Through the years, layers upon layers of public policies have been added in our country – one on top of the other – to create a complex, self-defeating labyrinth of jumbled mess.
We recognize that putting the toothpaste back into the tube seems overwhelming – if not impossible – but it can absolutely be done. Through Operation Overhaul, and working in close collaboration with Congress, we can reduce our debt, close the gap on our deficit, and end the massive waste, corruption, and inefficiency that infects every level of our federal government. Because this is such a big problem to try to solve, the only plausible answer is to be boldly strategic in our attack. We can no longer expect half-measures and incremental ideas to work. Instead, we need to embrace a full and fundamental restructuring.
It feels really clarifying to see all these issues in one place, not to overwhelm everybody, but so we can truly understand how deep and wide we must go to solve these challenges. Scratching the surface just isn’t going to cut it anymore, and there is no magic bullet. It’s not just one thing, it’s everything.
We just love how, for months after Donald Trump’s reelection, he and his posse ran around Washington like the Hardy Boys, jumping up and down about “government waste” like they were the ones who discovered it existed. News flash, guys! We’ve all known it has existed. For decades. This website thoroughly covers this, with detailed examples.
Before and after the election, the boys also talked incessantly of taking a wrecking ball to the federal government. This should come as no surprise because, for years, Donald has been raging against the “Deep State” or, as he so eloquently puts it, “the sick political class that hates our country.” Steve Bannon – the former chief strategist to Donald Trump turned self-appointed MAGA overseer, strategist, and propagandist – envisions the so-called Deep State as “Praetorian Guards,” a group of elite soldiers who served as the bodyguards of the Roman emperors.
Although these overlords have never offered a more precise definition of what the “Deep State” is, we gather from context that it’s the horribly corrupt members of the evil status quo who operate in the dark shadows of our big bad awful government.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald made clear that his first order of business in his “plan to shatter the Deep State and return power to the American people” was to “fire rogue bureaucrats” on “Day 1.” Russell Vought, who has now returned for round two of being the director of the Office of Management and Budget, took this heated rhetoric to the next level: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Dang. ‘Ol Russ was throwing some serious shade at these Americans. We can just imagine those evil bureaucrats now, complete with their spiky fangs and devil horns.
Evidently, the plan for Trump’s second term was for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the original co-leaders of his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to head the effort to make cuts to federal regulation, spending and personnel – or, as Vivek put it in a post on X, “we’re not bringing a chisel. We’re bringing a chainsaw.”
On January 22, 2025, Vivek Ramaswamy left DOGE to run for the Ohio governorship and Elon, his reputation and companies battered and bruised, fled Washington on May 28, 2025… which came as no surprise because, by all measures, DOGE was a colossal failure.
While DOGE itself disbanded with eight months left to its mandate – officially ending on July 4, 2026 – the chaos and long-lasting destruction it caused is immeasurable. From the slashing of life-saving programs TO a disengaged and demoralized federal workforce TO the significant loss of talent and expertise on every level of our federal government TO the severe consequences of interrupting federally funded research that is vital to U.S. innovation and economic competitiveness, DOGE’s destruction will be felt for decades.
One analysis – from the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service – found that DOGE and other Trump/Vance administration funding cuts have resulted in an economic cost of over $165 billion ($1,028 per taxpayer), which includes the loss of estimated economic benefits from axed grants; payments of severance packages; expenses associated with rehiring workers; and legal expenses to defend the 200+ lawsuits DOGE ignited – for everything from firing federal workers to the freezing of grants to the elimination of already funded programs.
Far from making “at least $2 trillion in cuts,” federal spending increased in 2025. The only real cuts DOGE made was to USAID; American small businesses; scientific, cancer and Alzheimer’s research; and to programs devoted to civil rights and diversity – but these costs, while seriously damaging to many individual Americans and our country overall, were miniscule compared to the behemoth that is the federal budget.
That’s largely because Batman and Robin clearly didn’t understand how the U.S. government operates. If they did, they would have recognized that their “savings” targets were delusional – and literally unobtainable – from the start.
They never seemed to comprehend, for example, that there are two types of government spending: discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending is authorized by Congress each year through the appropriations process, but mandatory spending basically runs on autopilot. Mandatory spending, or spending that is required by law, is handled through authorizing bills, allowing the government to fund all costs associated with programs like Social Security, military pensions, benefits for veterans, Medicaid and Medicare.
Because discretionary spending accounted for only 28 percent of the federal budget at the time – which means mandatory spending, plus interest payments on the debt (which alone totaled 13.1 percent of spending in FY2024), accounted for the other 72 percent – it was impossible for DOGE to come close to meeting its goal of making “at least $2 trillion in cuts” by slashing discretionary spending alone. Even if Elon had cut every penny of it, he couldn’t possibly hit his target.
This means that, if Elon was serious about his targets, things like Social Security and Medicare (together, 34.6 percent of the budget) and defense spending (12.9 percent) had to be part of the plan. He also had to break it to his buddy Donald that even if Social Security, Medicare, etc. were on the table, this still couldn’t happen if Republicans passed tax cuts that would add trillions to the national debt – which they did when they passed the One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025.
The “savings” delusion didn’t stop there. For instance, even with their devious Schedule F workaround, reducing the federal workforce wasn’t going to make a significant dent in the federal budget anyway. < Schedule F was a brainchild from the first Trump administration. Right before Election Day 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order, naturally, that said each government agency needed to identify career employees that could be shifted into a new job category they called Schedule F to make it easier to fire people, including senior federal career officials. The final list covered around 88 percent of the federal workforce. President Biden reversed this Executive Order on his very first day in office. But in February 2026, the Trump/Vance administration issued a rule that is essentially Schedule F. >
Excluding military personnel, the U.S. government was spending just over $300 billion a year on salary/benefits for federal employees. This equaled only around 4 percent of the federal budget. So even if he cut a quarter of these workers, that’s only a 1 percent reduction overall.
Nevertheless, within weeks of storming Washington, Elon had moved aggressively to disrupt U.S. agencies (Department of Defense, Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, Federal Aviation Administration, Internal Revenue Service, and Treasury Department) or dismantle them altogether (Department of Education, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Institutes of Health, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, of course, USAID).
…and disrupt them he did, with consequences that are still being felt far and wide today. The Social Security Administration – the $15.4 billion agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans – is still struggling. The website crashes, average hold times last hours, and the customer experience has plummeted as an exhausted workforce tries to keep up with 6 million unresolved cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions out in the field.
The IRS, which lost around 25 percent of its workforce, is fighting a substantial backlog of cases. The Environmental Protection Agency also lost around 25 percent of its workforce and had $28 billion in grants cancelled – a disheartening development for anyone who values clean air and water and protected federal lands.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture lost 20,000 workers and is decimated to the point that farmers who need vital information about the grants they rely on can’t get anyone to answer the phone. This is distressing at a time when the agriculture industry is already in crisis thanks to the Trump/Vance administration’s aggressive immigration tactics and high tariffs. This got so bad that Wes Gillingham, a farmer and the president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, told The New York Times in December 2025 that, “We’re just going to see a huge amount of farms going out of business this year because of the mayhem.”
To be sure, one of the most disastrous long-term consequences that the failed DOGE experiment has wrought is the negative impact it has had – and will continue to have – on our federal workforce.