on the taxpayer’s dime (and hence justifies Elon’s recent ask among all Executive Branch employees to list five things they achieved over the past week). Rather than try to take responsibility for their wastefulness, bureaucrats instead rationalize their behavior and adopt an attitude of privilege haughtiness.

This is especially true for an industry, the business of government, that by and large does not create anything of tangible value. To the extent Washington, DC is involved in the production of anything that would fall within the traditional categories of industry, it contracts that production out to third parties, who do the government’s bidding for them. The bureaucrats and lawyers thus find themselves increasingly out of touch with lived reality, and hence, at odds with the people whom they inevitably lord over. DC itself is living testimony to this fact: there is no real industry anywhere, rarely does one even find a car dealership or standard supermarket so commonplace in other parts of the country. The method for day-to-day life is atomized and transient; it’s a placelessness, an anti-reality apropos of a kitsch Hollywood set, with its makeshift Greek and Roman structures and buildings. These are studded throughout a brutalistically myopic cosmopolis that is somehow still very much a backwater outpost even though it ironically doubles as the capital city of the world’s most powerful empire.

Countries which grow in size and scale tend to also grow decadent – and the United States, exceptional though it certainly is, has observably not been an exception to that time-tested norm of mighty nations. And therewith, the real purpose of DOGE, which might appear on its surface as though it was merely serving a cost-cutting function, in service to a program of fiscal responsibility or the like. While saving from the cuts is a doubtless noble objective of the DOGE mandate, DOGE’s true, higher purpose is to extirpate government bloat, not simply as a means to save precious money for taxpayers, but to more fundamentally remind Americans of the constitutional system of governance that is their sacred inheritance.

In short: the DOGE prerogative is to restore the original Constitution, the creation of the Founding Fathers, driven by a spirit of noblesse oblige, which has been forgotten and obfuscated by the narcissistic bureaucratic imposter. Less rule by bureaucrat means more rule by the (small-d) democrat through their elected representatives in either the Congress or Presidency. If the people are to rule again fully and autonomously, without the entanglements of unelected career civil servants, they must themselves be reminded of the tenets of self-government: virtue, self-discipline, freedom of thought, and individual responsibility that were – and are – the cornerstones to the perpetuation of American constitutional government for generations.

After all, no government will last, and certainly not one founded explicitly on republican precepts, if not for the people themselves being constantly reminded of their natural birthright to self-rule, and the attendant duties and prerequisites that generational command necessarily obliges. But the recovery of the virtues that make self-government possible, the rebirth of America’s true Constitution and inheritance, points to something more glorious even than a revival of American republicanism, and the rule of the People over the rule of the civil servant.

Ultimately, the reason for instituting American constitutionalism was not simply to devise a form of government that satiated the bare minimum needs of human survival and human self-preservation. If that were all, such a government would necessarily corrupt because its lodestar would be a drive invariably down to the lowest common denominator; it would fail to innovate and progress, in the truest sense of the word, in ways that mankind’s greatest political achievements – Ancient Greece, Rome, Renaissance Florence, the British Empire – have also cultivated some of mankind’s greatest individual talents; the best political forms exalt and perfect that which is most noble in man himself.

It is fitting, if somewhat ironically fitting given our age’s propensity to shapeshifting morality and deeply confused reasoning, that America’s form of government, debased and corrupted over eons though it has been, still managed to anoint its greatest statesman and greatest entrepreneur to the highest positions of power, once again, over and above the titanic opposition of the deep state, mainstream media, Big Tech, the weaponized justice system, and the military-industrial complex.

The Founding was good because it was true; its truth lies in having formed a political system that meshes complementarily with the natural law. Thomas Jefferson so devised a Declaration of Independence which cleaved to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the universal moral law of mankind, and so ordained a Government that preserved unalienable Rights, such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Happiness, in this context, meant Human Excellence – the moral ingredients, or political virtues, that made Great Men of past, present, and future – from George Washington to Donald Trump – not simply plausible, or a lucky accident of History, but a fact of life: a mainstay in every generation across every age. That was the hope, the classical ideal, of the American Founding: it so also dovetails with the deeper goal driving DOGE; the shared hope, which is merit in its most noble and highest iteration, that future generations will not be chastised or browbeaten for their talents or gifts, and that which is greatest in men will no longer be demonized, as it is today by a perfidiously rampant, life and civilization-denying Left, but celebrated, throughout every institution in society.

That is the modus operandi of DOGE; it so happens to also be the modus operandi of every great society in Western history. So let it be America’s modus operandi again.

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Paul Ingrassia, a graduate of Fordham University and Cornell Law School, is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the NYYR Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow Paul on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.