The Steinway and the meat inspector
DOGE walked past the lobster money on its way to fire the meat inspectors. It never asked the people who knew where the money was.
By Cheryl Kelley
Every September, my mother packed a suitcase for the federal budget.
She came to stay with my son so my husband and I could work past dark. I was deputy budget director at AmeriCorps. He was budget director for the FAA's NextGen program. Two agencies, one babysitter, and the same deadline: September 30, the last day of the federal fiscal year.
Here is some of what that deadline bought the Pentagon in the final 30 days of fiscal 2025:
$6.9 million in lobster tail
$2 million in Alaskan king crab
$139,224 in doughnuts
$12,540 in three-tiered fruit-basket stands
A $98,329 Steinway grand piano
The month's total was $93.4 billion, a record. It was set in the same year DOGE promised to cut government to the bone.
Some of that spending was surely legitimate. Troops eat, and military bands play pianos. But spending at that pace, in that one month, every year, is not an accident. It's a habit. And habits have causes.
DOGE never looked for the cause. It promised to find $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $150 billion, and finally claimed $215 billion.
Meanwhile, the government paid people to leave, then paid again to replace them. USDA food-safety inspectors walked out the door while the agency advertised for their replacements in 54 cities. Over the same period, consumer complaints about meat, poultry and eggs rose nearly 40 percent, to a 12-year high.
DOGE walked past the lobster money on its way to fire the meat inspectors. It could have asked us where the money was. We knew, because we spent our careers putting it there.
The rule nobody wrote down
The rule isn't in any law, regulation or handbook. It's in performance reviews.
The CFOs and budget officers I've worked with say they, and nearly everyone they knew in federal finance, carried the same target in their annual plan: spend down your appropriation, often to within 1 or 2 percent, by September 30. Miss it, and you fail that part of your review. Keep missing it, and you can lose a promotion, or eventually your job.
I went looking for an official source. There isn't one. The government's guides to writing performance plans don't mention it. The Federal Highway Administration's guide even lists "dollar savings to the Government" as a mark of good work. The target is written office by office, into plans no database collects. No auditor flags the money it moves, because every dollar is spent legally and on time.
That's why reform keeps missing. For decades, reformers have blamed "use it or lose it" and proposed letting agencies carry unspent money into the next year. It helps. When the Justice Department got that authority for IT, only 3.4 percent of its IT spending landed in the year's final week, against 12.1 percent governmentwide. Fewer panic-bought pianos. But money that rolls over still gets spent. That's better spending, not savings.
The savings sit one level down, in the review. Reverse the target. Reward the manager who returns money, not the one who burns it. A small group of retired and current federal finance officials, including me, estimates that could bring back as much as $200 billion a year. That's a target to be tested, not a final score. But no one outside the system would have known where to look.
Our plan sends every returned dollar to Social Security. Federal workers have mothers, too. Tell a nuclear scientist and an HR clerk that what they save will shore up their mother's check, and watch what they find.
Eight laws, zero repeals
The same is true of paperwork. Since 1993, Congress has passed eight accountability laws and repealed none. Each built its own machinery: timekeeping codes that exist only to feed reports, parallel budget systems that re-sort money the financial systems already track, and the same re-sorting pushed onto every grant recipient.
Replace the stack with one report that reads directly from the systems agencies already run. Counting grant overhead, we estimate savings of up to $200 billion a year. Again, that's a number for the Congressional Budget Office to score. It comes from the people who fill out the forms.
When rivals become enemies
America was built to run on creative tension. Madison designed the Constitution so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition": Congress against the president, the states against Washington, each side checking the other.
That design assumes rivals who still share a room. Tension produces good decisions only when people argue and then listen. Somewhere along the way, our rivals became enemies. You can see it in a Congress that can't pass a budget on time, and at Thanksgiving tables where families no longer talk politics.
You could see it in Washington this past year, too. The government treated its own workforce as the enemy. Elon Musk waved a literal chainsaw onstage at CPAC.
A room full of enemies produces no better government than a room full of people who agree on everything. One gets you sabotage. The other gets you groupthink. The best answers come from the uncomfortable middle, where people disagree and keep talking.
You don't find a rule buried in a performance plan by firing the people who carried it. You find it by asking them.
A scalpel, not a chainsaw
That is the idea behind the Scalpel Act. It's a set of savings categories and targets written by federal finance people, meant to be argued over, scored by the CBO and fixed where it's wrong.
I helped write it, and I advise the campaign of Kelly Kirschner, a Democrat and former mayor of Sarasota running on Florida's Gulf Coast, who has adopted it. He has pledged to bring civil servants to the table to write the bill. Former five-term Republican Congressman Dan Miller has endorsed him, and so has Republican County Commissioner George Kruse.
An idea crosses the aisle when people are willing to listen across it.
I'm retired now. My son is a senior in high school, and my mother doesn't pack that suitcase anymore. But on September 30, in budget offices across Washington, the lights burned late again. Somebody's mother was babysitting so somebody's daughter could spend money nobody needed, to pass a review nobody wrote down.
Someone should ask her why. She would tell you.
Cheryl Kelley is a retired federal budget official who held budget leadership roles at AmeriCorps, the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She helped write the Scalpel Act and advises the Kirschner campaign.