The pursuit that President Trump has assigned Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to unearth and weed out waste in federal spending, will be invaluable if it succeeds in sufficiently reducing such expenditures as to make a significant reduction in our national debt. That, in turn, may also do wonders for the health of this country’s republican form of government.

As historian Niall Ferguson points out in the Wall Street Journal, “Debt has always been the ruin of great powers,” and the U.S. has just crossed a critical threshold by allowing the payment of interest on the national debt to exceed its annual expenditures on defense. Skeptics may doubt the capacity of DOGE to make much of a dent in this ever-growing debt mountain, simply because of the size of the country’s budget deficits and the complexity of the bureaucracy – to say nothing of the political interests (supported by congressional factions) that will resist such cuts. After all, a succession of presidents of both parties, starting at least as far back as Bill Clinton, has pledged to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government expenditures, without much evident effect.

Early indications suggest DOGE has already met with more success than prior waste-cutting initiatives. Many programs DOGE has highlighted were previously unknown to all but a tiny fraction of the public, and in all likelihood were in violation of what a vast majority of the public would approve of.

These included, for instance, four foreign projects cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, three of which were apparently funded by the State Department and one by USAID (contrary to her attribution of all four to the latter agency): “$1.5 million to advance DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

Compared to an overall Federal budget of some $7 trillion, of course, those amounts are trivial. But a serious citizen – whatever his political orientation – is compelled to ask: why on earth am I being taxed for any such purposes? Are the taxpayers of Ireland, Colombia, and Peru incapable of financing such “artistic” endeavors without assistance from the American people? And is there any reason to suppose that awareness of American support for DEI projects will enhance the country’s “image” in those countries, rather than subject it to ridicule?

If the Serbian people favor promoting DEI in the workplace, why can’t their government do it without American help? Surely, these projects, and many others like them, reflect no reasoned judgment of what will promote the good of the United States, or even that of their ostensible beneficiaries. Rather, they embody the bias of low-level bureaucrats, accustomed to treating federal tax dollars, at least in “small” sums of a few tens of thousands, or even a million, as play money.

But a much more significant (and costly) instance of monetary abuse just uncovered by DOGE in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency (under the leadership of its new head Lee Zeldin), is the $77.1 million previously awarded to 20 left-leaning nonprofit organizations and university programs under President Joe Biden’s “environmental justice” policy.

The Trump administration has announced that it will withhold $67.4 million in payments yet to be made under this program. The “five biggest losers” from the freeze in disbursements according to the EPA, as the New York Post reported, are the Institute for Sustainable Communities (losing $12.4 million), the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice ($8 million), the Minneapolis Foundation ($7.6 million), the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative ($7.2 million), and Philanthropy Northwest ($7 million).

A look at these organizations’ websites is instructive. The Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities, which boasts of having “worked with thousands of communities, organizations, institutions and companies in more than 30 countries” since its founding in 1991, reports that its “current priorities” reflect its judgment that “climate change, income inequality, and social injustice are the biggest threats to building strong, sustainable communities [its emphasis].” To address the first of these problems, the institute’s “major current programs include the Guangdong Environmental partnership and U.S.-China Partnership for Climate Action in China.”

How, one might ask, can China, the world’s second-largest economy, and which as of 2023 was reported to have six times as many coal-fired power plants under construction as the rest of the world combined (adding to its world-leading total), stand in need of American assistance for climate or environmental “action”? More broadly, why should even one penny of American taxpayer money go to the United States’ top geopolitical rival?

Meanwhile, domestically, the Institute invites “all community-based partners” to “check out our latest resource on media relations,” advertised as “a great starting point for navigating the complex spaces of public relations, news media, and interviews,” since “knowing how to communicate your work is a critical part of building climate resilience in your community.” With the aid of federal financing, the Institute will assist likeminded groups in boosting their local images, heightening their influence and, presumably, their capacity to apply for government grants of their own.

In other words: Taxpayers are paying to help local groups more effectively demand more taxpayer funding.

Turning to the Deep South Center, its latest “Grant and Funding News” boasts of having made use of the Biden administration’s “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” and (egregiously misnamed) “Inflation Reduction Act” to enable “transformational resources to flow to Black, brown, Indigenous and underserved communities.” More taxpayer funding for favored groups without any apparent oversight. (It is worth noting that it is doubtful whether the racial or ethnic criteria for the recipients can survive constitutional scrutiny in view of the nondiscrimination principle regarding government-assisted programs already enunciated by the Supreme Court with regard to college admissions in its 2023 Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling.)

