By Vincent Cook

The first month of the Trump administration featured among other things a highly-publicized spectacle of Elon Musk and his DOGE team being unleashed on various parts of the federal bureaucracy and sparking sharp partisan exchanges, with Democrats raging about a “constitutional crisis” triggered by Trump crudely ignoring many of the finer legal points regarding appropriated funds, bureaucratic organization, and civil service oversight (and darkly hinting that Musk is secretly pilfering personal data and promoting chaos and corruption for his own personal gain). On the other hand, Republicans are positively giddy, crowing about how they are “winning so much” in disrupting the woke machinations of Deep State cash cows like USAID and that Musk and his tech-savvy DOGE team are the ones heroically ridding the federal government of waste, fraud, and abuse.

In spite of the political storm triggered by DOGE, it is an error for Republicans to suppose that DOGE can somehow make government more efficient with spending cuts; even Musk admitted that if you merely make some cuts and don’t delete an agency entirely, the agency with all its spending just sprouts back like a weed does from its roots. Even worse, mass firings of Inspector Generals reflect a perversely wrong-headed notion now common in Republican circles: that selecting the “right” executive personnel is somehow a substitute for a rule of law, instead of recognizing that Inspector Generals must remain on the beat as the cops who keep bureaucrats in line long after the limited attention of the DOGE team has wandered off elsewhere. Noxious weeds will only sprout back faster if the bureaucrats who happen to survive a DOGE blitzkrieg are then put on a toothless honor system. Bureaucracies lacking vigorous, ongoing external scrutiny and........

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