Wasting Away Again in Washingtonville

 (With apologies to the late Jimmy Buffett) Internal inefficiency, political corruption, and external graft have grown from mere incidents to settled practices.

A new president is in town, elected in a landslide despite the corrupt corporate media assuring everyone that he couldn’t win.

But this wasn’t simply a win — it was a blowout victory with coattails that flipped the U.S. Senate.

Unsurprisingly, the radical left was utterly enraged, unhinged, and seething about the man elected to the nation’s highest office. They railed that the new administration had a secret blueprint from the conservative think tank to cut, reform, and remake the federal government. He was only concerned with the “rich.” Citizens would starve and die in the streets, the radicals screamed. Democracy itself was at stake.

The new president was preemptively labeled a “fascist.” The Marxist rabble promised to “take to the streets” and confront the new government at every turn and in every court in America.

We’re not talking about President Donald Trump here. We’re revisiting Ronald Reagan’s welcome to Washington, D.C., in 1981. Yet the Gipper was unfazed and went on his cheerful way, reminding his audiences that he had fought the Marxist/communist brigades toe-to-toe in Hollywood and won as they tried to take over the Screen Actors Guild.

I went to Washington as a Reagan Revolutionary in 1981 to work in the new administration – and I can report firsthand that today’s venom, bald-faced lies, deceits, contortions, and viciousness have a precedent. Ronald Reagan was the first post-war president who came to town to break the furniture and, in his own words, “make America great again.” And Washington’s ruling class hated him for it.

The second “disrupter” president, Donald J. Trump, has withstood a level of attack and hatred many times that levied against President Reagan. It’s in uncharted territory.

The difference today is that that volume is turned up full blast, and the entire weight of the federal government apparatus was organized to bankrupt the former president and jail him for something — anything.

In addition, of course, they attempted to murder him twice.

DOGE Derangement Syndrome

Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to run, the Department of Government Efficiency (an oxymoron if ever there was one!) brings all this to mind. When the entire radical-left Democratic party and the corrupt national media are in full-blown hysteria and panic, you know something good is happening. (DOGE has legal authority based on an existing White House entity, the US Digital Service, being repurposed and renamed by executive order.)

In 1982, Reagan created the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, popularly called the Grace Commission, chaired by the celebrated American industrialist, the late J. Peter Grace. With a team of 161 corporate executives and several thousand volunteers, the Grace Commission was tasked with reviewing the entire government from top to bottom to find waste and mismanagement and make recommendations on how to pare down the fat.

Just as in 2025, you couldn’t throw a rock in Washington in 1982 and not come up with example after example of simply stupefying waste, barefaced fraud, and political cronyism in the massive pool of thousands upon thousands of billions of dollars gushing up into the air like a Yellowstone geyser. And, sadly, like the geysers, it is a recurrent event that you can set your watch by.

When the Grace Commission turned over its report to Reagan in 1984, it made 2,500 recommendations to save $424 billion over three years (in a cumulative budget total of $2.1 trillion). It called for modernizing federal financial practices, streamlining federal operations and enhancing workforce productivity, remaking the civil service retirement system, reducing program fraud, and making a range of changes to defense procurement, among other things.

The report asserted that one-third of all income taxes are lost to waste and inefficiency, and an equal one-third was never collected at all in the underground economy. Out of the rest collected, the receipts covered only defense and entitlement spending. (You can see Reagan’s White House discussion of the report here.

It’s fair to say that the Grace Commission’s greatest contribution was alerting taxpayers to just how out of control federal spending was — and how disinterested Congress was in doing anything about it. The $100 billion actually saved were action items Reagan accomplished by executive order.

Trump 2.0

Lessons learned: Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 has been like watching Danny Devito trying to flip a sumo wrestler. The methodically laid-out return has left official Washington reeling and terrified, but with good reason: He understands the game this time.

Elon Musk and the DOGE troops have taken the Grace Commission concept to a whole new level. They are busy breaching the Washington bureaucracy’s gates and scouring the books with algorithms that can connect the fiscal dots. Unlike the spaghetti-spine politicians in Congress who are in on — and profiting from — the Washington game of hide-and-seek, DOGE is examining exactly where six trillion dollars — six thousand billion dollars — is being spent.

It’s hardly a secret that unaccountable money and broad discretion in how it is allocated and released is an open invitation to malfeasance from both the inside and outside, and it has been a scandal Washington has ignored for many decades. In 2019, Forbes reported that the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development couldn’t account for $21 billion in spending. It was reported last year that DOD had failed its seventh straight audit and could not account for nearly $900 million in spending. None of the vast treasures and weapons sent to Ukraine have been audited, while European resorts are thick with lavishly spending Ukrainians, and many reports suggest half the weapons received have been sold off.

In the COVID disaster, not only did Big Pharma rack up tens of billions in profit for a therapy of dubious effectiveness, but $200 billion may have been lost or stolen in government assistance to both individuals and businesses — and the real total will probably never be known.

While Trump’s rock-’em-sock-’em rollout of executive orders and Musk’s full-frontal attack on an uncooperative bureaucracy has official Washington in complete meltdown, the truth is that only tough love will work now. Internal inefficiency, political corruption, and external graft have grown from mere incidents to settled practices. Intricate networks of the administrative state systems to obfuscate and manage the government, often in direct defiance of the Office of the President of the United States, are being overrun by a laser-fast army of investigating programmers.

Who’s It Really Been Aiding?

USAID (which stands for US Agency of International Development, not the AID most taxpayers think of) was low-hanging fruit. The long-term corruption and pass-through accounts of USAID (with funding in excess of $40 billion and 10,000 employees) that fund political mischief by the CIA, DoD, and State Department are well-documented — despite the corporate media hysteria — and have been an open secret in Washington for years. Some NGOs and agencies, like the National Endowment for Democracy, also have vast funding and cutouts to allow the intelligence community to do whatever it likes outside public scrutiny or accountability.

Mike Benz, a State Department and DoD veteran who has become the go-to expert on Deep State internal workings and shenanigans, told Tucker Carlson, “The founders of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman and Alan Weisberg, literally have direct quotes saying that they were set up to do what the CIA used to do, but got in trouble for doing, and they didn’t want CIA fingerprints on it anymore. So, they wanted to create a nominally private NGO to do it. That way, when people got busted trying to overthrow governments, it would look like it was coming from an NGO instead of from the CIA.”

None of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government is new, and it’s hard to miss if you’ve worked in senior positions. Your humble scribe learned quickly in 1981 that a heck of a lot of official Washington turns a blind eye to reality. In complying with a budget initiative, an actuary in a smaller agency compiled a study demonstrating that tens of millions of dollars were “missing” and “unaccountable.” When I met him, he’d been consigned to a basement office with maintenance. No one would accept his study or return his calls. The very people who actually called for the study? They checked an action item off the list and never acknowledged the report. It died on some dusty shelf.

Musk, armed with his algorithms and young computer geeks — and X for public distribution — may do more in weeks than our government and Congress have done in generations.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.