This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.
I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked people who get the value of something off by three orders of magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off by 5B he went to prison.
I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.
A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:
> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.
They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.
And honestly it’s been both parties who have been more than happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they don’t retrench as individuals and private entities have to.
You have to be blindly partisan to be unable to recognize basic facts about the debt load and that republican governments are responsible for the vast majority of it.
You forget they talk about responsible budgeting when Dems are in office. Talk talk talk. Then they balloon the debt when they're running the show. Sure did talk though...