Musk, Vivek face target-rich environment for vile federal regs and waste

Elon Musk promises that his new Department of Government Efficiency can reveal how to cut federal spending by $2 trillion per year.

Musk and his DOGE partner Vivek Ramaswamy are compiling a list of Uncle Sam’s biggest boondoggles to send to the Trump White House.

It’s a target-rich environment — and if successful, they could do much to free up US industry, boost the economy and improve the quality of life for countless Americans.

President-elect Donald Trump labeled DOGE as “the Manhattan Project of our time,” comparing it to the discovery of the atomic bomb during World War II.

Musk is seeking “super high-IQ” zealots to carry out the charge.  

This is a major role reversal inside the Beltway, since DC’s “best and brightest” have become rich and powerful by pretending that government waste doesn’t exist.

DOGE should start out by targeting federal policies and edicts that directly multiply Americans’ misery.

Federal regulations cost Americans more than $3 trillion a year — more than $20,000 per household, per the National Association of Manufacturers.

Federal and state grants to mass-transit authorities entitle subways to scorn their commuters while fritting away their dollars.

In New York, the MTA spent $250 million on an emergency subway intercom system, but half of all the “emergencies” are prank calls, even as the system does a miserable job of responding to actual emergencies.

Thanks to anti-efficiency Department of Energy regulations, dishwashers don’t clean as well and take twice as long to finish. Ditto for water-saving showers and toilets.

A pending rule for new water heaters will raise costs by almost a $1,000.

The hottest outrage is the Environmental Protection Agency mandate for using only climate-friendly refrigerants in air conditioners it approves. The problem? The new refrigerants are believed to be flammable. “Aside from the fire, Mrs. Lincoln, how do you like your new AC?”

Federal grants for bike lanes are fueling traffic slowdowns and spawning fierce urban clashes. A public workshop on a proposed new network of bike lane in Long Island City. 

Mandates on self-driving cars illustrate how bureaucratic folly is on automatic pilot. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration limits automakers to selling no more than 2,500 steering-wheel- or pedal-free vehicles a year.

Most self-driving vehicles must have steering wheels, even though they’re not needed. That’s as pointless as spending billions to rent office space for government employees who work from home.

Then there are the government’s downright malicious “studies,” like Team Biden’s almost $300 million research on “misinformation,” which often justifies pressure on social-media companies to censor comments Washington dislikes.

America survived hundreds of years without the White House officials intervening to suppress memes that mocked officialdom.

There’s more: On Wednesday, Musk tweeted: “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.”

Absolutely right: The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the nation’s “most powerful and unaccountable regulatory agency,” exists primarily to “terrorize financial institutions,” fumes billionaire Trump donor Marc Andreessen. 

Low-income Americans could suffer from the CFPB’s proposal to restrict digital-payment apps.

Federal grants to curb the “school-to-prison” pipeline for minority students helped spur the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting that left 17 dead. Nikolas Cruz was not expelled from school even after committing numerous assaults and announcing on YouTube: “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”

Conservatives have posted list after list of wasteful federal grants online, with some of the wackiest cases coming from the National Institutes for Health, such as research on whether cocaine makes quails horny. 

But DOGE Target #1 should be abolishing the type of gain-of-function grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that likely spawned the COVID pandemic and left 7 million people dead worldwide.

Musk is correct that the Washington status quo is “antidemocratic” and that an “entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic.” 

But DOGE won’t be a self-driving fix to save the Constitution.

Even the most aggressive crackdown on government waste, fraud and abuse by itself won’t be enough to save all our rights and liberties.

That will require the longest, hardest fight that Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy and their allies can muster in the coming years.

James Bovard’s latest book is “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.”