The United States was founded on the premise that the government’s power stems from the will of the people. This is not how America functions today. People still vote, of course, but the power of those they elect is minuscule compared to the power of the legions of unelected bureaucrats who really run Washington, D.C., and the lives of everyday Americans.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, bureaucratic agencies issued an astonishing 3,018 rules and regulations last year. Congress passed only 68 laws. This means that for every law enacted by their elected representatives, Americans must obey 44 bureaucratic rules.

This is not what popular sovereignty looks like.

James Madison, the main author of the U.S. Constitution, wrote, “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” Yet today, Americans are subject to 107,262 pages of often vague and incoherent regulations passed, not by “men of their own choice,” but by a cabal of unelected technocrats who basically have the power to legislate, adjudicate and enforce those regulations.

President Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” during his first term in office by shrinking the federal workforce and scaling back the sheer number of federal regulations. But the swamp creatures fought back!

Intelligence agencies withheld reports from the president. Former spy chiefs slandered him as inexperienced, unstable and unethical. Federal agents raided the office of his personal attorney. Bureaucrats leaked sensitive information to hostile media outlets. Career employees in the Department of Justice refused to prosecute cases they disagreed with ideologically. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their paperwork. Attorneys at the Environmental Protection Agency refused to inform political appointees about major cases the agency was facing. In short, executive branch employees outright refused to obey the chief executive.

The end result of these “deep state” attacks was that President Trump became even more popular among the American people. Joe Biden’s time in the White House revealed that the deep state runs the country more brazenly when the president is senile. In the end, 77 million voters decided they wanted President Trump back.

After a decade of warfare against the bureaucratic state, President Trump has learned that no man can tame the massive leviathan that has taken over the federal government; therefore, he must destroy the beast and return power to the people.

Just seven days after winning the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, President Trump announced that tech entrepreneur Elon Musk would lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (doge) tasked with finding ways to dismantle bureaucracy, eliminate regulations, and cut wasteful spending.

“We will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 trillion of government spending,” President Trump announced in an official campaign statement. “They will work together to liberate our economy and make the U.S. government accountable to ‘We the People.’ Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026. A smaller government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!”

This wasn’t an empty promise. Using the U.S. Constitution as their North Star, Trump, Musk and a team of small-government crusaders have already set out to reverse a century-long power grab. They are facing fierce opposition. Yet the Bible indicates they will have a great measure of success reforming the government!

Drain the Swamp

The same day he took the oath of office, President Trump signed an executive order renaming the United States Digital Service to the United States doge Service. The rebranded department was tasked with helping President Trump present the American people with a smaller, more efficient federal bureaucracy.

Musk is not an official employee of the United States doge Service. He is a senior adviser to President Trump overseeing the effort to slash regulations, cut expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.

The Department of Government Efficiency is working to inform the American people where their tax dollars are going. It will be up to President Trump and the 535 people the American people have elected to Congress to actually do something about the excessive, wasteful, unlawful spending doge uncovers.

Since the federal budget deficit is $1.8 trillion, Musk has said that he wants federal spending reduced by $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Yet without major congressional reform to America’s Social Security and health-care system, doge may end up settling for a lower figure. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Musk and coauthor Vivek Ramaswamy estimated that President Trump could unilaterally cut $500 billion from the federal budget simply by nixing expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress. They also stated that doge would use the U.S. Constitution as a North Star to guide it toward smaller, more efficient government.

Three recent Supreme Court cases established that federal executive agencies have been exceeding their constitutional authority for decades. In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (June 30, 2022), the court held that the powers the epa exerted were unconstitutional. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (June 28, 2024), it held that executive agencies may no longer interpret their own application of a law. In Trump v. United States (July 1, 2024), it emphasized that “Article ii of the Constitution vests ‘executive power’ in ‘a president of the United States of America.’”

Taken together, these cases—not to mention the text of the Constitution itself—mean that President Trump is the sole source of executive power in the federal government and may therefore fire any federal employees issuing unconstitutional regulations. This fact terrifies those in the swamp who have made a comfortable living wasting taxpayer dollars. So they are doing their best to slander Musk as an “unelected” shadow president and drive a wedge between him and the president.

Musk has absolutely no power to cut government spending. He can only inform President Trump about the waste he finds. Once he does that, however, the president has broad power to act on it.

The doge tagline is, “The people voted for major reform.” Musk recognizes that President Trump is leading a populist revolution against the “deep state.” For decades, federal executive agencies have been allowed to legislate, judge and enforce the “regulations” akin to statute law. Some agencies have been allowed to grow so powerful that they can rig elections! Now America has a “once in a lifetime” shot at reducing the size of the bureaucracy to something closer to what the Founding Fathers would recognize.

Wasteful Spending

To kick off his quest to drain the swamp, President Trump offered a deal to the government’s 2.3 million bureaucrats: If they willingly resigned before February 6, he would continue to pay them until September.

About 77,000 federal employees—more than 3 percent of the federal workforce—accepted this generous deal. This could save the government up to $30 billion per year come September. And doge is just getting started. According to doge.gov, $55 billion in potential savings were identified during the department’s first month in operation. It has posted its ideas online and asked for input from American taxpayers on what the president should cut.

