Lawmakers want to cut waste, fraud and abuse—except when it’s their own pork.
Lord, make me chaste, but not yet. Especially when it comes to my home state.
Listen hard and you’ll catch that GOP prayer drifting through the halls of Congress and state capitals. Republicans are thrilled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—on camera. Yet their lustful hearts are already plotting how to ensure the efficiency god doesn’t demand any change of their own souls.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is warning the Musk operation to steer clear of her state’s long and inglorious tradition of hoovering up federal taxpayer dollars via earmarks. “To have the executive basically come in and dismantle something that was legislatively created—that’s outside the bounds of the executive,” she said on Monday. Iowa Rep. Zach Nunn explains that the “federal bureaucracy” “headache” is in the “national capital region”—not the federal employees in Iowa, who “are frontline workers.” And watch all those GOP governors race to prove their own “efficiencies” to DOGE, the better to avoid cuts in federal dollars.
What everyone knows—even if most won’t say—is that the “waste, fraud and abuse” that DOGE is tackling is gravy. The easy first targets are the woke, the indefensible. Diversity and equity contracts. International grants for LGBTQ operas or comic books. Leases for buildings with low to zero occupancy. Pricy executive “coaching” contracts.
What everyone also knows—even if most won’t say—is that this isn’t where the real money is. DOGE is mostly tinkering with operational (and some discretionary) spending—programs in which departments exercise choice. Yet those programs are fractions of budgets. As lawmakers never tire of hollering, only they have the power of the purse. Congress spells out how most dollars are spent—either by allocating or earmarking discretionary funds or by not acting and allowing mandatory funding to run on autopilot.
Meaning DOGE won’t succeed without congressional GOP grit—a reality Republicans are studiously ignoring. An easy example: Here’s betting that Mr. Musk (who has already called to “delete entire agencies”) at some point takes aim at the dozens on dozens of federal programs with duplicative, overlapping or obsolete missions—the very definition of “inefficiency.” And here’s betting that’s when the congressional whispers turn to squeals, as even some Republicans rush to explain why they really must continue funding that Rural Housing Service—never mind private lenders serve every boondock corner.
That’s already happening. Far from asking DOGE what it can do to help, the usual suspects are mobilizing to protect their home-state pork from the authority DOGE does have. Republican senators are balking at the administration’s decision to cap the overhead dollars attached to research grants that go to their universities. Farm-state Republicans introduced legislation to shelter an international food-aid program that keeps their constituents in cash, by moving it from the now-hated U.S. Agency for International Development to the more innocuous Agriculture Department. Republicans are grumbling about Mr. Musk’s attacks on the National Endowment for Democracy, which funds among other things, the International Republican Institute (whose board sports current and former GOP members).
This spending food fight is only getting started. And several test moments will soon highlight whether Republicans believe in DOGE or are simply paying lip service. One will be the fight over current government funding, which expires on March 14. Legislators are barreling—again—toward an omnibus, the preferred legislative vehicle for hiding pet projects. What a cringeworthy sight it will be if a GOP Congress sends President Trump a bill stuffed with more of the embarrassing earmarks, home-state graft and wasteful allocations that DOGE is working overtime to eliminate. Mr. Trump might spare everyone the humiliation by laying out some ground rules now.
The other will be the GOP’s “reconciliation” bill, in which it hopes to fund Trump priorities, extend tax reform and cut spending. There is money to be clawed back from recent legislation, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Republicans are cheering the administration’s halt on further allocations from the $5 billion Biden electric-vehicle charger program, but are they willing to give up the obscene amounts flowing to their own solar companies, transit systems or chip projects? Separately, how hard will red-state governors kick back against obvious reforms to Medicaid or education grants if it means fewer federal dollars to state budgets?
If Republicans carry down this road, they risk destroying their own DOGE experiment, rendering it ineffective or the overseer of a spoils system in which bad Democratic spending dies, while bad Republican spending thrives. With more than $35 trillion in debt, the time to be chaste would be now.
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