“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.” This quote is generally attributed to U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois), who died in 1969. To account for inflation over the decades, today we’d have to say “Eight billion here, eight billion there …"

And now that President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed up by Elon Musk, claims to have cut $65 billion in useless federal spending, we’re arguably talking about real money. Keep in mind, though, two things. First, for all the protesting and gnashing of teeth that DOGE’s contract cancellations and clawbacks have inspired, $65 billion isn’t even one percent of current federal spending. Second, thank goodness, DOGE has only gotten started: more cuts are sure to come as President Trump has called for Musk to be more aggressive.

Thus far, DOGE has targeted what’s best described as “low-hanging fruit”—the stuff that’s easy to pick. Without respect to dollar amounts or agencies involved, here’s a short list of contracts and grants that DOGE has so far had a hand in canceling:

• Central American gender-assessment consultant services
• Brazil forest and gender consultant services
• Women and forest carbon initiative mentorship program
• Training teachers to “help students understand/interrogate the complex histories involved in oppression, and help students recognize areas of privilege and power on an individual and collective basis”
• Empowering LGBTQIA+ refugees in Greece
• DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility) program and project management support services
• Grant to Climate Justice Alliance, which claims “climate justice travels through a Free Palestine”
• Professional learning around critical race theory and racial literacy
• Equity assessments of existing program policies
• Increasing DEIA programming for integrated pest management

These programs individually represent expenditures ranging from thousands of dollars to many millions. More could be listed that all have something in common with the bulk of DOGE’s cuts so far: these contracts and grants are designed to spread and reinforce leftist values.

For all the talk coming out of the Trump Administration and DOGE about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, so far it’s been about much more than that. If you took your car to a mechanic and he set about to damage fuel lines, pour sand into the engine, and puncture tires, you wouldn’t call that mere waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s active harm.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is failing to add value. The spending DOGE has eliminated funded efforts to subtract value by at least distracting agencies from their core missions. But even worse, the contracts and grants listed above would have actively undermined values (e.g., meritocracy) and industries (e.g., energy) that have made our historically high standards of prosperity possible.

How the money is spent is separate and apart from the amount of money that the federal government is spending, which last fiscal year amounted to over $6.7 trillion, nearly a quarter of the nation’s GDP. Last year’s federal deficit added another $1.8 trillion to the federal debt, which now amounts to a staggering $37 trillion ($107,000 per citizen), meaning the federal government owes nearly eight times as much as it collects on a yearly basis.

With deficits running a third the size of current revenues, debt so high that it’s nearly impossible to imagine it will ever be paid back, and spending dominating so much of our economy, Trump and DOGE can only be the beginning. Congress has to get directly involved because there’s only so much a president can do on his own to reduce spending.

One reason congressional involvement is necessary concerns the two biggest-spending departments in the federal government: Health & Human Services and the Social Security Administration. Together, these two agencies spent $3.2 trillion in 2024, or 48 percent of all federal spending. It seems unreasonable to believe federal spending can be reduced by more than 10 percent (necessary to reach historical levels relative to GDP) without touching nearly half of the spending.

The federal government’s fiscal health is “going to impact all of us in this room, regardless of party and whether you like me or not,” U.S. Congressman Kevin Hern recently said at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Glenpool. “We’ve got to find a way to pay for it and get our fiscal house in order.” Unfazed by some of the backlash against Elon Musk, Hern later told reporters: “We’re moving forward with the cuts.”

To get where President Trump appears to want to go, we need more lawmakers like that with a positive vision of the American people, one that sees us as determined, innovative, productive, and action-oriented citizens who only need the government to provide basics. The American people have stepped up before, and will undoubtedly do so again, if only Congress will let us.