Can we prevent it?
By JOHN KEREZY, eyeoncleveland founder/publisher
CUYAHOGA FALLS – As the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficient, or DOGE, continues its work, many in the media and general public are overlooking the most obvious outcome of DOGE’s initial findings.
For decades now, there have been huge expenditures of our federal tax dollars which Congress has not authorized. Article I, Section 9, Clause7 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to spend public money and collect taxes for the national government. DOGE is uncovering significant funds – probably in the hundreds of billions – which the executive branch has been allocating without Congressional authorization or oversight for a decade or even longer.
This trend accelerated under the Biden-Harris administration, so much so that by the last fiscal year there were hundreds of billions of dollars flowing from the U.S. Treasury to public and private businesses, non-profits, and non-governmental organizations — much of it without Congressional approval or oversight. With a fiscal 2024 deficit of $1.8 trillion, this amounts to literal raiding of the U.S. Treasury, our taxpayer dollars.
One such non-approved action was the outgoing administration’s post November 2024 election “parking” or allocating $20 billion in U.S. Environment Protection Agency funds to an outside-the-government financial agent. Done without Congressional approval, the $20 billion was earmarked for some questionable entities. One group, Power Forward Communities, was just begun in late 2022 and had only $100 in its bank account yet was designated to receive $2 billion in these funds.
The work of DOGE is in keeping with the Executive Order (EO) which President Donald Trump signed on his first day of re-entering the office of President, January 20, 2025. Writing about the implementation of this EO, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute pinpointed one of the purposes of the order, which goes beyond just waste, fraud and abuse. “Rather than simply reducing rules with excessive costs as regulatory orders have done traditionally, EO 14219 more explicitly targets regulations deemed unconstitutional, illegal power grabs, or obstructions to economic progress in ways that question legitimacy of the administrative state as such,” Crews writes. (Emphasis added.) “Criteria for rule termination and modification align with recent Supreme Court rulings curtailing administrative overreach, positioning the executive branch for legal confrontations to challenge federal bureaucracy in almost unprecedented ways.”
Another example of waste and spending which was not authorized was uncovered at the Pentagon. An initial DOGE review of Dept. of Defense (DOD) contracts uncovered $80 million in funds allocated for programs that do not support DOD’s core mission. Two examples, according to Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell, are $3.5 million by the Defense Human Resources Activity to support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) groups; and $1.6 million to the University of Florida to study the “social and institutional detriments of vulnerability and resilience to climate hazards in [the] African Sahel.”
WATCH THE REPORT
On Thursday (March 27) Fox News dedicated the entire hour of Brett Baier’s “Special Report” news program to an interview with Elon Musk and the top members of his DOGE team. Anyone who’s concerned about our government’s future should watch it (link is below).
“Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars … drop the federal spending from $7 trillion to $6 trillion,” says Elon Musk, in the interview. “We want to reduce the spending by 15 percent. It seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient … there is a lot of waste and fraud.”
“The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It’s astonishing,” Musk adds. “It’s mind bogging. We routinely encounter waste of $1 billion or more.”
“We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time,” Musk adds. And readers of this post can watch DOGE’s cutting in real time at its website: www.doge.gov
Here are several examples of what Musk and his DOGE team have uncovered, as reported in this news program:
• The Social Security retirement process is all done by hand, on paper. The system cannot handle more than 8,000 retirements’ paperwork processed per month, as the paperwork is stored in a mine in Pennsylvania. This process has been in place since the 1950s.
• Federal government datasets don’t interact with each other. Government IT costs $100 billion a year, and some critical systems are 50 years old or older and are very expensive to maintain. The main Social Security computer system crashed four times in 10 days in one month.
• There are over 15 million people over the age of 120 who are marked as alive in the system. (This was found in 2008, and nothing has been done about it.)
