One of President-elect Donald Trump’s most popular ideas is his new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Americans agree that waste in Washington is abundant: Polls show the average American thinks about 30 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government is wasted, redundant or counterproductive — and Trump is betting they’re right.
The idea of saving up to $2 trillion to reduce our $36 trillion national debt and to rein in our near $2 trillion annual deficit has great and widespread appeal.
In Musk and Ramaswamy, Trump has chosen two of the nation’s great business minds to co-chair this Herculean task of rooting out and halting hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud.
And typical of their creative, enthusiastic approach to the job, the two have asked Americans for ideas about how and where to find the waste.
In that spirit, for the last three weeks I’ve dedicated my WABC radio show to this massive effort.
I’ve asked our listeners nationwide to contribute their ideas for how the government can save our money — and the lines have been jam-packed.
Here are some of the best I’ve heard so far:
- Hold the world’s largest “garage sale” on the Washington Mall, and in every city that hosts federal offices. Auction off unused land, buildings, furniture, computers, vehicles, books and industrial supplies to the highest bidders and dedicate the funds exclusively to debt retirement.
- Enact severe penalties, up to and including shutdown, on any of the dozens of federal agencies that cannot pass a simple audit of how they spend our money.
- Initiate the biggest manhunt program in history to track down the fraudsters who stole hundreds of billions of dollars from welfare programs, COVID relief efforts, the PPP program, food stamps, Medicare and more. Use all federal police powers to claw that money back.
- Sell off unpaid federal loans, allowing private bill collectors to retrieve as much as they can of the hundreds of billions of dollars lent by taxpayers to corporations, small businesses, students and others, but were never repaid.
- Give the president the power to impound funds that were appropriated by Congress but went unspent by federal agencies.
- Incentivize federal employees to participate in identifying waste and suggesting innovative ways to save money. Give them a 15% finders’-fee bonus for every dollar saved.
- Repeal President Biden’s executive order placing diversity directors in every government agency. Their salaries and benefits run to millions of dollars annually.
- Stop all federal loan and grant programs to universities that have endowments of more than $1 billion unless they freeze tuition.
- Institute a 10% spending cut across the board, including defense (but exempting Social Security payments). Follow it with a nine-month zero-based budgeting exercise that requires justification for each new expenditure. Let these bureaucrats defend their jobs.
- Lay down the law to debt-laden states like New York and Illinois: No federal bailouts are coming — get your fiscal house in order!
- Defund sanctuary cities and states that are violating federal immigration laws.
- Move government agencies out of Washington, DC, and its surrounding suburbs. Put them where their work is most relevant: Send the Environmental Protection Agency to Flint, Mich., the Department of Energy to Pittsburgh, Penn., or Dallas, Tex., the Department of the Interior to Montana.
- Fire those 30,000 new IRS agents that were hired under Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
- Cut the Department of Education budget in half and send the remaining money to low-income parents in certified failing school districts to give their children alternative learning options.
- Stop all federal subsidies to any individual with an income of more than $1 million and any company with a market cap of more than $1 billion.
- Open non-environmentally sensitive federal lands to the mining of critical minerals, bringing in billions in royalties and lease payments.
- End the corrupt minority-ownership scam that supposedly ensures “diversity” in federal contracts, but only drives up construction project costs.
- End all foreign aid programs and all funding of the IMF and World Bank. Instead, airdrop copies of Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” into poor countries whose struggling people most need its message.
Common-sense Americans are coming up with these and hundreds more good ideas, and DOGE should follow their advice.
After all, it’s our money that’s being wasted.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.
