There have been a considerable amount of anti-DOGE protests at Tesla stores due to Elon Musk’s efforts to remove government waste and fraud. The ridiculous reaction from oppositions to DOGE shows how irrational these individuals can be as they would rather pay higher taxes that go towards waste and fraud in the government than to agree with Musk and Trump.

Governments around the world are plagued by inefficiency and waste. In fact, waste and inefficiency are inherent to government organisations because they are not run by profit and losses. Due to this, it is always better to let private companies provide the majority of services in society. There are cases of course, where a service should be provided by the government for free. These include education, shelter, water, food, healthcare, the military, and law and order. The reason shelter, water, food, and healthcare should be provided for free is because humans have an obligation to help others in need and these are necessary for humans to survive. Education is also important to provide for free as not only is it morally good for individuals to have equal opportunity, it is also better for the economy if the population is educated. Finally, the military and law and order are necessary to provide for free because everyone in society benefits from them collectively. Even though I have stated that these things are being provided for free, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a cost – it just means that the cost is not paid by the person who benefits from it. The cost is paid by taxpayers. This is the fundamental issue of governments – they are using someone else’s money to provide a service that benefits someone else. Due to this, governments will not only always be incredibly careless when it comes to unnecessary costs but will also provide a lower quality of service than a private company.

There have been many protests against the mass firings within the government. This reaction coveys a sense of entitlement. An individual is not owed a job – certainly not one that is paid for by taxpayers’ money. If an individual’s labour is not as productive as it should be, they ought to be fired to save taxpayer money. Not only does this mean that taxpayers will have to pay lower taxes, but these individuals will then have to get jobs in the private sector, where they will be more productive to the economy. A major wave of opposition has come against Musk sending all federal workers an email asking them to detail 5 things they got done in the week and stating that ‘failure to respond will be taken as a resignation’. While this caused quite a stir, it is a perfectly reasonable way to figure out which employees are being unproductive and wasting taxpayer money.

A common reason many object to DOGE is that an unelected billionaire is being given an incredible amount of political power. While the media constantly pushes this narrative, the truth is that Musk has little political power – DOGE acts as a purely advisory committee to the government. All DOGE does is give recommendations to the government for cuts to make. Many have also been opposed to Musk having access to government databases, such as Social Security numbers, information on federal employees, and the complete government transaction history. One question that these people need to answer is what they think Musk would possibly do with this data that could do any harm. The other question is why these people are fine with many unknown government officials having access to this data but they’re completely horrified by the idea of Musk having access to this data. These unknown government officials can also be corrupt and incompetent.

Many people also mention Musk’s conflict of interest as many of his companies are affected by government contracts. While this may be a valid argument, as stated before, DOGE is just an advisory committee – so any cuts that are made will be ones that the government deems to be beneficial to their operations. Even if Musk was able to gain a slight competitive advantage due to DOGE, it would still be the lesser evil than the government taking several hundred billion dollars from taxpayers and wasting it.

At the time of writing this article, DOGE has already cut $100 billion dollars – which is more than $500 saved per taxpayer. While there is still a lot more wastage to cut in the government, I doubt DOGE will reach the target of $2 trillion saved. However much DOGE ends up saving for the taxpayer, it has done an excellent job and will help many American families by preventing money being essentially stolen from them in the form of tax.