A different sort of question is raised by an announcement on the Minneapolis Foundation’s website. The Biden EPA apparently selected that organization to receive a total of $50 million starting in 2024 to serve as a “regional grantmaker.” Local communities can apply to the foundation “for subgrants to support various projects related to environmental justice, including local cleanups, emergency preparedness, workforce development, and addressing illegal dumping.”

This arrangement begs an obvious question: Why hire a private foundation to serve as a subsidiary grantmaker for the listed purposes – as if the EPA’s bureaucracy didn’t suffice by itself to soak up taxpayer dollars in the process of “administering” the agency’s funds?

The programs of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative and Philanthropy Northwest are similarly vexing. But one much larger example of likely abuse just exposed by Zeldin’s EPA that should be mentioned is the $2 billion award late last year to a new nonprofit affiliated with unsuccessful Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who famously refused to acknowledge her 2018 defeat but ran unsuccessfully once again for the position in 2022.

That grant to “Power Forward Communities” came from the EPA’s “National Clean Investment Fund,” designed to finance “home energy efficiency upgrades” by helping “homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options.”

Zeldin further cited a $7 billion grant to the Climate United Fund, which in turn helped fund the grant to Power Forward Communities. Like the grant to Power Forward Communities itself, this is a far more egregious instance of the “subcontracting” practice exemplified by the Minneapolis Foundation, which seems designed to obscure from public notice the way in which taxpayer funds are being disbursed, possibly with outright political favoritism.

In his February 13 announcement of the latter discovery, Zeldin maintained that the funding his team discovered was “purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight” before Trump took office. It remains unclear whether the Power Forward grant can be “clawed back,” since Program spokespeople had stated in August that it expected to start using the $2 billion in early 2025.

However, there is a larger lesson Americans should learn from recent revelations about these expenditures. As Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized in his classic Democracy in America, self-government cannot rest merely on the right to vote for representatives every two, four, or six years, only to leave the decision-making in between elections to bureaucrats working under the representatives’ (often nominal) supervision – as was confirmed in the France of his time.

Such a system, Tocqueville maintained, amounted to “democratic” or “tutelary despotism,” or what the British call the “nanny state.” Each of the grant programs DOGE has exposed, and doubtless many others operated by the EPA and most if not all federal agencies, exemplify the sort of problem Tocqueville had in mind.

More precisely, since the Frenchman himself cannot have imagined the scope, size, and cost of a system like the contemporary American one, disbursing taxpayer funds through thousands of such programs constitutes a way of concealing from the public the manner in which their national government is acting.

Tocqueville also made an important distinction between what he called “political” and “administrative” centralization. The former refers to the centralization of authority for purposes (most obviously, defense, foreign policy, the currency, enforcement of federal laws) that require a single national governing authority.

The latter, by contrast, operates in spheres that can just as well, or better, be directed at the local level (or in some cases nowadays, for financial reasons, the level of state government). In addition, he highlighted and admired the American spirit of volunteerism, which means that actions like “local cleanups” might often be conducted without any government intervention at all.

In comparing the centralized French administrative system with the decentralized American one of his time (the 1830s), Tocqueville observed that the former, run by “experts” rather than amateurs, was often more “efficient” for that reason. Nonetheless, he judged the latter system more effective, in that the sense that citizens taking care of their own affairs at the local level elicited a civic pride that caused more things to be done for the public good.

The current DOGE debate may recall for some readers an anecdote from Barack Obama during his successful 2008 presidential campaign. It concerned a letter he reported having received from a schoolgirl in South Carolina, lamenting that her middle school had a leaky roof, and asking why the government couldn’t fix it.

In response to such laments, upon election, Obama promised a “school modernization program” as part of his “stimulus package” for the economy. Remember those “shovel-ready projects” that Obama subsequently admitted, a year after the $800 billion package was passed, didn’t actually exist?

My own reaction upon hearing Obama cite the letter was to wonder, as Tocqueville might have done: might not a bunch of local guys, especially those with kids in the public schools, just have got together one weekend to fix the roof, even without pay? It certainly would have saved taxpayers a great deal of money, and likely been much faster, too.

And I wondered, as well, just what this young lady and her peers were being taught about the American system of government in their civics class. If DOGE (along with new agency heads like Zeldin) is successful, regardless of the overall amount of tax dollars that are saved, perhaps it will assist Americans to better understand, and thus regain, their right of meaningful, republican self-government.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.