The Trump administration is only four weeks old, and the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already revealed numerous examples of government waste, with each item seemingly more shocking than the last. For many ordinary Americans, the natural reaction to such revelations is horror, followed by a series of unanswered questions: How did this happen? Who is to blame? And why have these problems gone unaddressed for so long?

Although there’s plenty of blame to go around, blaming Congress — the usual punching bag when executive agencies rewrite policy without pushback — is inappropriate here because the waste and errors uncovered by DOGE are not at the policy level but at the detail level. No, much of the blame must fall upon the executive agencies themselves.

Take the recent revelation that the Treasury Department’s computer system made it optional to fill in a code linking a payment with a budget line item for approximately $4.7 trillion in payments (over an unspecified period… are we talking about one year or 20?). Certainly such granular details of a payment system are best left to agencies, not Congress.

But such an oversight can cause real financial headaches. Because this field was optional, it “was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced. Thus, not even the Treasury Department can explain to auditors why this money was spent.

Contrast this apparent sloppiness in the Treasury Department with the apparent pride its veteran employees took in their work. “The fiscal service performs some of the most vital functions in government,” declared senior Treasury bureaucrat David Lebryk, who announced his retirement after he briefly denied DOGE access to the payment system, during a short-lived stint as acting secretary. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”

Lebryk was the type of civil servant who receives glowing reviews from his bosses. “For many years, Dave Lebryk’s leadership has helped to make our payment systems reliable and trusted at home and abroad,” said Jacob Lew, a former Treasury Secretary during the Obama administration.

I agree with Lebryk that the government paying its bills correctly is “exceptionally important.” But I disagree with Lew, when he described as “reliable” a payment system that can’t account for up to $4.7 trillion.

Not that this was a particularly difficult fix for the Treasury Department. “As of Saturday,” DOGE continued, “this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.” Just change a bit of code, and — presto! — the problem disappeared. Was that so hard?

Why didn’t the Treasury Department correct this oversight before? Were they waiting on Congress to tell them to fix it (or, more realistically, waiting on Congress to ask about it)? Did they never review their own protocols and policies? How could they not know this was a problem?

The truth is, what DOGE found — oodles of improper payments — is not a new revelation. “Improper payments — those that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount — have consistently been a government-wide issue. Since fiscal year 2003, cumulative improper payment estimates by executive branch agencies have totaled about $2.7 trillion,” wrote the Government Accountability Office in March 2024. “GAO has found that these payments represent a material deficiency or weakness in internal controls. Specifically, GAO has noted that the federal government is unable to determine the full extent of its improper payments or to reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.”

That sounds like a big problem; someone should get on that. Did bureaucrats think this meant “someone else,” or did the thought never occur to them at all?

I don’t mean to be overly harsh towards career employees of the executive branch, but I simply cannot conceive of any more innocent explanations. If I were part of a team that was critical to the operations of the freest, most powerful government on earth, then I would urgently correct any errors that came to my attention — or at least alert my superiors to them. If I failed to address these errors, I don’t know how I could take as much pride in my performance as these civil servants evidently do.

Consider another recent example, the announcement that the Social Security database contained more than 10 million Americans over the age of 120, who were marked as living. This is impossible, of course. Early in human history, the Lord proclaimed, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years” (Genesis 6:3). As of October 2024, the oldest living American is Naomi Whitehead, age 114, and the oldest living person on earth was 116.

But while members of Congress do not readily cross-reference the Social Security database against death reports, surely someone in the Social Security Administration (SSA) should have that job. Even if no one has that job, surely it should raise some red flags when the intrepid civil servants at the SSA go to disburse a payment to a person born during the McKinley administration.

DOGE’s investigation has provided a few answers but provoked far more questions, such as the ones I’ve asked here. American taxpayers will ask these questions, and they deserve to know the answers.

At this point, it’s still possible that there are reasonable explanations for some of these questions (poor agency structuring resulting in broken communications, things that slipped through the cracks, lack of modernization, etc.) — though even such answers reveal a broken bureaucratic underbelly betraying their brazen braggadocio.

However, the longer these questions remain unanswered, the more Americans will suspect — rightly or wrongly — that the answer involves fraud, grift, or political favors. They are also likely to suspect — rightly or wrongly — that the public officials, civil servants, labor unions, activists, and media opposing DOGE’s effort to root out corruption are doing so because they have something to hide.

Something stinks in Washington, and DOGE has only begun to uncover the symptoms. When there’s a dead mouse in the wall, those blaming the pest control guy working to remove it are only pointing a finger at themselves.