In his address to Congress on Tuesday, President Donald Trump championed his executive actions, taking time to applaud the efforts of the new Department of Government Efficiency and its head, Elon Musk — the unelected bureaucrat determined to oust the government’s unelected bureaucrats. The president cited the agency’s detections of government waste and grossly mischaracterized initiatives funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Trump’s message was clear: in a government plagued by wasteful expenditure, there is no room for equity. As a public policy student, this is antithetical to one of the main concepts I’ve been taught.
Throughout my coursework, a resounding theme is that equity and efficiency are in tension — the most efficient outcomes are rarely met with fair distributions. With this comes an essential tradeoff to be considered: do policymakers pursue the policies that maximize financial benefit or work to address their gaps in outcomes among different groups?
In this administration, the efficiency versus equity tradeoff is out of the question; it seems the objective of the federal government is to purge anything that doesn’t maximize efficiency, raising alarms for those who recognize the much-needed efforts to address inequality through redistribution of funds and resources.
As the president listed off government initiatives targeted by DOGE cuts, efforts for equity were painted as a circus act. If Trump’s claims sounded ridiculous at face value, it’s because they are — they’re framed in a way to make the public scoff at supposedly wasteful, outlandish expenditures.
But when you peel back the layers, Trump’s mention of “male circumcision in Mozambique” is a deceiving description of an HIV campaign that has reported a 60 percent reduction in transmission of the disease. The claim of “free housing and cars for illegal aliens” is actually referring to funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, largely directed to refugees who have been granted legal status in the United States, not undocumented immigrants.
There is plenty to be said about waste in the federal government. Taxpayers bear the burden of irresponsible spending and, as a genuine stakeholder in these actions, have every reason to be concerned about where their money is going. However, scapegoating equity initiatives puts the brunt of the blame on agencies that are not the primary sources of overspending.
The average listener to the congressional address, with no fact-checking, would be led to believe that the largest source of government waste is USAID or the Department of Education. Yet, the largest portion of discretionary spending, the Department of Defense, has remained untouched by DOGE.
Not only does the administration’s absolute priority of efficiency write off necessary attempts to address unequal distribution of outcomes, but it further maliciously shapes the public consciousness of terms like “equity” and “DEI.”
