Britain needs its own DOGE
The late, great Milton Friedman once gave the single greatest insight into how money is spent, and it’s worth quoting at length:
“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself…you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else…then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself…then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.”
Rarely have truer words been spoken, and they are being proven as gospel truth in real time thanks to President Trump and his waste-cutter-in-chief, Elon Musk. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is combining the very best of journalistic transparency and ruthless private sector economising. The result proves that things are so much worse than even the biggest fiscal hawks ever feared.
On top of the billions being saved by cutting “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) roles alone, one of my favourite examples is $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. This represents the taxes paid by about two average American families in a year.
As wasteful as this spending is, the true tragedy is that it’s all money the American taxpayer worked and sweat and bled for. And disgraceful, arrogant bureaucrats signed it all away. But it is not just money wasted, it was often actively damaging the interests of the United States and the West in general. And the lack of transparency until this point has compounded the problem, all whilst debt soared. US annual debt interest payments exceeded military spending for the first time last year.
Back in Blighty, we crossed that fiscal Rubicon a long time ago. Our tragedy is that we could have been the early adopters of radical state efficiency. The controversial former Downing Street Chief, Dominic Cummings, warned us about this immoral and sickening waste in the British Civil Service. He decried, again and again, the mix of Treasury brain, wasteful projects and utter arrogance of our ruling class.
The results are plain to see. We are on the precipice of becoming a failed state. Britain is no longer a rich country, a safe country or even a moral one. We missed out on a golden opportunity to address all of these issues and more when Cummings left office. But DOGE and Musk’s success proves that a determined future Right-wing government can succeed once Labour are out.
We must strip all funding from bogus charities, from NGOs, from dozens of Government agencies that have tied the hands of elected ministers. It means, too, moving sweeping powers back from regulators and arms-length bodies back to the ministers and the cabinet. They will then sink or swim on their success, but at least they will have agency back from the agencies, power where it belongs.
It will also mean cutting the judiciary back down to size. No more judicial review preventing governments from acting and no more ECHR on our domestic statute book.
And it means cutting back vast swathes of the corpulent civil service blob. There are amazing people in the civil service, who are just about keeping the lights on. But they are suffocating under the waste, inefficiency and arrogance of our failed technocratic class.
Great groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance have done admirable work, but we need politicians with the courage to stand up to the entitled scroungers who feel taxpayers’ cash is theirs by right, and act on it. We need our own Department of Government Efficiency, before Britain sinks beneath the waves of waste.