As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cut government waste and abuse at record pace, Democrats have done everything in their power to stifle, stymie, and slander Elon Musk and his team. But for decades, it has been Democrats who have claimed to be the vanguard of increasing government efficiency.

In fact, every single Democrat president since 1976 has advocated for limiting the size of government and cutting waste – although those promises translated into precious little action once in office. This time-honored campaign pledge was only abandoned in 2020 by former President Joe Biden (it seems that by then even the pretense of limiting government power had lost its appeal in the Democrat establishment).

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced the “President’s Reorganization Project.” This initiative, which was explicitly aimed at reducing government waste and improving efficiency, was supposed to fundamentally reorganize the federal government – much as Trump and DOGE are trying to do now.

In his inaugural address, Carter stated, “We must streamline the government and make it work more efficiently… We can have an efficient government only if we reorganize it.” This project took the form of a federal committee focused on a top-to-bottom modernization of the executive bureaucracy. In 1978, Carter praised this approach. “The federal government has grown too complex, too costly, and too distant from the people it serves,” he said. “Reorganization is not a one-time effort but a continuing responsibility.”

The program had some laudable, if temporary, achievements. It resulted in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which increased accountability for federal employees. However, it ultimately failed to substantively reduce the size of the government. In fact, it actually led to the creation of both the Department of Education and Energy. Over time, these programs would significantly increase the government’s size.

Carter’s memoir later rationalized away this failure: “We made government less wasteful, even if we didn’t make it as small as some might have wanted.”

Then came Democrat President Bill Clinton. In his 1996 State of the Union Address, he proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” In 1993, he launched the National Performance Review, aimed at shrinking the federal bureaucracy. It envisioned the government as a company and American citizens as customers.

As a result, 377,000 jobs were eliminated from the federal workforce. This shrank the government to its smallest size since the 1960s. Under pressure from congressional Republicans, who won back the House in 1994 following former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s famous “Contract with America” campaign, Clinton also cut $137 billion from the federal budget, equivalent to roughly $330 billion today. As a result, the country had budget surpluses for fiscal years 1998-2001.

The strategies Clinton employed to implement these cuts were strikingly similar to those employed by DOGE. Federal employees are notoriously difficult to fire, even with cause. Thus, Clinton offered large buyouts and generous severance packages for career employees and made common-sense cuts to probationary employees – both methods DOGE has relied on.

In June 2011, President Barack Obama began a government efficiency campaign of his own, signing Executive Order 13576, “Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government.” Like the efforts of his Democrat predecessors, Obama’s program created a large bureaucratic committee that spent years reviewing improper payments and potential redundancies. In 2016, they proudly reported a “$20 billion” reduction from the budget.

“We’re going after fraud and waste with everything we’ve got,” Obama said at the time. Ultimately, however, the initiative amounted to little more than a convenient talking point for Obama during his 2012 re-election bid.

The biggest difference between DOGE and these initiatives led by former Democrat presidents is that DOGE and President Trump are following through on what they promised. Democrats are upset because DOGE is actually cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, not just talking about it.

But Democrats who make opposing DOGE their defining issuedo so at their own peril. While they bemoan that “nobody elected Elon Musk president,” voters did elect Donald Trump president. Trump explicitly promised multiple times that he would empower Musk and DOGE to take the exact actions they are taking now. In this sense, Americans voted for exactly what they are getting from DOGE.

Moreover, Democrats’ hysterical reaction to DOGE exposing Social Security fraud or cutting funding for transgender surgeries in Guatemala, DEI musicals in Ireland, and tourism programs in Egypt is unlikely to win them much sympathy with voters – something they desperately need following a shellacking last November.

Just last week, DOGE revealed that “the U.S. government currently has ~4.6M active credit cards/accounts, which processed ~90M unique transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24.” When Americans see Democrats protesting outside government agencies or calling Elon Musk a “threat to democracy,” they see politicians defending this sort of frivolous spending and enormous waste of taxpayer dollars.

Elected Democrats have for years claimed to want to create exactly the sorts of savings DOGE is now reporting. That they now turn around and cry foul shows that they were never truly committed to making the government more efficient in the first place.

Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.