It was an excellent interview with Jesse Watters, DOGE, and Elon Musk.  I think we are seeing something here that will stick around, and I couldn’t be happier, reflecting over the years to the early part of the Tea Party movement, when fiscal responsibility was our main concern.  It seemed inconceivable at the time that something like a DOGE would ever happen.  But here we are in 2025 having serious discussions about the massive government waste that taxpayers are funding, and it’s not just a campaign issue that comes up every four years.  As Elon Musk has set it up, DOGE has emerged as something that can stick around long after he’s gone, which is what good CEOs do for their companies: you set the table and make it so that you build a culture that can run on its own.  And I’m sure Elon Musk will stick around and be a figurehead of DOGE for a long time.  But what he has created and what the members are doing will last and become a part of government oversight that will last even as the political tides might change.  The Jesse Watters interview captured well what DOGE really is, which I’m sure they had no idea it would be.  One thing that was certainly obvious was that the people doing DOGE are brilliant and well-intentioned, and what Elon Musk has done as the head of the effort is set a standard that can now cascade into a culture of scrutiny that should have been present from the beginning.  Whenever you have money involved, there will be people looking to exploit the system so they can steal some of it.  And when you have a government this big and powerful, that can confiscate so much wealth from people, abuse was a certainty.  But to what extent can people only imagine, until now?

I don’t think Elon Musk needs to be there every day to run DOGE.  It’s nice that he is still doing it even as the government’s activism against him has sought to ruin his car company, Tesla.  Elon Musk might be the wealthiest person in the world, but this commitment to DOGE has cost him dearly.  And I think from here on out, all that needs to be done is to empower people like the current DOGE members into doing the work and to let it take on a life of its own.  What they ended up with differs from what they set out to do in saving trillions of dollars off the top of the budget.  Most of the savings they have extracted aren’t the obvious things like entitlement payments and program-driven budgets, but the day-to-day abuses that get hidden behind all the chaos.  Most of the savings coming from DOGE are in saved opportunity cost, which is usually very hard to measure.  Elon Musk’s way of thinking when running his other companies was just what was needed.  The government has required this oversight since it started collecting taxes, and what Elon Musk has done in this very short time deserves great recognition and gratitude because he could have done what most everyone does, and just ignored the problem.  When you are as wealthy as he is, he could have easily turned his back on the issue and moved offshore to live a fun life.  But to sink his teeth into this project took guts, and because of it, we’ll be talking about DOGE, I think, permanently. 

People can’t be trusted to do the right things on their own, and one thing that came out of the DOGE interview on Fox News was how many people have been abusing the system dramatically.  I saw much of this firsthand when my wife and I traveled to Washington, D.C. for an extended period and lived in Fairfax County to see how most of those communities entirely existed off the waste scraped off the top of government.  Many of the programs that have so much waste in them were created with the best of intentions, but when you involve people who are always looking for the easiest way to do things, a scandal is bound to happen, and many people are professional con artists, even to themselves.  They can look in the mirror and even lie to what looks back and feel okay with it.  Those are the kind of people drawn to government work, and the many spoils come from a largely unregulated system.  The stories of abuse that DOGE is telling are just the tip of the iceberg.  And, astonishingly, we are talking about it now.  I thought from the Tea Party perspective that we’d have to have another Revolutionary War-type engagement to get control of government spending and waste.  I never thought that President Trump, one of the wealthiest men in the world, would be in the White House, which meant he was personally free of the typical social constraints that even keep the questions from being asked.  Or that the wealthiest and most innovative CEO in the world would personally create a department to oversee waste management and root out the perpetrators like a gunslinging sheriff in a wild and hostile old west town full of criminals. 

I think Elon Musk has done enough, and if he did nothing else with DOGE, he has given us something that will last well into the future.  I do not think that Democrats will be back in the White House anytime soon, if ever.  I do not see them retaking power in the House and Senate and gaining the ability to stop DOGE politically.  No, I think DOGE is here to stay and will run fine because it has good people in it, and it started because of Elon Musk.  But it has emerged into its own thing, and now there is a level of expectation for it to continue.  The public will never not want a DOGE to look out for waste on their behalf.  Going back to the system where looters were free to steal all they could from the government system will never be what it was.  In a lot of ways, creating DOGE is what people looked through all the smoke to elect Trump in the first place was all about.  This is precisely why we wanted Trump.  Elon Musk wouldn’t be able to participate in our government if not for how Trump runs things.  This kind of CEO management style has taken this government waste problem and brought it out of the box for us to fix, instead of the continued policies of hiding the issue from the world and hoping that nobody notices.  DOGE has been so successful that the expectation will be that it will always be a part of government and that its role will expand with time to unleash enterprising people to protect government systems from the parasitic nature of most human beings.  Only the threat of getting caught will keep people in line.  And without DOGE, there was nothing to give criminals pause.  But now there is, and we are far better off for it.

Rich Hoffman

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