Ted Morgan is a retired political science professor living in Tamworth.

On Feb. 11, without providing any evidence, President Donald Trump declared that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was in the process of eliminating “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government. This is an old but politically persuasive claim Republicans and their Heritage Foundation allies have made for decades.

I mean, after all, who is in favor of “waste, fraud and abuse” in government?

The problem is, as some have no doubt realized, that DOGE is not about waste and inefficiency in government. It’s the culmination of a very long-standing strategy to get rid of a federal government that can provide help to a wide variety of people in need, limit the worst excesses of the private sector and shore up stressed local communities, among other good causes that the private sector is notoriously unable to achieve.

Some of you may remember Ronald Reagan’s quip, “Government is not the solution; government is the problem.” Well, we’ve lived 45 years under that hoariest of myths, and most Americans have paid a heavy price for it.

How does the Trump Administration and its hatchet man, Elon Musk, fit into this?

Most obviously through their massive layoffs of federal employees and by eliminating or slashing federal program after federal program. The effects of DOGE will be felt by a vast majority of non-wealthy Americans: veterans, workers, children, people who are sick or need health care, the elderly, people with low to modest incomes, people victimized by the rapidly increasing environmental disasters, local communities — the list goes on and on.

In reality, DOGE has two aims: The first is to make government so inept that more and more people will wonder why they’re paying taxes for a seemingly incompetent government. That would fit nicely with the host of misfits and incompetents Trump has appointed to head various federal departments.

But the other clear objective is that these federal budget cuts will provide cover for the next huge tax cut Republicans are planning for wealthy Americans. As in the past, they’ll likely give people in the lower 70-80% of income levels an extremely modest tax cut, but the real beneficiaries will be the wealthiest Americans. And, as in the past, the tax cuts will be ‘justified’ by the myth that cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations will generate economic growth.

Unfortunately, we’ve been here before. The Reagan administration slashed taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, thereby creating a huge federal deficit, yet the tax cuts failed to generate significant job growth. Instead, they ushered in the era of enormous inequality that is still with us. Most Americans saw no increase in their incomes. The George W. Bush pro-rich tax cuts had similar effects, as did the huge pro-rich tax cuts of the first Trump administration.

One result is that wages for most Americans have been largely stagnant for fifty years. There is no economic growth magic in these kinds of tax cuts.

But “tax cuts” sound good to people who struggle to make ends meet. The problem isn’t the level of federal taxes, it’s the inequality in who bears the burden of those taxes.

Like many things in the U.S., taxes impose the heaviest burdens on those with modest incomes. This wasn’t always the case, of course. From the 1940s to mid-1960 the richest Americans were taxed at a 91% rate on taxable income. Today, thanks to those tax cuts, their rate is 37%. Similarly, the capital gains tax, corporate taxes and estate taxes have all been significantly reduced, benefitting you know who.

Thanks to these tax cuts, economic inequality has soared. We have witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest families in America — one reason we hear so much about billionaires these days. In fact, a recent study published in the New York Times, reported that, for the first time, billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working class Americans.

Beyond the gross unfairness of this system, the truly ominous outcome is what this means for “our” government. Thanks to Republican-appointed Supreme Court majorities, campaign contributions have been classified as “speech,” meaning that restricting campaign contributions violates the First Amendment, no matter what this does to democracy. And so, in 2024, 150 billionaires contributed a total of $1.9 billion to political campaigns.

In brief, we have government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

If you feel the government has passed you by, welcome to the majority of Americans who don’t really have much of a voice in our political system. That, rather than alleged “waste, fraud and abuse,” is what is wrong with our government.