The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been officially working for less than two weeks. It’s funny how much has changed in those almost 14 days; President Trump and Vice President Vance seem determined to set a new definition of the idiom “Hit the ground running,” and so do Elon Musk and the DOGE.
On Thursday, the DOGE announced that they had canceled a huge pile of “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” (DEI) contracts and in so doing, saved the American taxpayers over a billion dollars. That’s right – over a billion. In 11 days, from January 20th to the 31st.
Updated data on DEI related contract cancellations with full detail: https://t.co/hEBk62KQvN pic.twitter.com/kcPATigb3x
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 31, 2025
Here’s more:
Through 1/29/2025, 85 DEIA related contracts totaling ~$1B have been terminated within the Dept. of Ed, GSA, OPM, EPA, DoL, Treasury, DoD, USDA, Commerce, DHS, VA, HHS, State, NSF, NRC, NLRB, PBGC, USAID, RRB, SSA, SBA, BLM, CFPB, NPS, and NOAA.
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 30, 2025
What’s next? I mean, this is a good start. A billion here and a billion here, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Turns out that eliminating DEI waste wasn’t the only thing the DOGE is looking into.
$784 MILLION in taxpayer dollars for a new U.S. embassy in South Sudan, initiated in 2023. This is not a reasonable expenditure.
Source: https://t.co/pa35rlCEZI
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 22, 2025
The GSA terminated three leases of mostly empty office space, with tenants relocating to nearby buildings in the GSA portfolio. With savings of $1.6M, these are the first steps to right size the Federal real estate portfolio of more than 7,500 leases
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 27, 2025
While all this is good work and all worth doing, it’s no more than what we might call “a good start,” and I can give you 36 trillion reasons why. A good start, yes, but it sure looks like the DOGE has upgraded perhaps from a scalpel to a steak knife. What’s needed is an axe – or a chainsaw.
Federal spending has to be gotten under control. Eliminating DEI contracts and ditching empty office buildings is worth doing, but it’s low-hanging fruit.
See Related: USAID Officials Lock DOGE Out of the Building, Trump Delivers the ‘Find Out’ Response
Trump Admin. Continues to Clean House, Firing Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Chief
To truly get federal spending under control, we have to return the federal government to within its constitutional limits. Entire agencies must be shuttered – Energy, Environment, and Education, just to name a few. Is this really so difficult? We have a very clear, easy-to-understand instruction manual for what the federal government is supposed to look like – in fact, it is more than an instruction manual, it happens to be the highest law in the land. There is a clause in it that states very clearly that if that instruction manual doesn’t specifically allow the federal government to do something, then it can’t – it is left to the states or the people.
It’s very plain language. Why not apply it? We could be cutting not billions but trillions. We could devolve much back to the states, following the principle of federalism, and let each state be a laboratory in government, as the Founders intended.
Still, a good start is a good start. The DOGE is doing great work – we can hope that they pick up the pace. Double, triple, quintuple the cuts, and then some. There is a world of waste in Washington. We must get rid of as much as we can.
To keep up with all this, if you’re an X user, you can find the DOGE at, of course, @DOGE.
