By John Geraci
Guest Editorial
‘Government is like an infant: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.’
Ronald Reagan may have said that decades ago, but it’s hard to imagine a more fitting description of our modern federal government. The only difference now is that the baby has grown into a bloated, unruly teenager with an unlimited credit card and no curfew. And thanks to a recent audit—brought to you by the unlikely duo of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk’s handpicked team of analysts—we’re finally getting a peek at just how much junk food this government has been gorging on.
Of course, the real scandal here isn’t the billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and ‘oops, we lost track of that’ spending. No, the real outrage, at least according to the ever-reliable Democratic outrage machine, is the process of the audit itself. How dare we question where our tax dollars are going? How dare we put oversight above the sacred art of blank-check writing? According to them, this is nothing but a cynical attack on government institutions, a right-wing fever dream cooked up by libertarian tech bros who don’t appreciate the delicate ballet of bureaucratic inefficiency.
But let’s not pretend the Republicans are innocent in this mess either. For every Democratic hand wringing over ‘partisan audits,’ there’s a GOP politician screaming about government waste while secretly making sure their pet projects stay buried in the budget. The entire system is a well-rehearsed Broadway show: Act I, the outrage over spending; Act II, the quiet approval of bloated budgets; Act III, the triumphant announcement that absolutely nothing will change.
The truth is, this is not a left vs. right issue. This is about a political system that has been hijacked by big money and special interests. Lobbyists write the legislation, corporations dictate policy, and the American taxpayer gets the privilege of footing the bill for all of it. Every election cycle, politicians promise reform, and every election cycle, those promises get funneled straight into the pockets of their biggest donors.
So, let’s be clear: if we actually want to stop this financial circus, we have to start with the root of the problem—money in politics. Until we sever the golden pipeline between corporate interests and our elected officials, we will continue to see the same performative outrage, the same wasteful spending, and the same tired excuses.
The problem isn’t that an audit is happening—the problem is that it took a billionaire meme-lord and a fictional government agency named after a cryptocurrency to make it happen. And if that doesn’t perfectly sum up the state of our democracy, I don’t know what does.
