W.J. Astore

You can’t do a wrong thing the right way

During World War II, the Nazi system of extermination camps was fairly efficient. Relatively small death camps like Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killed an astonishing number of people, more than 1.6 million and nearly all Jews, quickly and efficiently. If there were a Nazi DOGE, I suppose these death camps may have won “efficiency” awards from it. They stripped the incoming victims of all their valuables and then killed virtually all of them. The loot stolen by the SS was then distributed, again fairly efficiently.

Yet, conducting a genocide, a mass murder, a horrendous atrocity, efficiently is nothing to praise. Right?

Today, America doesn’t need a government that wages wars more efficiently around the globe. We don’t need more efficient genocidal nuclear ICBMs. We don’t need more efficient weapons delivery to Israel so that Gaza can be leveled and its people murdered or displaced from their land.

What we need is an effective government that does the right thing. 

The DOGE associated with Elon Musk can’t seem to recognize that you can’t do a wrong thing the right way. If you’re doing a wrong thing, you must stop doing it. Period.

Genocidal nuclear missiles are wrong. Stop building them.

Genocide in Gaza is wrong. Stop supplying Israel with weapons.

Waging war for peace is wrong. Stop doing it.

That said, efficiency does have some relevance. Consider the Pentagon. It has failed seven audits in a row. It is grossly inefficient even as it continues to be ineffective. How do you rein in a vast government bureaucracy that lacks both efficiency and effectiveness?

You don’t do it by rewarding it with more money. But that’s exactly what President Trump, Elon Musk, and Congress are doing. They all seek a trillion dollar war budget. They all want the Pentagon to grow and then grow some more.

If a sprawling bureaucracy is out of control, you must cut its budget in a big way, forcing it to confront its own waste, fraud, abuse, and related forms of corruption. That said, efficiency is again less important than effectiveness. Is the Pentagon effectively defending America? If not, how do you make it more effective?

Pentagon misadventures around the world are making Americans less safe. Incessant warfare is strengthening authoritarianism and militarism in America while weakening democracy and hollowing out infrastructure and finances.

A more effective Pentagon is one that would focus strictly on defending America proper while upholding the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. After achieving that, one could then focus on efficiency. A Pentagon budget cut roughly in half would lead to a more effective defense of America. A much smaller Pentagon budget could then be more easily audited, leading to greater efficiency.

Committing murderous wrongs in an efficient way is nothing to celebrate. Didn’t the Nazis already provide us with the most horrifying example of this?