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Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette is the director of government affairs at the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan, independent watchdog group with decades of experience calling out government waste. He is a native Mainer who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Southern Maine in 2014.
The Trump administration established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with the purported goal of reducing government waste. The DOGE team, along with Elon Musk and the White House, have made a big show of firing federal workers and cancelling federal grants.
But a deeper look at their efforts shows that DOGE and the actions it has taken so far are misguided and have little to do with efficiency. Similarly, a recent congressional hearing at which I testified was supposed to be focused on wasteful spending and improper payments, but it was more of a display of performative partisan theater, with committee members engaging in fiery monologues and sniping back and forth at each other, rather than engaging substantively with the witnesses.
If DOGE and the administration — and Congress for that matter — are serious about rooting out waste, they should support the inspector general system, reform the system for tracking federal spending, and target the rampant waste in the Pentagon budget.
As I recently stated in my testimony to Congress, inspectors general and the vital watchdog function they play in terms of rooting out waste and corruption in the government are paramount to any effort to clean up the government. Inspectors general are tasked with monitoring corruption in federal agencies, and they save the public significantly more money than it costs to fund inspector general offices. Yet President Donald Trump recently fired more than a dozen inspectors general, a move that was counterproductive to his administration’s supposed goals of reducing government waste, fraud, and abuse and cracking down on corruption.
If DOGE wants inspectors general to do their job well, they should push Trump to reinstate the fired inspectors general and support the independence of the watchdog system. We need watchdogs not lapdogs.
DOGE and Congress should also focus on the federal government’s systems for tracking federal spending. The government’s system for monitoring how tax dollars are spent is broken. If Congress reforms this system and better tracks how federal funds are spent, DOGE and others would be able to more accurately assess where there is waste. As it stands now, it’s challenging for anyone to assess how well federal funds are being spent and where exactly to locate the most egregious waste.
It would be irresponsible to write about government waste without mentioning the nearly $1 trillion annual budget for the Department of Defense. The Pentagon wastes taxpayer dollars on weapons systems that underperform and go massively over budget. Programs like the troubled F-35 fighter jet have served to line the pockets of defense contractors without producing the well-functioning aircraft our military deserve and our national security needs.
DOGE and the administration are reportedly targeting the Defense Department for cuts, by looking at layoffs and asking the agency for proposed cuts. But we need reform that ensures the Pentagon is making responsible spending decisions going forward and ending practices that allow Pentagon contractors to rip off the taxpayers.
If Trump, Musk, and the DOGE team truly want to attack government waste, they would look at these reforms.
Instead, the DOGE team has taken a slash and burn approach. This has already run into serious legal issues. The administration was also prompted to reverse DOGE’s decision to fire workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, after a public outcry over the decision to remove staff who were tasked with keeping nuclear weapons safe and secure.
Those tactics are misguided, and I sincerely hope the administration reverses course soon.
There’s no question that our federal government has a huge problem with waste. But when tackling this complex problem, we need surgical solutions that will ensure tax dollars are spent responsibly while keeping Americans safe.
