DOGE is dead — long live Washington boondoggles!

DOGE is done.

Just over a year ago, President-elect Donald Trump announced he was launching the Department of Government Efficiency to produce “a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy,” the “perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.”

But DOGE disbanded, Reuters reported last week, eight months before Trump’s deadline for what he hailed as a “Manhattan Project,” akin to the creation of the atomic bomb.

DOGE became the equivalent of a Pakistani nuclear-bomb test — a few loud clicks and then nothing.

Office of Personnel Management chief Scott Kupor claims that “the principles of DOGE remain alive and well,” including “making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”

But then why does Trump refer to DOGE in the past tense?

At least Kupor didn’t ludicrously promise Americans their DOGE-savings rebate “check is in the mail.”

Elon Musk, the Dogefather, promised DOGE would cut “at least $2 trillion” from federal spending.

But DOGE’s spending cuts vanished more quickly than a politician’s campaign promises.

Early on, the DOGE website exaggerated by a thousand-fold the savings from terminating one Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract.

Was an $8 billion triumph for taxpayers “close enough for DOGE work” to the actual $8 million cost cutting?

A Politico analysis estimated DOGE exaggerated savings across the board by more than 20-fold.

DOGE’s “fuzzy math” was par for the DC course. Republican congressmen inflated by a hundredfold the amount of federal spending cuts contained in a 2011 compromise sell-out deal with President Barack Obama.

DOGE had some brief successes.

Its actions helped spur up to 200,000 layoffs or other terminations of federal employees.

It exposed stunning abuses in US foreign aid, AmeriCorps, the Education Department and other agencies.

It helped blunt the Biden administration’s shameless exit stampede to throw billions of dollars at leftist groups.

Its investigators had the power to forcibly open federal files and analyze agency records to reveal Americans are often governed much worse than they feared.

A few days after Team Trump raised the DOGE white flag, the Treasury Department announced federal spending for October had soared to almost $700 billion — 18% higher than a year before. 

October also produced the highest-ever monthly federal deficit — which also means the 2026 fiscal year is off to the worst-ever start for the US budget.

Treasury reported in October the national debt had scored its fastest-ever trillion-dollar increase (except for the pandemic).

But nobody in the Trump White House appears to give a damn.

His Big Beautiful Bill will add more than $3 trillion to the national debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The new “Trump accounts” — $1,000 federal handouts in bank accounts for newborn babies — serve no real purpose except to make gullible people believe Donald Trump loves them.

In his March address to Congress, Trump pledged: “In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget.”

But Trump didn’t specify whether “near future” meant before or after hell freezes over.

Was DOGE just a flag of convenience?

With DOGE’s demise, will the Trump White House adopt the same motto towards federal waste, fraud and abuse it attempted unsuccessfully for the Jeffrey Epstein files — “Nothing to see here, move along”?

In January, Trump illegally fired 17 inspectors general for federal agencies, and many of those positions remain vacant.

The Trump administration is finalizing a new policy that decimates legal protections for government whistleblowers who expose federal crimes or abuses.

Perhaps the Trump White House presumes that what people don’t know won’t hurt the government.

Was DOGE doomed because Washington politicians remain hellbent on forcing Americans to pay any price to momentarily boost their rulers’ popularity?

Trump recently announced that “a dividend of at least $2,000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone” via the federal revenue from tariffs.

That payout far exceeds actual tariff revenue and is a brazen ploy to buy votes for Republicans in the midterm congressional elections.

The Republican Party Platform for the 1968 election proclaimed, “An entrenched, burgeoning bureaucracy has increasingly usurped powers, unauthorized by Congress,” and called for radical reforms to “preserve personal liberty” and “improve efficiency.”

Since that lofty declaration of principle, Republican presidents and members of Congress have helped spawn endless deficit spending that’s destroyed almost 90% of the purchasing power of the dollar since the Nixon era.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), announced a week ago she’s resigning in disgust because “Americans are used by the Political Industrial Complex of both Political Parties” and “nothing ever gets better for the common American man or woman.”

Does the DOGE demise symbolize the final collapse of any effort to prevent federal spending from wrecking Americans’ financial future?

In September, Musk announced: “The government is basically unfixable.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) aptly said: “DOGE fought the Swamp and the Swamp won.” 

DOGE won’t deliver the 250th birthday present Trump promised to Americans. But, to borrow the words of the Declaration of Independence, can Trump at least avoid committing “a long train of abuses and usurpations” that make Americans fear “absolute Despotism”? 

James Bovard is the author of 11 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.”