I support DOGE, but...

I support DOGE, even as I am worried that mistakes will almost certainly be made.  I spent thirty years in government and I saw enormous waste and massive wrong-headed spending decisions.  Having said that, I would much prefer that reform be made from the bottom up rather than from the top down.  The individuals at the working level are the most knowledgable about what is necessary and what not.  Were I in charge, I would give every single supervisor a cost-reduction target and require them to make the decisions necessary to achieve that level of savings.  I would also caution against over-ambitious fiscal targets.  If my analysis was that a given agency could safely reduce its budget by ten percent, I would require the head of that agency to reduce costs by five percent.  

At the same time that this process was going on,. I would increase the budget in those areas that increases were necessary.  A prime example of which is Defense.  For obvious reasons, this is where the process would be most difficult.  Requiring a supervisor to cut at the same time that you are increasing his budget would require some intense supervision across an enormous bureaucracy.  Mistakes would be inevitable and success would be extremely difficult to achieve, but that does not remove the necessity to do it.  The simple fact is that we can not continue to spend more money than we have.  Borrowing from others, as we are doing now, only works as long as others are willing to loan us money.  The difficulty that we are having controlling our economy and maintaining the value of our currency is already weakening our ability to borrow.  China is leading the charge against us in this realm at the same time that it is challenging us in virtually every other arena - including nuclear arms.

My assessment is that our greatest vulnerability is economic and, in my mind, that stems from the nature of our society.  We are, as a society, fat, lazy, cowardly, greedy and naive.  Very nice, very well-educated, very polite cowards.  Very different from the poorly educated, hard scrabble, riff-raff that built this country.  Those folks had heart and balls enough to get the job done - however they could, whatever it might be.  We seek legislation to protect our rights in the bathroom and demand that our feelings be protected.  My assessment is, that unless we grow a pair and have an epiphany as to the relevance of the need for all people to live a decent life, we will eventually be forced into a nuclear exchange with one or another foreign antagonist.  The state of our economy at that point in time will be largely irrelevant.