President Donald Trump’s creation of a Department of Government Efficiency on Day One of his second presidency, and delegation of responsibility for its oversight to Elon Musk, has resulted in revelations of extraordinary waste and fiscal irresponsibility not only within aid agencies but within government departments. Among the more astonishing (and infuriating revelations) include the following:

— The United States Agency for International Development reportedly funded the college education of Anwar al-Awlaki, who later had ties to the 9/11 terrorists.

— USAID sent $15 million to the Taliban for condoms — a bizarre decision, since the Taliban has outlawed all contraception.

— The Environmental Protection Agency gave $2 billion to a little organization called “Power Forward Communities,” founded by Georgia Democrat (and election denier) Stacey Abrams. The organization had reported just $100 in income the year before the massive grant.

— Indeed, the EPA was discovered to have wasted tens of billions of dollars in the last months of the Biden administration — which one EPA employee compared in an undercover video to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic” — in an effort to dispose of funds willy-nilly before Trump’s inauguration.

Americans (including Trump) had long suspected that our tax dollars were being misspent, and Trump promised that he would investigate it, expose it and stop it if elected in 2024. Trump’s reelection demonstrates — among other things — that the 77 million Americans who voted for him took that promise seriously.

Indeed, polls being taken now indicate that support for Trump’s and DOGE’s efforts is rising as more information about the dissipation of America’s wealth is revealed to the public. The U.S. Debt Clock has even added a “DOGE Clock,” which is tallying up the wasteful spending that Musk and his DOGE crew have discovered.

But many Democrats and other left-leaners are outraged at the exposure of these unnecessary expenditures rather than at the waste itself.

Americans have been taken aback by these reactions.

First, it’s frankly shocking that anyone wouldn’t care about billions of dollars frittered away without accountability. And the Trump administration isn’t just targeting initiatives loved by the Left; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he wants an 8% spending cut for the Department of Defense annually for the next five years and promised that the department will pass an audit within the next four.

It’s also counterintuitive that millions (billions?)of dollars would be given to illegal aliens here, while citizens who have lost their homes in calamities like the Maui and California fires or the hurricanes that hit the southeast last fall were told that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had run out of money.

It isn’t just the recipients of out-of-control spending and causes of appalling waste that Americans are seeing clearly for the first time; it is also the extent to which our government — Democrats and Republicans alike — does not care about us or our well-being or that of the nation. The deep state and everyone feeding at the trough can be as indignant as they like about the “lack of process” in Musk’s activities or Trump’s brash way of handling the problems he has inherited. It’s clear that outsiders — and only outsiders — can clean up this mess.