Does it feel like spring is breaking early this year, even if much of America is in the midst of a mid-February sub-zero freeze that penetrates right to the bone? Perhaps it is due to the continued action and success of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that is demonstrating it was not just a good idea that erupted like a volcano during the 2024 presidential campaign but perhaps the mechanism that will ultimately destroy the febrile Deep State by identifying and cutting off its tentacles one by one.
How do we destroy the Deep State? We starve it – of funding, of financial backing, of persistent Congressional support. This has been going on for far too long. And it has been going on for far too long because of the inertia of government, where programs proceed as they always have because of an unwillingness or even fear of demanding a full stop. It takes a leader to do that and, my God, America has a leader in Donald Trump, who is supremely indifferent to the nagging anxieties of the Left – from the recesses of Capitol Hill to the ivory towers of academia.
The Deep State might be able to function through private capital, but you can bet it would not thrive for long. Private investors are not only unwilling to spend a fortune on a parallel government, they have become far too accustomed to taxpayers footing the bill. DOGE was an inspired idea because it represents the first time that the US federal government has actually created an internal agency to monitor, expose and eradicate unnecessary, unsightly and, yes, obscene spending on whimsical but often corrosive projects and programs. It is time to deep six the Deep State – the resilient and willful bureaucracy that seeks to control the policy process in Washington – and DOGE is well on its way to doing so.
The revelation that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) acted precisely as we all suspected in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and deliberately punished supporters of Donald Trump could perhaps sound the death knell for the Deep State.
"FEMA spent tens of millions of dollars in Democrat areas, disobeying orders, but left the people of North Carolina high and dry. It is now under review and investigation," Trump wrote, noting how FEMA under the Biden administration was a "disaster" and "should be terminated." Trump continued, "It has been slow and totally ineffective. Individual states should handle storms, etc, as they come. Big savings, far more efficient."
Of course it should be terminated but it was DOGE that put FEMA in the president’s crosshairs by pointing out that the Deep Staters were continuing to exercise what must be defined as either extraordinarily stupid judgment or an overt attempt to subvert and dismantle the explicit policy directives of the Trump administration.
On Monday, Elon Musk said on X that the DOGE team discovered that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) paid out "$59 [million]" to "luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants" last week. This comes as DOGE has been going through spending records of government agencies, looking for waste.
As Musk pointed out, "The DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants. Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order."
These two revelations are powerful indictments of not only why FEMA is an utterly worthless and politicized government agency that does not even seek to offer objective assistance to Americans but provide largesse to illegal immigrants, it is a visceral example of just how the bureaucracy thinks it knows better than elected officials or the people who voted for them – especially the people. Can you imagine FEMA sending $59 million to house illegal immigrants in February 2025? I thought Donald Trump was now the president. Hasn’t he initiated a deportation program that has already seen the removal of criminal illegal aliens and their shipment outside of the country? Aren’t we now operating under an entirely different policy mindset than we were a few months ago under the Biden administration, when the federal government was working in tandem with the Deep State? The answer is a resounding yes to all three of those questions but that reality means virtually nothing to a lingering bureaucracy that is firmly committed to advancing its policies despite having the world change around them.
The optics of seeing hard-working North Carolina American citizens living in tents or campers because their FEMA ticket at the local hotel had expired, while seeing illegals living in five-star hotels on the Great White Way was both sickening and heart-breaking. But not to the woke folks at FEMA, who figured the people in North Carolina needed to be punished while the illegals in NYC should be rewarded for their cheek and criminality.
How did FEMA – which, I’m sure was founded on relatively humanitarian principles – develop into such a corrupt and politically devious organization that had the gall to announce that promoting equity – and not public safety – was its chief objective? Well, if there’s an iron law of oligarchy stating that all organizations tend to deteriorate into control from above, there also appears to be an iron law of wokism where government agencies will always demonstrate a tendency to lean leftwards.
But I recall watching a shocking video that showed just how FEMA’s middle management really believed in all of this rubbish and had completely lost focus that they were working for a government agency that was supposed to be about saving lives in the aftermath of natural disasters.
The video, titled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Community Before Disasters: Preparedness and Mitigation Consideration” is from a March 23, 2023 session available on YouTube.
The meeting is chaired by Tyler Atkins, who, at one point, notes how he was particularly impressed with the phrase "radical spaces of kindness and care" and says the meeting has “sparked, in my mind, thinking about preparedness and how you said, you know, LGBTQIA people and people who have been disadvantaged already are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with. So you add a disaster on top of that, it's just compounding on itself. And I think that is maybe why we're having these discussions. It isn't being talked about. It isn't being socialized. We're not paying attention to this.”
DOGE needs to keep on undermining the Deep State just as it has sought to undermine conservatives and continues to try to undermine a Trump administration that is intent upon restoring some degree of sanity to government. The more chaos and connivance it finds, the more it must reveal and the more the administration must cut. It needs to ruthlessly carve out the DEI programs, the Critical Race Theory roundtables, the transgender theater, the LGBTQ+ forums and the insane studies that you the taxpayers have funded without recourse to even give a complaint for decades. Starve this nonsense of funding and you will starve the objectives and the planning of the Deep State bureaucracy that thinks it will outlive the best purposes and purest motives of any elected government because it has always managed to do so.
Not anymore.