Americans Want a Government Free of Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Originally published at the American Spectator (Feb. 16, 2025)

Finding himself standing astride history and holding a big, beautiful mandate from the voters, President Donald Trump has made his triumphant return to The Swamp to clean things up once and for all. Though Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 throughout the campaign, the mandate from the voters has included significant portions of that very blueprint from the Heritage Foundation. The wild-eyed accusations of what the blueprint actually said bore no relation to reality, but Trump’s slashing of waste and fraud in the federal government has caused panic among the institutionalists anyway.

The first of many victims: the slush fund known as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Created with an executive order by President Kennedy in 1961, it has grown beyond all reasonable scope, spending tens of billions of dollars on absurdities overseas. It would not take an act of Congress to delete it.

Trump has begun to act with the echoes of Reagan’s Grace Commission, the Tea Party revolution, the spoils system, the Roaring Twenties, and even the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative ringing across history. And the polls have rewarded him with the highest approval ratings he’s ever achieved. The only caution Trump must heed—make it count, and make it work.

"Ironically, the replacement for the spoils system, the professional civil service, has created the bloated, permanent bureaucratic state that bedevils us today."

The Right Side of History

President Trump has historical through-lines for his new role as government reformer. Trump can look to the past to understand his reform-minded agenda will create a greater version of America than what’s become of it under progressive leadership.

President Calvin Coolidge rightly called this kind of monstrous progressive bureaucracy and spending unconstitutional. “Government extravagance is not only contrary to the whole teaching of our Constitution,” Coolidge said, “but violates the fundamental conceptions and the very genius of American institutions.” Not only did Coolidge refuse to create extra spending to respond to an economic recession, he pressed for an agenda that lowered taxes and lowered government spending.

Four decades before Coolidge, President Chester A. Arthur—representing the conservative wing of the Republican Party—implemented stronger immigration restrictions and ended the “spoils system” of a new administration hiring its allies and supporters for government jobs. Ironically, the replacement for the spoils system, the professional civil service, has created the bloated, permanent bureaucratic state that bedevils us today.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued Executive Order 12369, which established the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government. Known as the Grace Commission, after its chairman, J. Peter Grace—a CEO from the private sector, it brought 150 volunteers together from the business community to run dozens of task forces to tackle spending and efficiency in the government.

Reagan said the commission’s goal was to “drain the swamp” of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies. The Grace Commission presented a report to Congress in 1984 that identified savings of almost a half a trillion dollars in three years, rising to $1.9 trillion by 2000. The report concluded that one-third of all government revenues ended up wasted or blown on fraud.

Most of the recommended reforms never saw the light of day—especially those requiring legislation from the Democrat-controlled congress, led by Speaker Tip O’Neill.

In 2005, revelations of insane spending out of USAID caused the late Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) such righteous outrage that he authored the law that brought us the invaluable USAspending.gov.

Even Bill Clinton, no conservative, declared, “The era of big government is over.” He appointed Vice President Al Gore to head up something called Reinventing Government, which boasted a reduction of 16,000 pages of regulations and 351,000 layoffs from government positions. Even those two liberals knew the voters didn’t want massive government overreach—a main driver in the defeat of the Biden-Harris machine in 2024.

A Realization of the Tea Party Dream

The Tea Party movement was born not of racism—as commonly accused—but of voter outrage at explosive spending by Democrats and establishment Republicans. The Troubled Asset Relief Program passed after President George W. Bush declared we had to suspend free market principles in order to save the free market. That was quickly followed by Obamacare, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and Obama-era spending that doubled our national debt.

"We knew it was bad. They knew we knew it was bad. They kept doing it anyway, even when we told them to stop—over and over, for decades. Now that they’ve been exposed, they’re flailing about looking for a scapegoat."

We demanded responsibility. We never got it.

Now we have Trump appointee Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency—the cheekily named DOGE—engaged in an epic cleanup, attempting to return to what Coolidge called “the very genius of American Institutions.” But instead of Tip O’Neill slow-walking the legislative solutions, we have swamp denizens and their stenographers in the corporate media preemptively accusing DOGE and Musk of all manners of inhumane acts—accusations designed to incite rebellion against him personally, in the style of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

The accusations are just so many straw man arguments.

This effort has caused the institutional left to throw predictable temper tantrums, as they have throughout history. The AP breathlessly reported that Russ Vought, the “architect” of Project 2025, was confirmed as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget—the same role he held in Trump’s first term. “The modern conservative President’s task,” Vought wrote in Project 2025, “is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.” That fiend.

The President can’t limit, control, and direct the executive branch without knowing where the money goes. Shouldn’t that, after all, be one of the main jobs we hire the executive to execute?

That’s where DOGE comes in—and what it actually does is ingenious. DOGE maps the vast federal leviathan, using computer algorithms, to show where our taxpayer money goes. Reporting from the inside indicates the young and hungry computer programmers who designed the algorithm found the waste and fraud so quickly, career bureaucrats didn’t know what hit them. The web of deceit was so pervasive, when it was mapped the process actually unstuck several bottlenecks for local infrastructure projects across America, while also ending funding for things like condoms in Middle Eastern countries and transgender clinics in India.

Before the smoke had cleared from the crater that used to be USAID, DOGE had already set its sights on bigger goals. When its coders map the rest of the federal government, they’ll have exposed hundreds of billions in wasteful spending. As the Daily Caller reported, “An [Office of Personnel Management] memo dated Feb. 4 seeks the redesignation of chief information officers across the government from career positions to political appointees. OPM has recommended that every agency send a request to OPM to reclassify its CIO role from career reserved to ‘general’ by Feb. 14.”

This will likely happen without any congressional oversight needed.

We knew it was bad. They knew we knew it was bad. They kept doing it anyway, even when we told them to stop—over and over, for decades. Now that they’ve been exposed, they’re flailing about looking for a scapegoat. Meanwhile, the American people continue to applaud. They’re unlikely to stop applauding DOGE, Project 2025, historical precedent, and the demands of the people, no matter how many career bureaucrats see their fiefdoms torn asunder by scrutiny.

(READ MORE: To Reform the Pentagon Bureaucracy, Permanently Defund the Think Tanks Which Feed It)