Why Are People So Upset With the Work of DOGE?

 President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are in the process of eliminating federal contracts, cutting spending, and reducing waste and fraud. The process will of necessity cut jobs, but the end result will be a smaller, more efficient government.

There is a lot of hyping of fear by people who have political megaphone. According to Hans von Spakovsky, “Democrat officials, public employee unions, and their minions in the media have no qualms about trying to terrify the public with ridiculous claims in an attempt to counter President Donald Trump’s swamp-cleansing initiatives through the work of the Department of Government Efficiency.” He offered the following examples as evidence of ridiculous claims. 

Just look at the recent hysteria from Capitol Hill. Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., likened the dismissal of federal employees to “a bank robber trying to fire the cops and turn off the alarm just before he strolls into the lobby.”

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, pontificated that “firing this many critical employees at once could make it impossible for our government to provide BASIC services.”

But the nuttiest scream of all came from yet another congresswoman, Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., who urged supporters of dismissed U.S. Agency for International Development workers to “Shut down the city! We are at war!”

She didn’t want to talk about the bizarre, absurd misuses to which those USAID workers had put the hard-earned dollars of American taxpayers, like funding a “transgender comic book” in Peru. That is certainly something worth “going to war” about. Not!

Von Spakovsky noted that the mainstream media are acting as they usually do to “amplify the political Left’s hysteria.” He then suggested that Americans take “a realistic look at the reduction in federal bureaucracy relative to the bloated size of the federal government” to show “just how ridiculous these claims are.” He claims that the mainstream media “are engaging in the worst type of fearmongering hyperbole.” He then proceeded to share the numbers that “can’t be exaggerated.”

The current proposals for reduction in federal agency personnel add up to just over 238,000 employees. But that number represents less than 8% of the more than 3 million current federal employees, according to the Pew Research Center. That 3 million figure, however, does not include the roughly 1.3 million active-duty military personnel. Pop that number in and out of the total of 4.3 million individuals receiving paychecks from the federal government – paid for by U.S. taxpayers – the Trump administration wants to reduce the size of the executive branch by only 5.5%. That 4.3 million number of total employees makes the U.S. government the largest single employer in the entire country, larger than private companies like Walmart or Amazon. Moreover, that number is so large that it means the federal government bureaucracy is larger than the total population of half of the states, including places like Utah, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Add in the conglomerate of 109,000 government contractors, according to a 2024 study by the Government Accounting Office, and the dismissal percentage plummets even more. The estimates of the number of individuals employed by those contractors range from almost 4 million to over 5 million. Including those federal contractors drops the percentage of taxpayer-paid staff being laid off even more drastically.

If less than 8% of the civilian workforce has been shaved off, without taking into account contractors, that means over 92% of federal bureaucrats are still staffing the multitude of federal agencies. That’s 2.8 million federal workers still taking care of the business of the federal government. If the critics are correct that this minuscule reduction will cripple America, that says a lot about the inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and incompetence of vast swaths of the government.

Only by ignoring these statistics can critics continue to proclaim that the reductions in force proposed by the Trump administration will lead to a disaster. In fact, fewer government workers means fewer federal bureaucrats trying to overregulate, overtax, and overburden Americans in their personal lives, their businesses, and their professions.

Von Spakovsky concluded that the reduction in workforce was not “the end of the road for laid-off federal employees.” He says that they will do fine in the private sector. His reason? More than “30% of the federal workforce holds a bachelor’s degree, and over two-thirds of the now-former staff of USAID possess postgraduate degrees.” They have the education and the experience to work in the private sector – where they would have to show up to work.

Meanwhile, the federal government would be leaner and more efficient. Getting rid of “the waste, fraud, and abuse that infests the nation’s capital will benefit the American people and the republic.”