Lessons Learned From Washington

Between the time he left office in 2021 and Jan. 20 of this year, President Trump had a fair amount of time to both observe governmental dysfunction and prepare for reclaiming his position in the White House. Last June, his debate with Joe Biden tore down the curtain that had helped hide from Americans the reality that their president was not mentally or physically fit to lead. I was certain then of the ensuing outcome of the election and anticipated sweeping changes upon the transfer of power. 

Now, a month into Trump’s second term, it’s pretty clear that he was already laying the groundwork for a massive rebuild of the federal infrastructure. What we’ve seen in the weeks since his inauguration reveals a level of planning depth that had to have been years in the making. 

I suspect the lessons from his first term, when “resistance” was advocated even within the ranks of executive department employees ostensibly reporting to him, had something to do with that.  

Some of his backers had hinted at the breadth of change to come, but not many in the mainstream media were taking them seriously. They should have. Few among us realized the extent of what was coming.

Already, the lawsuits are flying in wide-spread bids to slow down the avalanche. It will be up to the courts to decide whether Trump’s consigliere, Elon Musk, has gone too far in his cost-cutting fervor at the Department of Government Efficiency by delivering an ultimatum to tens of thousands of government workers, demanding that they justify their employment.

That approach might fly in business—it certainly did at X, where he fired roughly 80 percent of the former Twitter staff. But public service is a different creature. None of us is compelled to post on X. All of us, though, are affected by what happens in Washington. So change of this magnitude is bound to invite cries that Trump is acting more like a dictator than a “president for all.”

Musk’s team of twenty-something programming whiz-kids is tearing through the financial record of a government that, abetted by leadership from each political party, has grown out of control. They’ve identified hundreds of billions of dollars in questionable expenditures, and trillions in untraceable outlays. History is being made and Americans will soon be exposed to much more internal deceipt. 

That part should make every taxpayer’s blood boil, even if the process for identifying it isn’t entirely comfortable.

Not Just a Federal Issue

I suspect elected leaders in every state are evaluating what can be done to address overspending at the state level and there’s no doubt many cities, including our own, are responsible for vast amounts of waste at the expense of the tax payer. I wish I could find a photo I took in or around 1992 of about two dozen park workers in the City of St. Louis. It might have been their lunch break—I hope it was—but every one of them was sprawled out on picnic tables and on the ground, sound asleep. This memory is burnished in my mind about some government workers.

Let’s face it, government workers earned the  reputation long ago about being unproductive and at times, downright lazy. In some cases, criminally fraudulent. 

Some perspective: We’ve seen plenty of that in the for-profit sector, as well. 

Fair or not, we hold those in public service to a different standard. The question many of us are posing, in the era of DOGE, is: What are those entities, from school boards to city halls to county courthouses doing to ensure the trust the public has placed in them? 

State Senates in Missouri and Kansas have created Web sites that allow people to report instances of fraud or fiscal abuse. Those are fine first steps, but they differ in major ways from the tech-driven upheavel Musk’s team is delivering in D.C.

News reports on DOGE’s stunning arrival in the Treasury building early Jan. 21 reflect the depth of change that’s coming in the administration of federal dollars. The computer geeks came armed with algorithms that effectively mapped much of the nation’s spending. It’s disappointing that previous adminstarations haven’t made that a priority of their own.

As long as Musk & Co. color within the lines of the law, exposure of wasteful spending should be applauded. 

American tax-paying citizens deserve efficient governance. The overhaul in Washington was way overdue. It’s way past time for a similar effort perhaps in every state and in every city and county. 

Let’s hope we’re at the dawn of a New Era of Governance Accountability.