"Dave" and DOGE and how not to think about government spending

Accountant Charles Grodin can fix EVERYTHING.

Fiscal discipline can be fun and folksy and so easy anyone could do it! Or something! (Source: Youtube)

First off: I am on record as loving Dave. Have you seen Dave? Go see Dave.

Dave rules. It slaps. It romps. Dave is from the great ‘90s cinematic era when high-quality, silly-but-not-stupid adult comedies ruled the earth.¹

Dave is the story of an everyman named – wait for it – Dave (played by Kevin Kline), who looks a lot like the president (also played by Kevin Kline).

One day, guys from the White House come tell Dave they need him to be the president’s double for a tiny sliver of one night — literally for a walk from a building to a car. Dave says yes, and he has a blast.

The real president, meanwhile steals off to bone one of his aides, Laura Linney (can we talk about this stacked cast?), and has a heart attack mid-coitus. The president slips into a coma. And so the president’s aides, including Frank Langella (stacked. cast.), ask Dave to stick around for a bit longer.

Hilarity and hijinks and also a romance with the first lady, Sigourney Weaver (SWOON), ensue.

Anyway. At a certain point, Dave decides to actually do stuff as president – and specifically, he chooses to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from cabinet departments to save funding for homeless children.

And this, dear readers, is why I am here today. Because as we hear more and more about DOGE and proverbial government waste, fraud, and abuse, I increasingly can’t stop thinking about Dave. This film, while outrageously charming, is a perfect illustration of what I suspect is a popular (but entirely incorrect) way to think about government spending.

Allow me to illustrate with two scenes.

To save the funding for homeless kids, Dave calls in his accountant buddy, Charles Grodin (do they give Nobel Prizes for casting?), for help:

The crotchety accountant thinks the government’s books are a mess! He’d be out of business if he were this sloppy! LOL!

Look. I am not here to defend the US government’s accounting practices, the technicalities of which I know nothing about.

But this kind of thinking is wrong on so many levels.

First off…

[climbs atop soapbox]

The government is not a business. It prints money. It subsidizes mortgages. It lends money to college students. It insures the health of tens of millions of old and poor people. It’s true that, like a business, the government has inflows and outflows of money, and it can’t go into debt forever.

But the government doesn’t have the same goals as a business. The government is trying (one hopes) to make constituents’ lives better. Businesses, meanwhile, try to profit.

[huffs angrily, climbs down]

But more importantly: the basic idea at work in this scene is that the government’s fiscal problems would simply be fixed by a Common Man coming in and rolling up his sleeves and applying some old-fashioned horse sense.

“Look at all this spending on studies putting shrimp on treadmills!” Common Man would say. “I have a few things to say about that, by God.”

And the ticker-tape parade would ensue. Kisses and brass bands and lower government interest payments. Hooray!

–

This brings me to point number two.

After having Accountant Charles Grodin look at the books, Dave holds a cabinet meeting – with the press also attending – and basically shames the various secretaries into cutting useless programs until he saves the program for homeless kids. Hooray!

And this is the dream, isn’t it? A fearless, moral leader points out the obvious silliness of a few programs, cuts them with unanimous approval, and hands the money to hungry children.

This is what I think about when I see tweets from DOGE.

A DOGE account has been posting about what it (Musk?) thinks are wasteful spending projects:

Source: Twitter/X

Now, to be clear: I take no position on whether any of this is “worth” cutting. I don’t even take a position on funding cuts for my own employer. I’m a reporter. I don’t get a say. And that’s fine.

But the point I’m making is that DOGE is trying to pull a Dave: list a bunch of programs that (to the person writing DOGE’s tweets) are self-evidently wasteful, and then cut all of those programs.

Which means that as DOGE gets rolling, we reporters have to keep our eyes on two big things: one is what happens to the savings. If the government stops spending on a bunch of scientific studies, does it go to homeless kids? Deficit reduction? Tax cuts?

And then it’s important to discuss whether that is a worthy/wasteful place to put that money.

And now, the second thing reporters need to put in context, which is the scale of DOGE spending.

Musk at one point on the campaign trail said that through DOGE, he wants to cut $2 trillion from government spending. That’s a lot, and doing it is going to be hard. To understand this, I point to this really well-done piece from the New York Times’ Alan Rappeport:

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have said that they want to cut $2 trillion of federal spending over an unspecified period of time by shrinking government agencies and eliminating fraud and waste. That is nearly the size of the 2024 fiscal year deficit alone …

Mr. Trump has pledged not to cut entitlement programs and Republicans are loath to slash military spending. That leaves scant space to scale back the biggest drivers of the debt.

Once again, as Mr. Rappeport notes, Congress members who want to cut big spending would have to go beyond cutting a few scientific studies.

For perspective, let’s go back to the Simpson-Bowles Commission. (In case you were wondering: yes, this is the most panty-dropping sentence I’ve ever written.)

Simpson-Bowles was a bipartisan group Obama put together in 2010 to find ways to keep future deficits/debt in check. The group’s recommendations largely involved a big mess of unsexy solutions like cutting tax expenditures and switching to chained-CPI for Social Security cost of living increases and getting rid of the AMT and you’re catatonic and your nose is bleeding and you’re having one of those quiet seizures. Focus.

Yes, there were cuts to discretionary spending involved – big cuts. But the point is that to really change the nation’s fiscal trajectory, you’ll have to piss off a lot of people by doing things like making major changes to Social Security or Medicare

By the way: did Simpson Bowles get implemented? No. After all the compromising and haggling and rending of garments, it died. The end.

I stand ready to analyze and explain and calculate if DOGE puts forward a bunch of dense, fibrous, Simpson-Bowles-ish plans for fiscal stability, of course. But whatever they propose, it’s going to be another fun test of the news media’s ability to put things in correct, non-stupid perspective.

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LINKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Speaking of movies: I’ve been working my way through early Scorsese, and my Captain Obvious take is that holy GOD young Robert De Niro was amazing. Has any actor had a run as great as Taxi Driver-Raging Bull-The King of Comedy? My God.²³

Food politics and gender and 2025 predictions. I was on It’s Been a Minute with wonderful host Brittany Luse and equally wonderful NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, to talk tech and social media and food politics and the raw milkmaid dress and Berghain. It was a lot, in the best of ways.

Jami Attenberg’s Craft Talk Substack. God bless this woman for joyfully encouraging anyone and everyone to write. Jami is just wrapping up a Mini-1,000, where she encourages readers to write 1,000 words a day. The beauty is that she never makes it feel like work; writing is a thing you get to do, not that you have to do. Subscribe and then go forth and be creative.

Your old-internet joy for the week: Weird Twitter: The Oral History. The Diet Parpo tweet still makes me damn near pee myself. Hey: remember when Twitter rocked? Also, remember when Buzzfeed rocked? Remember when we were young and taut and bouncy and the universe opened up before us like a wide, limitless road, and we sat around all day doing Hogwarts House quizzes and laughing at the parody Mayor Emanuel account ok fine things have been bad for a while but either way they’re undeniably worse now.

1. Speaking of which, the holiday season is not really over. Which means it’s also time to watch While You Were Sleeping. Do it now.

2. Does this mean I’m incubating some sort of lengthy take on Scorsese and masculinity? Fuck yes.

3. Also, The Last Temptation of Christ is one of my favorite films of all time, so also prepare for me to be insufferable when I get to that rewatch.