A recent interview with Elon Musk got me to thinking about Doge, the Department of government efficiency from a totally new angle. I’ve been reading about the waste that they’re discovering, the fraud that they’re discovering. There’s no doubt that they’re going to save an enormous amount of money, maybe even as much as a trillion dollars. But as I listened to Elon Musk explain his thinking, I realized that there was an even bigger, deeper impact that Doge was going to have. You know, many years ago, in 1952 President Harry Truman said of General Eisenhower poor Ike, when he gets in here as a president, he’s going to think that when he issues in order something’s going to happen, because in the army, orders are followed up and people inspect to see that you do it. But in the civilian government, he said, Truman said,

I signed something, and it may or may not happen, I have no ability to go out and track it. And it reminded me of a rule Senator Connie Mack taught me, that you get what you inspect, not what you expect. Well, what Elon Musk has done is bring in a bunch of really smart young people who really understand information technology, and what they’re doing is going through the federal government, basically monitoring whether or not President Trump’s executive orders are being implemented. And the principle that Musk is articulating, I agree with 100%

Lincoln promises government of the people by the people and for the people. And unfortunately, over the last 90 years, the Rooseveltian revolution led to huge bureaucracies surrounded by lobbyists, and we increasingly got government by bureaucrats and lobbyists, for bureaucrats and lobbyists, and of bureaucrats and lobbyists, we did not get the kind of basic, honest commitment we should have had. And you see this as the various work of musk and the doge team do all of a sudden, lots of senatorial inquiries, lots of congressional interests, they were either being blocked. People just refuse to answer, or the bureaucrats were lying. So I think the biggest impact of Doge may come in creating an ability to actually monitor the entire federal government and know whether or not the elected official, not the bureaucrat, is in charge, and know that the wishes of the American people, as expressed through the people they elect, are being implemented, or the wishes of the lobbyists and bureaucrats are being implemented. If this does work out this way, it is going to be one of the great changes in American history. It is going to return to government of by and for the people, and we will look back in later years, and be amazed at how gigantic government had become, how out of touch with the American people it had become, and what a dramatic problem it was to try to get it back under control. I must say, having watched the interview, I was more impressed with Elon Musk than ever, because he’s very smart, but he’s a real patriot, and his description of the importance d