Trump And DOGE: Our Best Hope

Howard Lutnick is a New York financier who has served as Chairman of Cantor, Fitzgerald. He was the co-chair of President Trump’s presidential transition team. Lutnick was recently confirmed as Secretary of Commerce. 

Trump and Lutnick became acquainted in the 1980s in New York. Lutnick was impressed with Trump’s ability to take negative energy directed at him and convert it into positive energy for himself. 

Lutnick was recently interviewed by Chamath Palihaptiya and David Friedberg. Lutnick shared that he believes that Trump is one of the most intuitive people he has ever met. An example is Trump’s focus on the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal is a vital shipping link for United States commercial and military interests. 

Trump watched as Chinese companies gained control of the deep water ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. He saw that China was building bridges over the Canal. Trump recognized that it was not in America’s national security interests to have the Panama Canal controlled by China.

Trump asked Lutnick to research the issue and then they developed a plan for America to gain control of the Canal. 

Trump watched as our US deficit ballooned over the past decades. He watched as politicians from both political parties refused to lower spending. With Congress unwilling to reduce government spending, Trump realized that drastic measures were necessary to avoid a United States bankruptcy. 

Last October, before the election, Lutnick went to Texas to convince Elon Musk to use his skills to find the waste, fraud and abuse in the federal budget. Elon listened to Lutnick’s proposal and agreed to take up the challenge of fixing our budget issues. 

Musk gathered a team of successful entrepreneurs from across the country and across the political spectrum and focused them on fixing our governmental operations. They realized that our current inefficient government was a disservice to all Americans. 

The motto of DOGE can be summed up in the phrase: “Stop sending money to the wrong place so we can always defend sending money to the right place.”

Musk and his team quickly found that there was no governmental process to get back the government money that had been sent out incorrectly. Since no one has ever been fired for sending money to the wrong place, why would bad actors in government ever worry about intentionally sending money to the wrong place. It is so bad that for years requests would come from some government group for the Treasury to send a check to a particular organization. There would be no reason given for the request and yet the check would be sent out. 

With so many government employees and so little oversight, it is easy to understand that there would be some fraud and waste. Lutnick is convinced that by eliminating fraud and waste, our budget can be balanced and important programs like Social Security can continue to help many Americans.

No thoughtful business person would run their business like the federal government runs its operations. Millions of people work for the federal government and no one is ever fired. Most of the people who work for the federal government are good people. It is just a system that encourages wasteful spending. Whenever someone has attempted to reduce the number of federal employees, the Democrats and CBS and CNN begin to shout that innocent Americans will die because of less government spending. After the bad press, many politicians get nervous and then the budget continues to expand. This scenario has continued for decades and as a result we have a costly and inefficient government. 

Trump and Elon’s goal is a government that is much more efficient and better able to meet the needs of our neediest. Of course, the Democrats and our local online newspaper, who do not understand how to run a business, are fighting DOGE.

When Covid hit our country and the government set up PPP funds to help the public, there was tremendous amounts of fraud and waste. At least $200 billion dollars went to Chinese gangs. Yes, that was billions of dollars wasted. This is typical of government spending. For years we have been told by politicians from both political parties that there was nothing that could be done to prevent waste and fraud. 

Trump and the DOGE team are attempting to change this pattern by exposing the fraud and waste and by establishing protocols that  eliminate the potential for fraud and waste in the future. 

It is a shame that this process is so controversial. The DOGE team is saving the taxpayers billions of dollars a day. All the Democrats can do in response is find a Tesla to destroy. 

Any successful business person understands the need to examine operations to make a business more efficient. If Trump’s DOGE team can continue working to find waste and fraud in the federal budget, our children and grandchildren will be the beneficiaries.