There is an important lesson that President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) has to teach elected bodies all over the country. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson few have mentioned explicitly.

If you’ve asked this question of yourself, you’ve already understood the lesson. The question is: Why wasn’t there already an agency like DOGE?

Why did it take an executive order from the president to have someone take a deep dive into how federal agencies spend their money?

Given the fact that there is a Government Accountability Office (GAO) answerable to Congress, how is it that DOGE is finding so many instances of egregious waste of federal funds? (I would say taxpayer money, but so much is borrowed.)

One such example is from a small agency called the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Funded at about $55 million a year—not a lot of money by federal standards—it’s not clear to me what USIP’s purpose is. This “peace” agency has an armory full of weapons and spent a good deal of money on private jet travel. When DOGE came knocking, the agency accountant deleted a terabyte of accounting data (since recovered), a clear case of obstruction. Every year, leftover funds were hidden by sweeping them into a private bank account.

The Inter-American Foundation, an agency created to hand out grants and funded at $50 million a year, spends almost half the money (42%) on management and travel. Meanwhile, the Small Business Administration (SBA) has given $330 million in loans to people whose birth dates, according to SBA records, would make the loan recipients over 120 years old. That might be fraud, or it might be an egregious lack of attention to detail. Either way, it’s not good.

This happened because past presidential administrations, and more importantly, the United States Congress, just didn’t care.

Most elected bodies are focused on passing laws, be they ordinances at the local level or statutes at the state and federal levels. Most state legislatures and the federal Congress are “full time” legislatures, meaning they have a legislative session every year. Members of these legislatures are constantly engaged in law-making, along with fundraising and constituent service. They haven’t the time (by their calculation) and certainly not the inclination to exercise true oversight of the government for which they budget. Then, of course, there are members of such legislative bodies who constantly engage in activities for which the office isn’t really intended, like city councils passing resolutions condemning or recommending some sort of federal policy unrelated to city issues.

DOGE discovered that $4 billion of U.S. Department of Education funds intended for COVID relief of some sort were being used to rent Caesar’s Palace for big parties. Stadiums were rented as well. When DOGE started asking for receipts as a condition for receiving funds, funding requests completely ceased. Obviously, accountability as basic as demanding a receipt was enough to stop pure waste and abuse of the funds. This abuse was discovered when DOGE investigators found that Treasury issues payments without requiring any sort of budget code to indicate what the payment was for or that it was authorized, a basic piece of information and accountability for ease of audits.

Basic controls aren’t in place because hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress didn’t care to make sure they were in place. They didn’t care to employ anyone truly independent to review such controls. But, there’s another issue involved.

Every Oklahoma state lawmaker should view the all-too-familiar mantra that schools are underfunded with a very high degree of skepticism.

Why is the federal government involved in funding what it funds? Why are there more than 400 agencies today when there were only four at the nation’s founding? With so much money being bandied about, and so many agencies given discretion to spend it, how possible is it to truly get a handle on how it’s spent?

The same questions could be asked at any level of government, and especially at the state level. The public education example particularly comes to mind given the course of my own career. For almost 10 years in Texas, I virtually swam in all aspects of education policy. In Oklahoma, I did research on education spending and effectiveness, and even researched methods to some degree. My wife has taught full-time in public schools as well.

After years of research into public education and observing how regularly the system’s lobbyists lied to state legislators about the state of funding that I’d researched, I came to the conclusion that the system would willingly spend a million dollars to justify grabbing one more dime from taxpayers. I mean that literally. And Elon Musk’s DOGE provides proof. It’s a lesson for every state legislature in the country, and every legislator should view the all-too-familiar mantra that schools are underfunded with a very high degree of skepticism. And every state legislator should remember that their job includes exercising some hard-nosed oversight.

Basic controls aren’t in place because hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress didn’t care to make sure they were in place.

Why are there more than 400 agencies today when there were only four at the nation’s founding?