John Stossel: DOGE To The Rescue?

The Department of Government Efficiency has started making moves. The D.C. media are furious about his attempts to cut government agencies.

But I take Elon Musk’s side. More efficient government has been promised often. It’s never happened.

Instead, government just grew.

Sen. Rand Paul showcases stupid government “investments” like the $118,000 study of finger snapping, which the National Science Foundation said was “inspired by the infamous finger snap of the (comic book) villain ‘Thanos.’” The government concluded that “varying degrees of friction between the fingers alters … performance of a snap.”

Gee, thanks.

They even spent thousands of dollars to study whether Neil Armstrong, landing on the moon, said: “One small step for man,” or “one small step for “a man.” NASA says no “a” is audible in the recordings, and I never heard an “a,” but we all paid for an expensive study in which the Science Foundation concluded, “Ambiguity exists.”

Gee, thanks.

They also spent $1.5 million to study ways to improve the taste of tomatoes. Researchers found that sugar helps.

America is going broke. Silly rich people should fund such frivolous research. Taxpayers shouldn’t.  But each special interest will fight for its life, and even if Musk cuts all such funding, it would barely affect our ever-increasing deficit.

Let’s look at bigger cuts:

In my new video, Chris Edwards, editor of the Cato Institute’s “Downsizing Government” website, says, “The first thing I would cut is over a trillion dollars in subsidies to states and local governments — K-12 school funding, school lunch funding, food stamp funding.”

Giving people food stamps sounds kind, but Edwards notes that, “Taxpayers fund candy and cake,” and when “state governments ask to eliminate junk food … they aren’t allowed to.” Really. States aren’t allowed to limit welfare payments for junk food.  

Edwards also proposes cuts to corporate welfare: “Federal government spends $180 billion a year subsidizing corporations … but that doesn’t help the average person.” More could be saved by selling the government’s stockpile of “an unbelievable 300,000 buildings.”

Many sit empty. The ones in my video look first-class, but government still won’t sell them. Nor do bureaucrats sell land they don’t use. The federal government owns a lot, including most of the land in America’s west.  

“We don’t know the market value,” says Edwards, “It is in the trillions.” Instead of selling, politicians print more money and use it to buy even more land, like Biden’s recent purchase of 640 acres in Wyoming.  

President Donald Trump says he will make cuts. Will he? Last time he didn’t. This time he seems more serious about it.

He recently moved to end DEI programs, telling federal DEI workers, “Don’t come in.” But he’s still paying them!

“It’s very difficult to fire federal workers,” Edwards points out. Also, even if Trump managed to fire every federal employee, it still wouldn’t eliminate the deficit. It’s almost impossible to do that, without cutting the biggest spending — Defense, Medicare, Social Security. So far, Trump says he won’t touch those.

“Trump does not have to solve the entire deficit problem in his four years in office,” says Edwards, “but he’s got to get the ball rolling.” Government doesn’t need to balance the budget. If it just slowed spending growth, the private economy might grow enough to reduce our debt. 

But how can the private sector grow when there are so many regulations? “SpaceX had to do a study to see if Starship would hit a shark,” Musk complains. He says he told the regulators, “It’s a big ocean, you know? There’s a lot of sharks. It’s not impossible … “

When regulators finally dropped their shark objections, Musk thought the Space X launch was approved.  “We said, ‘OK, now we’re done.’ And they said, ‘What about whales? … If the rocket goes underwater, then explodes, and the whales have hearing damage?’ This is real! It goes on and on.”

Maybe Musk will change that. Hope so. To overcome our ruinous deficits, we need growth. To get that, we need less government spending and fewer rules.  

Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”

Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”

COPYRIGHT 2025 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.