DOGE, Corporate Welfare, and What is Waste

$1.4 Billion per year are lost to corporate tax loopholes, corporate welfare, and tax subsidies.

According to the Cato Institute, a Libertarian policy research organization, there exist approximately $1.4 trillion worth of annual tax loopholes, corporate welfare, and other special-interest tax subsidies. These are "legal" methods for corporations to pay no

taxes, pay drastically reduced taxes on their billions and billions of dollars of profits each year, or actually receive taxpayer money. If the purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is truly to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, why has DOGE, Elon Musk, and President Trump so far ignored these loopholes, corporate welfare, and subsidies?

No one sensible would deny that politicians on both sides of the aisle are beholden to corporations. The larger the company, the more sway they have over our senators, representatives, and anyone who wants any chance of landing in the White House. This perennial goblin was turned into a kraken thanks to the outcome of a case that went before the Supreme Court in 2007 known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In a nutshell, the outcome of this case was a ruling that "money equals speech." Dollars, those of a corporation, could be spent in any amount on politics if they were not spent directly to the candidate's campaign or party. The underlying principle in the ruling was that a corporation had the same rights as a person and that to limit theirs pending to organizations such as "Super PACs," was limiting their free speech, denying these entities their constitutional rights. As such, nothing short of a constitutional amendment could ever rein in the overwhelming influence of wealth, particularly corporate wealth.

Currently, the only elected official even tangentially connected with DOGE is the President, himself. Corporate tax loopholes aren't the current mission of DOGE in large part because Musk, the individual who is in charge of DOGE (though, as reported on 2/18, the White House stated in a court filing that he isn't), is one of the largest benefactors of those loopholes. Can you see where I'm going here?

Questions have been asked as to why only Democrats are upset with what DOGE is doing. As with the vast majority of issues, attitude toward falls along party lines. Republicans who want to be re-elected know that contradicting anything from President Trump is tantamount to political suicide. As for the other side, I will only speak for myself: It's not this nebulous ridding of waste and fraud that is bothersome, in concept. It's more complicated than that.

The places where there should be concerns are twofold. First, the method being used contradicts Constitutional law. At this stage of the game, anything that goes against Constitutional law (without the prescribed method for doing such) is a very bad idea. That is, to use the cliché, a very slippery slope. One "smaller" breeches are let to slide, it makes the next much easier. Further, the idea that there is zero oversight on the process is truly worrisome, and should be for everyone. If the actions of DOGE were "amazingly transparent," as Musk has claimed, then let there be other eyes on the day-to-day workings other than a team of computer hackers, Musk, and whatever other recent appointees are working behind closed doors.

Aside from the dubious information that has been coming out (mostly on Musk's X feed and that of DOGE, itself), there are serious questions to be answered regarding what are considered "wasteful expenditures," who is making those decisions, and how much information is or isn't being released. When asked about Musk's obvious conflict of interests because of his government contracts and the investigations that were pending regarding his companies, the WH press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, stated that, when Mr. Musk identifies a potential conflict of interest, he will recuse himself from that particular item. An individual self-policing in such a manner is, historically, one of the main things that courts would identify as a conflict of interest!

As for the culpability of each party, there really is none to be had for either side. Either the money was being spent by the letter of whatever spending bill (law) was passed and it just doesn't please those in power, or it was being mishandled after the fact by someone along the food chain. Either way, a sitting congressperson on either side of the aisle will either say that the letter of the law was not followed or that they were unaware of the impropriety of one or another bureaucrat.

The details notwithstanding, any claim of purpose being to trim waste that doesn't begin with tax loopholes for corporations that are recording record profits year after year, is a false claim at best.