OPINION:
If you haven’t watched the Bret Baier interviews on Fox News with Elon Musk and the other executives who have given their time and expertise to exposing the rampant fraud and inefficiency of our federal government, I urge you to do so.
It will infuriate you, and that’s what we need right now. A lot of voter rage is directed at how Washington is routinely misspending our tax dollars with impunity.
What shines through in the interview is that these volunteers at the Department of Government Efficiency are on a patriotic mission to repair our ship of state. They are hunting down the rats and scoundrels who have played us (we, the taxpayers) for fools for so many years. It is the greatest robbery, with more than $1 trillion of fraud and corruption in world history.
Yet too many Democrats are reacting as if Musk himself is the scoundrel. Apparently, we shouldn’t blame the criminal but the detective.
The “Musk-ateers” have uncovered 10 million Social Security recipients older than 120 (how many monthly checks were sent out?) How about $10 billion in rent for empty office buildings? Hundreds of millions of dollars for foreign aid programs went to “nongovernmental government organizations,” and the money then disappeared down a rabbit hole. More than $150 billion in fraudulent Medicaid spending. A federal workforce that has been MIA for three years. Defense contractors charging the federal government twice as much for weapons systems thanks to “cost-plus pricing” schemes.
In the wake of this epic failure of governance, nearly every leading Democrat in Washington has had the exact same scripted response: “We’re all against waste in government but …” This is followed by a soliloquy about how Elon Musk is going to far …” Translation: Democrats and their army of lobbying bosom buddies aren’t against the rampant fraud and corruption at all. If they were, Presidents Biden or Obama would have done at least something about it.
They never lifted a finger. Nor did Republicans all these years. Washington hid behind a curtain of plausible deniability, even though we had scores of auditors and inspector general reports spotlighting the continuing raid on our federal fisc.
Ripping off taxpayers is one of the biggest businesses in America. It’s so routine that it isn’t seen as a criminal action anymore but rather as the cost of doing business inside the Beltway — like paying off the mob.
Why are Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Al Sharpton not sharing in our collective outrage? Is it because they knew it was happening and feel guilty that they did nothing to stop it? Is it because they think that waste is a normal byproduct of government that can’t be prevented?
Or — and this is the most sinister and obvious explanation: THEY ARE IN ON IT. This could explain how many politicians spent their careers in Congress and retired as multimillionaires.
In other words, what is most revealing about the Washington slime that we are waking up to in real time, thanks to DOGE, is that waste and fraud are the currency of Washington. It pays the bills, and everyone in the swamp gets their cut. Remember: One-third of $7 trillion is the stuff of fortunes.
The classic example is the $2.7 million that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse directed/laundered to his wife via a nonprofit environmental group she worked for. This was a clear graft, but it went unpunished. We are living through the harrowing last scene in a Hollywood murder mystery when you discover that the police chief was in on it all along.
What is especially maddening is when the Washington elites who profess to stand for “good government” excuse the waste as trivial and then reflexively change the subject to “the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes.” Their solution to the fraud and waste is to feed the beast with more money.
In reality, perhaps the greatest public service of the Musk-ateers is that they have taught voters that Washington should never get another penny of our tax dollars until the sewer is completely drained and the tens of thousands of fraudsters inside and outside government are put out of business and hopefully behind bars.
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.
