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.

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We know 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.

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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.

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We just love how, since Donald Trump’s reelection, he and his posse have been running around Washington like the Hardy Boys, jumping up and down about “government waste” like they are the ones who discovered it existed. News flash guys! We’ve all known it has existed. For decades.

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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.” Stephen K. 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.

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Although these overlords of the MAGA movement 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.”

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Fifteen days after the election, Batman and Robin outlined their plans in The Wall Street Journal, establishing this as their premise: “Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats – tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.” Based on the article, the basic tentpoles of the dynamic duo’s strategy was as follows: First, they would “work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies.”

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“These rulings” referred to two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings – West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) – that drastically curtailed federal power. (which, in many ways is extremely ironic!)

In West Virginia v. EPA, the court found that, under the major questions doctrine, federal agencies can’t impose regulations that deal with major economic or political questions unless they have “clear congressional authorization” to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the justices overturned what is known as the Chevron doctrine, holding that federal courts should “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority” and that “courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”

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Second, to reduce federal spending, they would cut programs that the U.S. Congress still fund, but where specific spending authorization had lapsed. This covers a wide range of programs, from veterans’ health care to national defense programs to key antipoverty programs. Third, they would implement “large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments,” which should “yield significant savings” because “the federal government’s procurement process is badly broken.” Fourth, although Elon and Vivek didn’t specify how many federal employees they would fire, they wrote that DOGE’s goal was to “help support their transition into the private sector” and that the president would “use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.”

 

For this one, they claimed they could strip away job protections and civil service rules for nonpartisan government workers by using the magical “Schedule F.” Schedule F is 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. The final list covered around 88 percent of the federal workforce. President Biden reversed this Executive Order on his very first day in office.

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Okay, none of this sounds that scary, right? … but let’s take a look at what has actually happened.

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< On January 22, 2025, Ramaswamy left DOGE to run for the Ohio governorship… and it looks like Elon, after proving to be a major political liability, will leave when his temporary exemption from certain ethics and conflict-of-interest rules as a “special government employee” is up – but the damage has already been done. >

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Within weeks of storming Washington, Elon’s DOGE 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 the Agency for International Development, a.k.a. USAID). He also moved to force out hundreds of thousands of civil servants and gain access to some of the government’s most sensitive payment systems.

 

Without question, the United States government – a goliath that spent $6.75 trillion in FY2024 and employs over 3 million people – needs a major overhaul. However, how we go about doing it matters. A LOT.