By now, the American people have had about enough of Elon Musk’s DOGE. Enough of the destruction of things they care about, and the threats to so much more. The Hands Off demonstrations, up to 5 million strong, reached even into previous Trump strongholds. A few weeks earlier, a mid-March Quinnipiac poll found that 60% of voters disapproved of DOGE’s mass firings of federal workers, while just 36% approved.
But the idea behind DOGE — that there’s massive government waste, which could easily be slashed — remains stubbornly popular, driven by generations of conservative messaging and neoliberal me-tooism. As Paul Krugman noted in December, a Reagan-era commission of nearly 2,000 business executives organized into 36 task forces "mostly came up empty" after 18 months of investigation. As Krugman noted, “most government spending happens because it delivers something people want, and you can’t make significant cuts without hard choices.” The conservative fantasy of “waste, fraud and abuse” evades that fundamental fact. That’s how you get the mass dismissal of IRS workers, which will cost the government $500 billion in revenue, presented as an example of conservative efficiency.
