Marjorie Taylor Greene with the Trump-Vance ticket.
Photo: Dustin Chamber/Bloomberg/Getty Images

No one knows how to handle it Department of Government Efficiencywhose DOGE acronym is based on a cryptocurrency-adjacent meme. Donald Trump’s recently acquired pal Elon Musk seems to have developed the idea of ​​some kind of cartoon superhero agency designed to destroy the Deep State – or maybe it was just a joke, suggests Decrypt Liz Napolitano. DOGE has no legal status, no public funding, no authority to do much other than bloviate, led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamytwo men with zero experience in the federal government they promise to expose and largely blow up.

Musk came up with the wild goal of $2 trillion in federal budget savings that DOGE allegedly generates (out of $6.75 trillion in total federal spending, including such trifles as mandatory interest payments on existing public debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, national defense, and a thousand other programs and services, most of which have enjoyed bipartisan support for decades). Although he has claimed that most of this excess spending is being soaked up by deep government bureaucrats, the reality is that total State salaries amount to approx 800 billion dollars. Ramaswamy has stuck with the gimmicky idea of ​​killing all programs for which grants are made without formal legal authorization (a very common practice which the nice child seems to misunderstand as being about illegal expenses), which i.a. eliminate veterans health careperhaps the most sacred cow of all federal programs. Ramaswamy has too suggested that a model of what DOGE would accomplish is Argentina’s radical austerity program under President Javier Mileli, which has pushed that country into recession and doubled poverty rates.

On a Wall Street Newspaper op-ed who laid out his vision for gleefully blowing up the public sector, Musk and Ramaswamy suggested that Trump could unilaterally implement his recommendations via the illegal methods of presidential fundraising (eg, cancellation of congressionally appropriated spending), a ploy that contributed to the downfall of Richard Nixon when he tried it. The dynamic duo also vaguely but alarmingly said they would pursue reforms to government contracts via a “temporary suspension of payments,” which sounds a lot like the cancellation of federal obligations.

Now, it’s possible that this is all just a fantasy exercise by two rich boys or even a way to keep them busy and out of the actual work of the Trump administration (although Musk and Ramaswamy have been assured the President’s Office of Management and Budget, which drafts Trump’s own fiscal policy recommendations, will pay close attention to their results).

Certainly, the idea that DOGE will be a rhetorical playground for extremist rhetoric was reinforced by the move just taken by House Republicans to provide oversight of the mock department, which The Hill reports: To put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of overseeing the aptly named “Delivering on Government Efficiency” subcommittee.

Now unlike her new partners in the demolition industry, she has a total of three years in the public sector, although it has all been spent running around the country like a firebug promoting the MAGA cause and grabbing headlines through high-profile antics in the House. The deep thinking about government efficiency we might expect Greene to show was expressed by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer in defense of the much-mocked Georgian extremist:

“We don’t care if anybody’s feelings get hurt if we take away their fat cat bureaucratic jobs in Washington,” Comer told conservative commentator Benny Johnson.

Greene, Comer said, is “not afraid to back down or walk away from a fight.”

She is also not afraid to speak authoritatively about things she literally knows nothing about. She has a very safe ultra-Republican district and now a license to demagogue even more than usual. Greene, Musk and Ramaswamy make up the three musketeers in what will likely be a pretend war on inefficiency that will generate headlines and social media fire and not much else.