DOGE Should Have Been Permanent

I supported DOGE, and I still do, which is exactly why its ending makes me angry rather than relieved.

Start with the mission, because the mission was right. The federal government wastes money on a scale that has lost all meaning, hundreds of billions a year in improper payments alone, on systems so old that fraud rings treat them as an open door. I have written about that leak before. The maddening thing has never been that the waste exists. It is that nobody with real power ever went looking for it. Inspectors filed reports no one read. The numbers came out every year and changed nothing. Then, for the first time in memory, a body with the weight of the presidency behind it walked into agencies that had not been seriously examined in a generation and forced the country to look at what it found. That was a genuine public service, and the people who spent last year pretending the government was a tight ship before any of this are not being honest.

So my complaint is not that DOGE existed. My complaint is that we built it to die.

DOGE was stood up as a creature of the executive branch, dependent on one president and, for a while, one very famous personality. Anything built that way carries an expiration date stamped on it from the first day. The moment the other party takes the White House, an executive initiative is dissolved by the same pen that created it. Its cuts get quietly reversed. Its findings get filed away. Everyone who was embarrassed by it goes back to business. A reform that lasts exactly as long as one administration is not a reform. It is a press cycle. And that is the real sense in which DOGE risked becoming theater, not because the waste it found was fake, but because the fix was never built to outlive the man who started it.

The answer was obvious, and it sat in plain view the whole time. Congress should have made it permanent. Not a task force riding on an executive order, but a standing institution created by statute, with a real charter, audit-grade authority to open any agency’s books, and a mandate that survives whoever holds office. Tie it to the one power that actually moves money, Congress’s control of the purse, so that when it finds a program hemorrhaging cash, the finding carries teeth instead of hashtags. Give the federal government the standing immune system it has somehow never had, a body whose entire job is to hunt waste, fraud, and antique systems, year after year, no matter which party is counting the receipts.

A permanent body would also have answered the fair criticisms of the temporary one. The rushed, error-strewn savings tallies that did not survive an honest audit are exactly what a hundred-day sprint produces and exactly what a standing institution with professional auditors would not. The cuts that had to be reversed because someone severed a function before anyone understood it are the predictable price of moving at the speed of a livestream. An institution with memory and continuity learns why a fence was put up before it tears the fence down. Permanence does not only make reform last. It makes it careful, accountable, and credible in a way no blitz ever can be.

Here is the part that should bother everyone. The political class, both halves of it, quietly preferred DOGE temporary. The side that launched it got a spectacle and a cudgel. The side that opposed it only had to wait it out. What neither wanted was a permanent watchdog with statutory teeth, because a permanent watchdog is an inconvenience to everyone who spends, and in Washington that is everyone. So the best governance idea in years was run as a campaign prop by its friends and starved by its enemies, and then wound down, and the leak it exposed is still sitting there, exactly where it was.

We had the right idea. We refused to make it last. And that refusal, bipartisan and deliberate, tells you more about why the government cannot govern itself than any single line item DOGE ever found.