A government watchdog unlike any before it, the quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the brainchild of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump. DOGE has no congressional authorization, no Senate-confirmed leadership, and no formal budget. Yet, in just a few weeks, it has uncovered billions of taxpayer dollars funneled into programs that Congress either never noticed, never cared to investigate, or deliberately ignored.

Among DOGE’s early findings: $20 million for a Sesame Street-style puppet show in Iraq, $10,000 for an ice-skating show to combat climate change, and $1.5 million to LGBT organizations in Serbia. There was even money going to unspecified projects and questionable groups in Gaza and Yemen.

These aren’t budget-line hypotheticals that the fringe right of the Republican Party made up or distorted to rally their base for an even louder chant of “Drain the Swamp!” They are real government expenditures, paid for with real taxpayer money and appropriated by Congress.

Despite its quasi-official status, DOGE has exposed a fundamental truth that those who follow Congress have known for a long time: it often can’t and won’t perform the level of oversight the American people rightfully expect when it comes to spending their money.

For decades, both parties have treated spending oversight as a talking point rather than an actual constitutional responsibility. Lawmakers of all stripes have been too distracted by partisan brawls and endless campaigns to do the unglamorous work of following the money. The result? Billions in spending that no one—especially the lawmakers—can fully explain.

And now, voters are beginning to look beyond Congress to reign it in. Through its own decades-long negligence over the purse strings, Congress opened the door for DOGE’s prying eyes—and Musk drove a (federally subsidized) Cybertruck right through it.

Every dollar spent by the federal government—whether on veterans' benefits, military aid, or a cabaret show in Colombia (yes, another real DOGE finding)—is legally required to be authorized and appropriated by Congress. Despite what Trump or Musk tweets or does, it is Congress, and only Congress, that has the constitutional power to spend taxpayer funds.

But that power comes with an equal fiduciary responsibility to ensure that those dollars are spent wisely and as Congress intended. It’s that second part where Congress has failed—and it’s why DOGE exists at all.

It wasn’t Congress that directly approved a line item for the absurd expenditures so far uncovered by DOGE. Neither the House nor the Senate held specific votes to pay a contractor $1.5 million to “observe mailing” operations or provide funds to stand up a women’s forrestation mentorship program in Brazil (again, both real). None of these expenditures would have come close to passing if they were given a straight up or down vote.

So, how did they come to be?

Congress often appropriates funds to federal agencies in broad and vague language, leaving the departments to decide how much should be spent on what. They aren’t blank checks, but they aren’t fully filled out either. Bureaucracies take advantage of the latitude Congress gives them to spend taxpayer money, and sometimes they choose bizarrely, even corruptly.

Make no mistake, though, Congress did vote to appropriate money to the departments and agencies that ultimately made the decisions that DOGE loves to highlight. They just didn’t line-item where every dollar had to go. They wrote the check and then never looked back.

Once the money is out the door, Congress routinely neglects the responsibility that comes with the power of the purse: oversight. The committees tasked with overseeing government spending and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse are failing on all fronts. They are simultaneously without the capacity to proactively oversee agency decisions, distracted by political infighting, and too timid to challenge the bureaucracies doling out the cash. That’s why indefensible spending continues year after year without real consequence.

Until DOGE.

Despite having no congressional authorization or funding, DOGE has already chalked up wins by exposing wasteful spending that Congress failed to catch and continued to vote for. By highlighting the absurd, it has built up political capital to go even further—and it is.

DOGE operatives have accessed the Treasury’s federal payment system, something no private citizen should be able to do. It has also closed the doors on federal buildings, notably USAID, leaving elected members of Congress—the funders—literally on the outside looking in. That’s not at all how it’s supposed to work, democratically or constitutionally. But because DOGE’s efforts are exposing indefensible spending to an already distrustful American public, more than half the country is cheering them on, shrugging their shoulders at their blatant overreach into Congress’s constitutional authority. At least someone is finally auditing the federal checkbook, they argue.

Here’s the problem: there are wrong ways to do the right thing. We already have the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal agency tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. GAO, importantly, reports to Congress, not a president or a billionaire with his own financial interests at stake. However, GAO is incredibly slow and encumbered by red tape that DOGE doesn’t pay any attention to. Congress’s current auditing mechanisms and processes clearly aren’t working, leaving an opening for DOGE to exist outside normal checks and balances, to swoop in and seize control.

Now, that control is expanding, and soon it won’t be used solely on cleaning up waste but to justify sweeping crackdowns on entire departments and programs that Congress voted for and funded. After all, foreign aid was an easy and strategic opening salvo; it’s broadly unpopular and intangible to Americans who are more worried about kitchen table issues than how to prevent the next pandemic or thwart Russia or China from pushing poorer, unstable countries towards autocracies.

Don’t expect DOGE to stop at foreign aid spending, though. The next targets will be domestic programs and departments that have long been in the GOP’s crosshairs, many of which are more popular than foreign aid. For example, they’ve already started taking aim at the Department of Education with the apparent goal of completely abolishing it. Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps—programs that millions of Americans, including many Trump voters, rely on—will soon be put under DOGE’s microscope, too.

Prep yourself. Waste and fraud will be uncovered in these so-called audits. Their size and reliance on contractors and the lack of a true congressional oversight all but guarantees it.

DOGE’s solution, however, won’t be nixing the problematic spending. It will instead be cutting the programs entirely, or at least as much as they can without engendering pushback from congressional Republicans. Even if the waste uncovered is miniscule in government terms, it will be used as a pretext to go after whole programs. Moreover, because Congress let these problems fester for so long without any meaningful or systematic oversight, it—and Democrats especially—will struggle to mount an effective public defense when DOGE begins announcing freezes and cuts.

If Congress wants to reclaim the power of the purse it so proudly declares its own, it must take its responsibilities more seriously. Americans are right to be upset at its routine failure to perform its constitutional duties. Appropriating money is only half the job. Anyone can swipe a credit card, but ensuring that the money is spent properly is the inescapable responsibility that comes with the power to spend. You can’t have one without the other. If Congress wants control over the purse strings, it has to own the duty of accountability that comes with it.

When lawmakers don’t pay attention to where those dollars go after they approve them, presidents are more than happy to take over and steer the process to their own partisan ends. Much of the country may thank them, even if the president is only supposed to administer congressionally approved funds.

Congress must decide: does it want to control government spending, or is it content to let the executive branch—and DOGE—do it for them? Trump, Musk, and DOGE obviously prefer the latter, but that leaves taxpayers subject to the whims of an unelected billionaire—one riddled with conflicts of interest and hellbent on breaking systems only to rebuild them in their own image. That’s no way to govern in a healthy democratic republic.

The truth is, Congress has only itself to blame for DOGE’s existence and aggressiveness. If lawmakers don’t wake up to the reality that oversight is just as important as appropriating, they will soon find that the power they once held—the power they claim as their own—is slipping permanently into the hands of a president and his unelected, unchecked enforcers.

Casey Burgat is a former congressional staffer turned George Washington University professor and the author of the new book, We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back.

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