EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS - Behind the DOGE Chaos
Written by Phil Mattera
Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem gleeful about the chaos they have unleashed on the federal workforce. Claims that the onslaught is designed to root out fraud and waste while promoting efficiency are spurious. The examples of waste offered by DOGE are usually erroneous or trivial, and there is nothing efficient about the way agencies are being ravaged. Nor does it make sense to fire inspectors general, the professionals most skilled at addressing corruption.
Is there any method to the madness? Behind the noise there seem to be two major objectives. The first is a new form of deregulation. In the past, corporate-friendly administrations sought to diminish oversight of business by rescinding rules and changing laws.
Trump and Musk are instead trying to achieve those objectives by crippling regulatory bodies. This is happening in part by asserting full control over independent agencies and installing loyalists to oversee them. Even more aggressive is the effort to prevent the agencies from functioning by decimating their staff. Regulations don’t mean much if no one is available to investigate non-compliance and take enforcement action. The administration also seems to be testing whether it can get away with unilaterally closing entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the consent of Congress. This is brute force deregulation.
The second objective is to create opportunities for government contractors. Despite the attempt to depict many government functions as redundant or unnecessary, many of the activities being targeted for large-scale staff reductions are not really expendable. By drastically reducing head count, Trump and Musk are creating conditions under which agencies will have no choice but to outsource more work to the private sector.
It is telling that amid all its fabricated charges about waste and abuse, DOGE focuses very little on the major source of fraud in the federal government: dishonest contractors. When it is functioning normally, the Justice Department spends a good portion of its time going after these companies. Violation Tracker documents 4,000 cases brought under the False Claims Act resulting in more than $60 billion in penalties. And those are just the cases in which the contractor got caught.
In February, DOGE posted a website with a Wall of Receipts purporting to show $65 billion in savings from contract cancellations. Yet the individual listings on the site were riddled with errors, including contracts that were no longer in effect. Many of the others were for outlays related to now-taboo areas such as DEI and environmental justice. There were more than 100 entries for agency subscriptions to news services, which the Trump Administration is cutting to punish the media and presumably to make the point that agency officials no longer need to be well informed about what is going on in the world.
More than 750 of the contract cancellation listings related to agencies such as the CFPB that are being dismantled, with no indication that contractor misconduct was involved.
If DOGE were serious about addressing fraud, it would be singling out large contractors such as Booz Allen that have been involved in major false claims cases. Companies such as these are presumably being shielded because they are the ones to which agencies will turn for help in performing the functions their diminished staffs can no longer handle. DOGE is also failing to focus on functions such as weapons production that are already being handled by the private sector and have a history of fraud.
In some cases, the DOGE offensive may be paving the way not just for outsourcing but for complete privatization. Among the functions said to be candidates for private sector takeover are FEMA disaster relief, NOAA’s National Weather Service, and the Education Department’s student loan program. Trump’s announcement that he wants to take direct control of the U.S. Postal Service seems like a prelude to privatization.
There is nothing new, of course, about presidential efforts to reduce business oversight and increase outsourcing. What’s different is the lawless way Trump and Musk are pursuing these aims. And then there’s the added scandal in the fact that Musk personally stands to gain so much from weakened enforcement and expanded contracting. Musk even took the brazen step of moving to have one of his companies take over a major existing contract that had been awarded to Verizon for modernizing the air traffic control system.
It is not yet clear how the DOGE juggernaut can be stopped, but for now it is helpful to look behind the theatrics and see whose interests are being served.
Philip Mattera heads the Corporate Research Project in Washington, DC, and writes the blog Dirt Diggers Digest.
