Democracy Dies in Darkness

The Washington Post's slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" has been amplified throughout the culture by self-congratulatory liberals ever since the WaPo adopted it in 2017, but today liberals are in a quandary. It's the progressive left and their Democratic allies who are seeking to turn out the lights and conceal in darkness the mischief and corruption their friends in executive agencies have been fomenting over the past several decades.

As the Trump administration, through its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), seeks to shine a spotlight into the dark recesses of the Washington bureaucracy we're being treated to the spectacle of diehard resistance from the left.

This turnabout of "principle" by the left is something we should all be used to by now. There was a time when Democrats stood for the little guy and against the corporate fat cats. Today they're bankrolled by the fat cats and as numerous commentators have observed, they no longer give a rip about the little guy.

Gerard Baker points out in a column at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that the Democrats have chosen to bankroll illegal migrants over American citizens, to give criminals a pass while ignoring victims, to pretend that men who think they're women should be allowed to compete in sports against girls, and to bow to the demands of powerful teachers' unions over the interests of children and the parents who pay the teachers' salaries.

Is it surprising then that Democrats would endeavor to hide from scrutiny the unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars by government bureaucrats who deviously funnel the little guy's resources into their pet projects such as earmarking $15 Million for "Contraceptives and Condoms" in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?

They argue that what Trump's doing - saving the taxpayers money by eliminating waste, fraud, and unnecessary jobs - is unconstitutional, but this argument is hard to credit. Article II of the Constitution clearly states that the executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States. These agencies are all executive branch agencies, so aside from completely eliminating a department established by Congress, the president is pretty much free to do as he pleases in managing them.

The left also objects to the work undertaken by DOGE on the flimsy basis that Elon Musk is un-elected, but so are the bureaucrats who are channeling these multimillion-dollar grants to the most dubious recipients. Which is better, un-elected bureaucrats secretly wasting our resources, often in support of causes that are antithetical to the interests of the United States, or an un-elected watchdog exposing their corruption?

They complain that Musk's army of investigators are mere 18 to 25-year-olds who have no experience and no business rooting about in the records of agencies like USAID. This is a very odd objection for the left to make since it was Democrats who led the fight to get 18-year-olds the right to vote, arguing that if they were old enough to fight in a war they were old enough to vote. Well, if they're old enough to fight in a war then why aren't they old enough to ferret out the waste and abuse in our governmental agencies?

In a parenthetical comment Baker says,

A word about those teenagers: Funny how the left is so outraged about kids barely out of college marching into buildings along Constitution Avenue to investigate the misuse of government budgets. They cheered as hordes of little Maoists straight out of Ivy League schools took over tech companies, media organizations and the entire marketing departments of corporate America in the past decade to subject the rest of us to the iron rule of woke ideology.

He closes with this:

Whether or not it succeeds in dramatically reducing the size of government, the paramount virtue of this exercise is the exposure of the hegemony in our system of a political class that sees itself as immune from popular accountability. Government is supposed to exist for the people, but the DOGE process has laid bare what we have long suspected—that at scale, it exists first and foremost to further the interests of the permanent bureaucracy and their like-minded friends who dominate almost all our major institutions.

That’s why Democrats are so upset about the exercise: It is the most serious challenge to the control their people have long exercised, irrespective of election results and the popular will.

Yes, that and the fact that the revelations DOGE is bringing to our attention are likely to deeply embarrass a lot of powerful people.