The Democrats’ reaction to the Department of Government Efficiency’s necessary mission might seem a bit excessive. But it is understandable. Their taxpayer-funded slush fund has been exposed.

Rather than joining with Elon Musk, who is leading DOGE to root out federal waste and fraud, and improve the transparency of the murky federal leviathan, the Democrats are attacking him. At a rally a week ago outside the Capitol, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, chanted “Elon Musk must go” along with a rabble that seems eager to do harm to the South African billionaire.

There have been similar protests in other cities in which baying mobs demand that Musk be deported, sexually violated, even launched to Mars.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants the Democrats to find a way to “fire” Musk. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer has groused on X that “an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” surely unaware that he’s implying that the permanent bureaucracy is a separate, unaccountable, untouchable and unconstitutional branch of the government. Harpy pundits swear Musk is carrying out a coup and is a threat to democracy, a frivolous slogan that the political left cannot resist using.

Other complaints against the DOGE operation included grousing that Musk’s team has access to sensitive Treasury data and is holding back important federal programs.

But the real reason the Democrats are so upset is because their racket at the U.S. Agency for International Aid has been exposed, and they fear it’s just the first of many similar duplicitous schemes throughout the government that will be uncovered. They’ve even been able to convince their core voters that Musk and his team, merely doing the job they were asked to do by the duly elected president, are pure evil that must be stopped.

What has to be stopped, though, is the Democrats’ five-star gravy train that funds, as described by Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute, “deep-state operations, censorship, and NGO graft on a scale never before seen.” In this shell game, taxpayers’ dollars are funneled “through multiple layers, with various entities handling and redistributing it” to the right groups and people who back those who are directing the funds. It’s a virtuous rather than vicious cycle – or virtuous at least to its participants who reap the benefits.

There have been so many ways of describing the manipulations and maneuverings but none we’ve seen so far pierce quite so accurately and deeply as does the description from former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, who explains “why Democrats are so angry” so clearly that even a New York Times or Washington Post reporter could understand.

“For years, they’ve been getting paid with your money, a billion dollars a week of American tax dollars, and laughing at you as the United States faces a fiscal deficit and as you’ve pinched your pennies hoping to survive the Democrat Party’s 20% inflation, as their leftist allies were living large,” writes Kass. “They’ve been discovered. We see the hate and madness in their eyes directed at us for seeing the other side of their face. Now they’re screaming like scalded cats in a sack.”

Law professor and the Instapundit himself Glenn Reynolds also lays it out with clarity.

“With trillions of dollars passing through the federal government every year, there are a lot of opportunities for crooks and financial predators to siphon some off,” says Reynolds. “A cynic might even speculate that the people screaming the loudest about DOGE’s audits are the people most invested in the fraud.”

It really doesn’t take a cynic, though. A fair-minded person would see the same thing.

Which is why we’re where we are today, with Democrats re-enacting right in front of us Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” doing their best to direct attention away from their own misdeeds.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board