The news cycle has been incredibly busy over the last month, but I want to go back a little over a month to the crisis in California. The state had done little to properly prepare for any sort of wildfire crisis. One of the biggest contributing factors was the lack of brush clearing in California's forested areas. The underbrush was left to grow out of control, and outside groups with outsized influence on the government actually fought to allow it to grow even bigger and become a bigger threat to citizens.

Soon, it was so big that a single spark allowed it to become the kindling that tore down whole cities and left people's lives in ruins. It was mismanagement at its finest, and it serves as a metaphor for what we're seeing in Washington D.C. today. Over the course of a week, we have seen dozens of stories in the press about the work Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE are putting into dismantling an overgrown and independently-acting federal bureaucracy. At times, each piece seems more unhinged than the last. 

The press is doing a lot to amplify the message from the bureaucrat class: These interlopers have no idea what they are doing, and it's going to hurt our agencies! 

But the agencies have grown out of control. They run, largely unchecked by either the executive or the legislative branches, and they accumulate power at a pace that at times seems to put them above the government structure that was established by the Constitution. The fault lay with both the executive and legislative branches, for sure - the former created it and the latter ceded its power to it. But, thankfully, the Supreme Court has spent the last two years undoing a lot of that by targeting the powers the bureaucracy has assumed.

All of this brings us to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE. 

The team-up between Trump and Musk is an odd one, but it makes sense in a way. One is a president whose first term was undermined by the bureaucracy he now fights to dismantle. The other is a businessman who grew tired of social media censorship. Both are creatures of the corporate business world who thrive on takeovers and rapid restructuring. But the federal government is not the same as a corporate business, and the out-of-control bureaucracy is not packing up its desk and going home quietly.

This is why we're seeing dozens of pieces of journalism attacking DOGE, Musk, Trump, and the people working with them to cull the overgrowth that is the bureaucracy. These are the panicked screeches of a class of people who long thought themselves above scrutiny. They have had the power of the Chevron deference, public sector unions, burdensome employment requirements, and no one to really challenge them. That has changed now, and they have no idea how privileged they sound when they start screaming about having to return to their offices or about having to answer to someone who was actually elected by the people the government is supposed to serve.

The DOGE fight makes the federal government more democratic, not less. It gets rid of unelected people making decisions for you like the worst kind of helicopter parents. It eliminates a group of people who think themselves above the law. It is absolutely proper for Trump to want to tear the bureaucracy apart - look at how much they thwarted him at every pass during his first term.

But Trump is also approaching it smarter. He has a team, the people he has hired behind the scenes are drafting the strategies, and Musk's DOGE is marching out to follow those strategies. The bureaucracy is not and should not be exempt from answering to the public. The executive branch reining it in is a great start. My hope is that the Republican-help Congress will codify the changes and take its own power back.