Op-Ed: Jessica Anderson: Donald Trump’s DOGE reforms deliver for the America First agenda

Imagine if the country’s largest and most successful companies stopped performing audits and ignored their shareholders. Eventually, these companies would see their performance and profits decline, and they would ultimately fail.

In corporate America, waste, fraud, and abuse are crimes — but in government, they’re just what the American people are expected to tolerate. Bloated bureaucracy, wasteful spending, and misaligned priorities have become the norm for a government that should exist to serve the people.

President Donald Trump recognized the gross misalignment between what the government actually does and what it should be doing, and pledged during his campaign to bring accountability back to the federal government and end waste, fraud, and abuse in our system.

President Trump has wasted no time in following through on this promise with a two-pronged approach.

First, his administration has addressed the policies that are completely misaligned with American interests and values. Just a month out from taking office, President Trump has empowered DOGE to help expose and stop some of the most egregious abuses of our taxpayer dollars.

Americans have quickly learned that while we spent the last four years struggling with inflation, the federal government was using our taxpayer dollars as a slush fund by agencies like USAID to bankroll a transgender opera in Colombia, a DEI musical in Ireland, and allegedly even an al Qaeda terrorist’s college tuition. This is not to mention the millions of dollars that have been funneled to house illegal migrants in luxury hotels in New York City while North Carolinians were forced to live in tents following Hurricane Helene’s devastation throughout the southeast.

Though the Biden administration deserves a lot of the blame for these failures, the gross misprioritization of our taxpayer dollars and government resources did not happen overnight. In fact, these failures are largely the product of decades of over spending and broken processes that have allowed the federal government and its unelected bureaucrats to become unaccountable to the American people.

This is exactly why the second piece of President Trump’s approach deals with process.

President Trump knows how bloated bureaucracy and cumbersome interagency processes can get in the way of his agenda, so he’s acting quickly to make cuts and ensure the government runs more efficiently. When I ran the legislative review division at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during President Trump’s first administration, I saw firsthand how it would take three or four days just to get edits from other agencies on straightforward items like a congressional testimony or a statement of policy (SAP). Bigger items like budget cuts or eliminating regulations could take weeks of policy meetings, not because there wasn’t a plan, but because the agencies weren’t set up to process things quickly. In fact, sometimes it felt like they were set up to slow roll the president’s agenda.

President Trump’s immediate actions to downsize the federal government’s workforce with buyouts and cuts are key to creating lasting change in Washington. Not only will cuts have the immediate benefit of making government more efficient, but they will also root out deep state, unelected bureaucrats who use their government positions to drive a Left-wing political agenda.

We have already seen that our government can do a lot more with a lot less. Downsizing the government and rooting out bad actors is an important piece, but we also must make sure we are replacing Left-wing bureaucrats with common sense Americans. Just as Democrats spent decades filling government jobs with far-left ideologues who started out in political positions and then “burrowed in” to career roles, conservatives must become permanent fixtures in these key career positions. Only then can we have lasting reform, regardless of who is president next.

President Trump exposed the mess of our federal government in a matter of weeks, which is exactly what he was elected to do. Months before the election, President Trump and Elon Musk were already publicly talking about an overhaul of the federal government, so it’s no surprise that a recent poll showed 70 percent of Americans believe Trump is doing “what he promised” during the campaign. And, a recent focus group of Arizona swing voters earned the President high marks for his actions since taking office. This coupled with high second-term approval ratings for the president are proof that Americans support his actions to downsize government.

The overwhelming popularity of government cuts and reform should signal to Democrats that this is a bipartisan issue that resonates with Americans of all political backgrounds and affiliations. Instead, unable to think beyond the beltway, Democrats are resorting to unhinged demonstrations and screaming fits at government buildings as they defend the outrageous and nonsensical programs that have been funded by USAID and other agencies. Yet another example of why they lost so dramatically this past November.

There’s no doubt President Trump, DOGE, and Republicans are off to a strong start in 2025. Reforming our government and fixing the broken processes is a complicated task, but President Trump has built the coalition and team needed to accomplish this goal. The American people are behind him, and the Golden Age has just begun.

Jessica Anderson is President of the Sentinel Action Fund.