Image by Alec Favale.

Between Elon Musk’s brief, disastrous tenure with the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and the Republicans’ mad rush to gut health care and food assistance for millions of lower-income Americans, you’d think they’d just discovered a massive cabal of diehard leftist criminals committing “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the federal budget. Of course, any pretext that all this was in the interest of reducing the deficit was belied when Trump’s Big Ugly Bill handed the giant corporations and the richest among us billions in tax cuts they don’t need.

A quick look back, though, shows that there’s nothing new in the Republican charge that our government is awash in fraud, waste, and abuse. That verbal triumvirate has been standard fodder with so-called conservatives since at least the 1980s and the Reagan administration. And strangely enough, those little words always seem to mean tax cuts that increase........

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