The Waste DOGE Was Never Meant to Find

For years, Tom Nichols told his readers the same thing: government waste is mostly a myth politicians use to avoid hard choices.

He wasn't alone. The phrase "waste, fraud, and abuse" has been a fixture of American political rhetoric for decades — a crowd-pleasing promise that implies painless savings exist, just waiting to be found. Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic, pushed back on this in 2020 and again when Donald Trump unveiled the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in 2024, calling it a meme dressed up as policy. His logic was simple: if obvious waste were everywhere, someone would have cut it already.

This week, he issued a correction.

A Jet With a Queen Bed, and an Agency That Buys Billboards on Wheels

Three stories, all surfacing within weeks of each other, cracked Nichols's confidence. The first arrived alongside the abrupt exit of Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. NBC News reported that DHS had leased a Boeing 737 — outfitted with a queen bedroom, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen TVs, and a bar — and sought to purchase it for $70 million. Two Gulfstream jets had already been bought for a reported $200 million.

The stated purpose: deportation flights. The problem: the Trump administration has made a point of keeping migrant detention conditions deliberately austere — one facility described by Atlantic reporter Caitlin Dickerson featured "an airless cafeteria with a rancid smell." A DHS source told NBC the deportation explanation was "far-fetched." Even Trump, whose appetite for luxury is well-documented, reportedly found this excessive. The plane became a factor in Noem's reassignment to a newly invented envoy role.

Her departure then exposed a second case. ICE's former No. 2, Madison Sheahan, had spent roughly $2.5 million purchasing a fleet of SUVs wrapped in bold ICE branding and logos. The catch: ICE is a covert operations agency. It relies on unmarked vehicles. The branded fleet is now largely useless, and the agency is trying to offload it. ICE officials reportedly nicknamed Sheahan "fish cop" — a nod to her prior role at Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. A significant portion of the contract, it emerged, went to a prominent Republican donor.

Then came the Pentagon. A watchdog group's analysis of spending from September alone found $98,329 spent on a grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff's residence, nearly $9 million on lobster tail and crab, and $15.1 million on rib-eye steak.

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The Efficiency Agency That Made Things Worse

This is where the story turns genuinely strange. DOGE, the body explicitly created to hunt down exactly this kind of spending, missed all of it — or chose not to look.

Under Elon Musk's leadership, DOGE promised to cut $2 trillion in federal spending. Instead, CNN reported this week that its cuts have weakened the government's capacity to prepare for domestic emergencies, monitor terror threats, defend against cyberattacks, and assist Americans stranded abroad. Federal spending, by most measures, rose during DOGE's watch.

The pattern is hard to ignore. The officials spending freely on jets, branded vehicles, and steak were insulated from scrutiny. The cuts DOGE did make targeted agencies and programs that Trump, Musk, and budget director Russell Vought had political reasons to dismantle. Whether DOGE was incompetent, misdirected, or both, the outcome was the same: the waste it claimed to hunt went untouched.

Meanwhile, the administration announced a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by its own tariffs — government spending to patch a government-made wound. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act included $40 billion in subsidies for fossil-fuel producers, many of them already profitable.

What This Actually Costs

Nichols is careful not to overcorrect. The Pentagon's fiscal year 2025 budget exceeded $2 trillion. A grand piano and some luxury jets are rounding errors at that scale. The uncomfortable truth he spent years defending still holds: closing the federal deficit requires real structural choices — spending cuts to major programs, higher taxes, or both. No amount of waste-hunting changes that math.

But he lands on a different kind of accounting. When government leaders participate in the very behavior they claim to be eliminating, the cost isn't best measured in dollars. It's measured in the erosion of the premise that public money serves public purposes.

For global observers, the episode raises a familiar question in an unfamiliar context. Accountability mechanisms — inspectors general, congressional oversight, press freedom — exist precisely to catch this. When the people running those mechanisms have interests in not looking, the architecture of accountability becomes decoration.