• Health and Human Services (HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid) Only 60 percent of medical researcher grants go to researchers; the other 40 percent goes to administrative overhead. There are 700 different software systems, and they don’t interact with each other. There are also 27 different chief information officers in HHS.
• Duplicative functions: There are 40 different communications offices in HHS alone.
• The IRS has 1,400 people whose sole job is to just provide laptops and cell phones to employees.
• The Treasury Dept. has no audit function to verify or oversee payments. Only one bank account (Treasury general account) disperses the federal government’s outgoing funds. Its consolidated financial report is unreliable: the federal government couldn’t pass an audit based on generally accepted accounting principles. There is no verification for payment orders.
• There are about 4.6 million credit cards, for 2.3 to 2.4 million federal employees.
• There are fraudulent More than $300 million in Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have been given to children aged 11 or younger. One loan was given to a nine-month-old. Another $300 million in SBA loans have been awarded to people who are over the age of 120 (according to the records).
“If we don’t do it … America is going to go bankrupt,” Musk says about two-thirds of the way through the news program.
ONLY WAY TO PREVENT CATASTROPHE
When he visited and observed America in 1831, French diplomat, historian, and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how well the U.S. democracy functioned. In a two-volume book he wrote later in life, titled “Democracy in America,” de Tocqueville explained why the U.S. worked so well:
“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults,” he said.
What neither our Founding Fathers or de Tocqueville could have anticipated is the degree and extent which our federal government – specifically the administrative/regulatory part of the government – has exceeded its authority. DOGE is uncovering some of this, but the situation is far worse than many realize.
Our national debt (as of April 4) is more than $36.2 trillion dollars, but due to out-of-control spending and unfunded mandates that debt is expected to get far worse in the years ahead. A Congressional Budget Office projection (see illustration below) is that will exceed more than 150% of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2055.
The federal government’s spending is on a path which will enslave our children and our grandchildren to this burdensome debt for all of their working lives. Is that what we want?
There is only one solution to address the horrific problem. Fortunately, the authors of our Constitution did provide a way to do so, through what is in Article V of our government document. In it, there is a provision for a Convention of States (COS) to make amendments to our Constitution.
Think about it: Do you believe the administrative state in Washington DC will stop exceeding its authority and stop unauthorized spending? Do you think the elected members of Congress would agree to a balanced budget? Or to term limits for themselves?
No.
But We the People – through the state amendment process, can bring about changes and improvements in a way that will save the government, and our posterity, from the terrible danger we’re facing.
Here is a link to a video from the Convention of States which explains how such a convention to amend the Constitution would work:
If you agree, I suggest you do two things:
1) Contact your state representative and/or senator, and tell them you support your state becoming one that advocates for calling for a Convention of States.
2) Sign the COS petition, linked here: https://conventionofstates.com
In volume two of “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville also wrote this warning about the possibility of a new form of despotism:
“It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”
That is the path we’re on, unless we take powerful steps now to stop it through a Convention of States. Again, that link is: https://conventionofstates.com
SOME SOURCES USED
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “ at: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/administrator-zeldin-announces-billions-dollars-worth-gold-bars-have-been-located
Clyde Wayne Crews, Competitive Enterprise Institute, “DOGE’s first cut at bureaucracy: A target inventory,” March 5, 2025
C. Todd Lopez, U.S. Dept. of Defense, retrieved from https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4096431/initial-doge-findings-reveal-80-million-in-wasteful-spending-at-dod/ March 4, 2025
Brett Bair, “Special Report” Fox News, March 27, 2025. You can view the entire interview here: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6370654580112
Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America,” Vol. 1 (1835)
Peter G. Peterson Foundation continually warns Americans about the national debt. Here’s a link: https://www.pgpf.org/
Convention of States: https://conventionofstates.com
Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America,” Vol. 2 (1840)
Artificial intelligence used for the non-cited illustrations in this post.
Reposted with permission from the author whose blog can be found here: https://eyeoncleveland.com/2025/04/04/raiders-of-the-u-s-treasury/
