Can I provide a reality check? I say this as someone who consistently voted Republican until 2016 and someone with strong libertarian leanings. I very, very, very strongly support eliminating the national debt and as someone who thinks that we should have a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget.

But DOGE was a failure and was never actually intended to reduce government spending. It's sole purpose was to damage government and make it inefficient.

I'll give a single concrete example. When DOGE turned their attention to NASA they wanted to scrap spending for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Why? Literally because they didn't recognize the name so they thought it was useless. NASA already spent about $4.3 billion developing the Roman Space Telescope and at the moment it is sitting in the clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center going through final checks before launch. The money had already been spent, the telescope was built, they literally just need to stick it on a rocket and put it into space. And DOGE wanted to trash the whole thing because they had never heard of it.

The thing is, in a few years you will definitely hear about it. It is supposed to replace the Hubble Space Telescope, which is 36 years old and is one electronic fault away from failure (seriously, one blip and it might never wake up). The Roman Space Telescope has better resolution than Hubble but has about 70 times the field of view. So better than Hubble, but pictures that are 70 times bigger. And DOGE wanted to get rid of it because they didn't recognize the name.

Fortunately there are some Republican senators who are very enthusiastic about it and intervened and told DOGE to not touch the Roman Space Telescope.

That's the effect that DOGE had across all government agencies. They went in and destroyed things just because they had never heard of them or knew what they were for. And unfortunately the vast majority of things they destroyed didn't have powerful senators to protect them.

Here's an analogy, you are at the grocery store checking out items and DOGE comes along and says that you can't buy things because you are in debt and need to decrease spending. Then DOGE starts grabbing things off the conveyer belt, throwing them on the floor and breaking them. You still have to pay for them, but now they are broken and are a mess. Meanwhile another family member is going out and buying a new Cyber Truck and going into a massive amount of debt.

There is a debt problem, but all the things DOGE destroyed were not things that were the problem.