We’ve seen in the last few months a disastrous display of what happens when amateurs run amok with government resources. The destruction caused by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) crew has harmed the lives of possibly millions of people and will take years to rectify. Some estimates suggest that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lives have been lost due to the cut in foreign assistance. The Partnership for Public Service, the primary nonprofit advocating for federal employees, has suggested that the so-called “cuts” will result in the government spending more money, not less, due to lost productivity and the departure of experienced workers.
Yet this month, we got an example of what actual government oversight and genuine cost-cutting look like. The House of Representatives Subcommittee on Government Operations held a hearing with the sexy title, “Safeguarding Procurement: Examining Fraud Risk Management in the Department of Defense.” The hearing included the Inspector General of the Department of Defense (DOD) and an expert with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). For policy wonks in D.C., the GAO is often called the last honest person in Washington. They thoroughly investigate how tax dollars are spent and study how to improve the efficiency of government programs. (Wait … wasn’t that supposed to be the mission of DOGE?)
From 2017 through 2024, the GAO found $10.7 billion in “confirmed fraud, and developed 17 recommendations to improve the financial management of the department. This is not small potatoes – the Pentagon is responsible for half of all discretionary spending and 82 percent of the government’s “total physical assets” (that bureaucrat talk for “stuff we buy”).
The two-hour hearing featured thoughtful and intelligent questions from Democrats and Republicans as they jointly explored the research on the topic and discussed ways to achieve taxpayer savings. The Chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), and the top Democrat, Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Maryland), calmly and clearly outlined their intention to work in a bipartisan manner. “We made the determination that Mr. Mfume and the Democrats intend to forthrightly address this issue and come up with real answers, and we’re going to work on this together,” Rep. Sessions said. “Working together is something that we on this side of the aisle look forward to,” Rep. Mfume said.
Unlike DOGE, instead of coming up with fantasy contracts and false savings, the GAO found actual fraud in financial management, including:
- $200 million in stolen funds by a contractor who misrepresented their ownership status.
- Bribes from a contract to Navy officials defrauded the government of millions of dollars.
- A contractor selling the government defective parts, resulting in the grounding of 47 F-15 fighter jets.
The GAO also found that the Pentagon was dragging its feet and delaying the implementation of the recommendations. Only four of the 17 recommendations were implemented, and over a seven-month period, the DOD delayed launching a revised fraud risk management strategy five times. This may sound boring, but good governance that leads to solid results often is boring.
DOGE claims its work has saved taxpayers $160 billion. Instead, according to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, DOGE has cost the taxpayer $135 billion by putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, rehiring mistakenly fired workers, and resulting in lost productivity. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that proposed cuts in staff at the IRS will result in $160 billion in lost revenue to the Treasury due to reduced collections and fewer taxpayer audits.
Genuine government improvement doesn’t come with a narcissistic billionaire wielding a chainsaw and unleashing untrained techies to wreak havoc with the federal government. It comes from experts, with deep knowledge of how the government works and with a patriotic commitment to making it work better. The sooner the Trump Administration figures out that immutable reality of governance, the sooner they’ll find actual savings for the American public.
Bradford Fitch is a former Capitol Hill staffer, former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, and author of “Citizens’ Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials.”
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.