America Needs a Constitutional Government, Not an “Efficient” One
by Paul Dragu
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to make government more “efficient.” But unconstitutional programs should be eliminated, not made more efficient. …
At the time of this writing, the national debt of the United States had hit an incomprehensible $36,300,597,047,646. By the time you read these words, it’ll be higher. Much higher. The government has been adding billions of dollars of debt every day.
The debt is rising at a stupidly fast and dangerous pace. On December 4, 2024, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned that the country is on an “unsustainable” fiscal path and called for a course correction, just days after the debt topped $36 trillion for the first time.
The Treasury Department includes on its website a graph that illustrates how much the debt has risen over the past 100 years (see graphic below). In 1924, the national debt hit $394 billion. Spending rose significantly around the World War II era, and began plateauing around 1950. In 1982, spending again began rising significantly, pausing for just a moment around the 2011 mark, before it rose and rose until the concerning uphill trend turned into the unscalable cliff we are facing today.
The top three spending categories are Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, according to treasury.gov. They make up half the budget. Only the latter category existed before 1930. The federal government has exploded in size over the last 100 years. In addition to the emergence of the welfare state, agencies including the departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and many others have been created. About three million federal employees — more than the populations of Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska combined — run this bureaucratic behemoth.
Ridiculous, Wasteful Spending
On January 2, news broke that the Department of Justice spent more than $100 million between 2021 and 2024 on proposals promoting woke content in classrooms, including anti-white racism and perverse sexual ideologies. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported issuing an $850,000 federal grant to “Centerstone’s LGBTQI+ Family Support Program” to provide training for military families to “affirm the gender identity” of their children.
It gets worse. House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus Co-chair Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) revealed to the Daily Mail some ridiculously egregious government waste projects that federal workers approved. They include a $2.3 million National Institutes of Health study to test cocaine use in beagles, $6.9 million to study “smart toilets” that recognize the user’s “anal print,” $118,000 to study if a metal replica robot of Marvel Comics’ Thanos could really snap his fingers, and $75,000 in grants for a Harvard study on lizards being blown off trees with leaf blowers.
Accountability is another problem. The government lost about $200 billion in Covid “pandemic” relief money to fraud and abuse. And in November 2024, the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row, “with the nation’s largest government agency still unable to fully account for its more than $824 billion budget,” The Hill reported. Over the years, the Pentagon has been unable to account for nearly $2 trillion. Stunningly, a spokesperson said after the latest failed audit that the massive agency plans to pass an audit in 2028.
Enter DOGE
Donald Trump’s administration is tasking the Department of Government Efficiency — an unofficial government agency — to tackle spending at the behest of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. The Tesla magnate and his fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will be the lead nongovernmental advisors for the department. Trump said the goal of DOGE will be to “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” and partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget to drive large-scale structural reform.
Musk said during Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally before Election Day 2024 that he wants to cut at least $2 trillion in federal spending. Ramaswamy has said that entire agencies will be “deleted” under DOGE’s recommendations, driving mainstream-media lemmings into a tizzy.
While Musk has not said he plans on cutting Medicare and Social Security, there are indications that he’s open to reducing defense spending and a number of blatantly ridiculous expenses, of which there is no shortage.
Ramaswamy has hinted that the Department of Education may be in the crosshairs for elimination. “The Department of Education just failed to receive a clean audit for its 3rd time in a row (budget: $268B),” he posted on X November 19, 2024. This isn’t the first time incoming administrations have targeted the unconstitutional department. Ronald Reagan also promised to eliminate it.
DOGE may also target expired programs taxpayers are still paying for. According to a DOGE post on X, “In FY2024, U.S. Congress provided $516 billion to programs whose authorizations previously expired under federal law. Nearly $320 billion of that $516 billion expired more [than] a decade ago.”
Another area of possible waste reduction is federal employment. Musk and Ramaswamy have vowed to end telework for tens of thousands of federal employees. On November 23, Ramaswamy posted, “Most federal workers don’t physically show up, yet the cost of maintaining & providing energy for govt office buildings is $15BN/year (not counting billions more spent on office furnishings). The government owns 7,967 vacant buildings. This is nuts. Sounds like a job for DOGE.”
By requiring government employees to report to the office, the idea is that many will quit since they can’t work from home anymore. But this won’t be so easy. Early in December, Joe Biden struck a deal with the American Federation of Government Employees that allowed the extension of telework for some 42,000 Social Security Administration workers until October 25, 2029. This exemplifies the type of resistance DOGE and its congressional supporters will encounter in their mission to cut spending.
The D.C. Swamp has obviously shown no desire to reduce spending. Democrats and Republicans alike have spent like drunken sailors. Just over the last four years, Congress has drafted multiple massive spending bills, hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages long, with funding for a hodgepodge of programs mixed together in a toxic spending soup with plenty of pork thrown in. Then they’ve presented the spending packages without any time for legislators to read them, the goal being to cram them through without scrutiny. It’s a very stupid way for a nation to operate.
Just Follow the Constitution
While Musk, Ramaswamy, and everyone else who’s serious about saving the nation from financial ruin may have the right intentions, the simplest way to pull the nation back from the approaching fiscal cliff is to eliminate unconstitutional spending. The parent company of this magazine, The John Birch Society, has for years maintained that more than 80 percent of the federal government is unconstitutional. America’s foundational governing documents do not permit a federal health bureaucracy or an energy agency. There is certainly nothing in the Constitution about the federal government intruding in education or the environment, either. There’s nothing in the Constitution allowing federal police agencies such as the FBI or ATF. On and on we could go, but you get the point.
Americans also need to push for the elimination of the federal income tax and the restoration of sound money. When the government can’t loot the paychecks of hardworking Americans, it’ll be forced to shut down entire agencies. And when fiat money is abolished and replaced with precious metals, that’ll put an end to the endless printing that mounts as debt.
In short, the best way to reduce spending is to get back to the U.S. Constitution.
