OPINION: Get your popcorn: DOGE promises non-stop entertainment

Given the choice between sloth and greed as to which is most disdainful, I am going with sloth. And with that as an opening to this column, I find myself inside a deep, dark hole that I will now attempt to claw my way out of.

My subject matter is President-elect Trump’s newly formed DOGE — Department of Government Efficiency. To commence my clawing, I need to first turn the clock back to 1986. The location is Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park, New York City. A crisp winter day, snowflakes are falling, and smiling people with red earmuffs are twirling atop the open-air rink. You get the picture.

This ice rink had been in disrepair for years; with millions in cost overruns, the city still couldn’t complete the work and get the public back to skating. Enter Donald Trump, who proposed to Mayor Ed Koch to finish the job in exchange for skating and concession revenues. An arrangement was struck and Trump finished the rink two months ahead of schedule and managed it at a profit for more than three decades with record attendance, me included. (I lived nearby at that time.)

To be sure, constructing a Trump Tower, a country club, or even an ice rink, is not equivalent to DOGE’s goal: eliminating waste in the federal bureaucracy. It is, though, an entertaining opportunity to witness what might be done when a man consumed by greed and power has the audacity to enter the fathomless maze of thousands upon thousands of federal agency employee cubicles — most of which are now empty (they telecommute).

How can the rapaciousness of Trump’s billionaire noblemen possibly make any significant change to the deep state? That immeasurable mountain of pork, piled drip upon drip over decades. The endeavor though, promises to be thrilling. Egos of those dimensions attempting to move inert matter, file cabinets welded to steel pylons. Those pylons, incidentally, span over 100 regulatory agencies and 2.3 million federal employees, 800,000 of which are government union members. Total payroll is some $300 billion. Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?!

Consider what we have: an elected plutocracy, the very zenith of predatory capitalism, in a brazen attempt to apply what works at casinos, at satellite and rocket companies, at high-tech unicorns, to the mentality of a person who when asked why they chose their particular public service career at a federal agency, replies, “stable job, good benefits.” When you squeeze pork, you don’t get accountability, you don’t get efficiency. You do get anxiety and fear. As one minion at the Department of Energy put it, “I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone.”

To be sure, I am not under any illusion that Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy, or incoming OMB Director Russell Vought, or the newly minted Senate DOGE Caucus, are going to transform the swamp into a sparkling sheet of ice. They will create a great deal of havoc in the form of a myriad of lawsuits. Employee morale will plummet even further (harness your imagination).

Musk is not going to help his cause by posting a “leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.” He adds, “This will be both tragic and extremely entertaining.” While the vaudeville from the White House will enthrall with four years of seamless click-bait, the grand tragedy is not the thousands of jobs purged, but that their organizational genius is fueled by petty political crusades. Their daggers are selectively aimed at the EPA, DOL, Dept. of Ed, the IRS, the FTC, and the FDA, and not pointed at the DOD and Homeland Security, which together account for 60% of government payroll.

In fact, payroll as a whole is a paltry 4% of the overall federal budget. And you can be sure not to find the $40 billion in USDA farm subsidies on Musk’s leaderboard. DOGE itself will not be immune to infection, and will become yet another tumor in the deep state.

Caked in mud, I’ve yet to make it out of that sink hole I ventured into earlier. I had staked my claim on greed being better than sloth. Even if I checked the wrong box, whatever the outcome, I’m blaming it on bureaucratic red tape!

After years of globetrotting, Broadman finds himself writing from his perch on the Palouse and loving the view. His policy briefs can be found at US Resist News: https://www.usresistnews.org.