“There’s crazy things!” Musk said at an impromptu February 11 press conference in the Oval Office with President Trump. “Just a cursory examination of Social Security, and we’ve got people in there that are about 150 years old.” He cited examples of taxpayer dollars spent on sending condoms to Mozambique, a government employee whose net worth jumped $23 million during her three years in office, and the fact that the retirement process for federal employees takes months because their documents are not digital but paper forms stored in a mine.

As doge employees scrutinize the various departments, the list of “crazy things” identified grows: $1.9 billion in Housing and Urban Development was misplaced while Joe Biden was in the White House; $50 million in “environmental justice” grant money given to a group that believes “climate justice travels through a free Palestine”; a contract for “Asia Pacific-Sri Lanka climate-change mitigation adaption and resilience coordinator services for forest service”; a workshop for “intercultural communication diversity dialogue circle communicating across differences”; “groundwater exploration and assessment in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania”; a contract for an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the National Institutes of Health Museum; and millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subscriptions to media outlets like the New York Times, Politico and others.

Other examples exposed or highlighted by doge include leases for underutilized and unused buildings; dei scholarships in Burma; Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for a New York City hotel that housed migrants, cartel members and the man who went on to murder Laken Riley; and so much more.

“The last time a comprehensive review of the federal government was completed in 1984,” doge posted on X, “the budget was $848 billion, national debt was $1.6 trillion, and debt-to-gdp ratio was 38 percent. The budget is now $7 trillion, the national debt is $35.3 trillion, and the debt-to-gdp ratio is 121.6 percent.”

The U.S. is wasting its way straight into disaster! The Congressional Budget Office admits that by 2035, roughly 22 percent of all tax revenue will have to go toward paying the interest on its debt, which will by then have grown to $59 trillion.

This is obviously unsustainable!

Unless doge is successful in slashing spending, America will go bankrupt paying 2.3 million bureaucrats spread across 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary subcommittees to micromanage their lives for them.

Founders’ Vision

You would think that every American would be grateful for this long-overdue audit of the government. To the contrary, many Big Government leftists are organizing hundreds of lawsuits against President Trump’s administration in an attempt to make sure that the taxpayer cash keeps flowing into insane, corrupt programs here and abroad.

District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, went as far as to issue a temporary restraining order preventing doge employees from accessing the payment system of the Treasury Department because he did not believe doge was an official government agency.

The chief executive of the executive branch of government has established a department for auditing the executive branch—and a low-ranking judicial branch judge blocks him. Such judicial activism is not about preserving the U.S. Constitution. It is about empowering bureaucrats to subvert a president who was given a mandate by 77 million citizens to do what he has promised to do.

Under the Constitution, Congress writes laws, the courts interpret laws, and the president enforces the laws. This means that President Trump cannot usurp Congress’s legislative power or the courts’ judicial power, and judges like Paul Engelmayer cannot usurp Mr. Trump’s executive power. President Trump has the constitutional prerogative to audit the executive agencies that report to him, change funding, and fire employees as he sees fit.

The 1974 Impoundment Control Act forbids the president from stopping expenditures authorized by Congress. Musk wrote in his Wall Street Journal editorial that doge should prioritize slashing programs that are either unauthorized by Congress or are being used in ways Congress never intended. The Supreme Court likely will have to rule on some of doge’s proposals, but none of Musk’s recommendations so far should be controversial—unless you are an activist judge, establishment politician or government bureaucrat who is on the take.

Unfortunately, many powerful and influential people don’t want to see America’s “deep state” downsized. In a telling speech given on Constitution Day in 2010, Prof. Michael Klarman of Harvard University (an institution that receives more than $670 million in federal funding each year) said conservatives were guilty of “constitutional idolatry.” He cited the rise of “the administrative state” as both unconstitutional and necessary for the good of the country. “The framers set up three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial,” he said. “But today we have a vitally important fourth branch—the administrative state—which is almost certainly unconstitutional in multiple ways according to the original design of the framers. Yet courts have legitimized administrative agencies, and it’s hard to imagine them doing otherwise.”

Comments like these show what President Trump and the doge movement are up against. Many corporate media commentators keep repeating the lie that Trump is a threat to democracy, as if he is somehow violating the U.S. Constitution by having Musk audit the executive branch. In reality, the more educated leaders of the political establishment know that the swamp is unconstitutional, but they don’t care. They think bureaucrats know how to rule the nation better than the elected representatives of the people. They are fighting tooth and nail to keep the swamp as deep and as murky as they can.

Kingdom’s Court

Hundreds of Obama-aligned judges and politicians are attacking President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. However, Bible prophecy indicates they will have much less success than they did under Obama and Biden and during President Trump’s first term.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has proved that President Trump is an end-time type of the ancient Israelite King Jeroboam ii. He wrote in the August 2019 Trumpet issue that Amos 7:12-13 are actually a prophecy that this same Jeroboam figure will be supported by a religious movement called the “king’s chapel” and a secular entity called the “king’s court,” or “kingdom’s court.”

“In Washington, D.C., is the Supreme Court building, where judges are to interpret the law,” he wrote in “Can President Trump Get Control of His Own Divided Government?” “In the same area are buildings for the cia, the fbi, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and others. Most of them were built during and after the Great Depression, when they had a lot of manpower to use, so they built some truly impressive structures for the government. It is logical this prophecy is talking about these government structures, or agencies. After all, if Jeroboam is going to be used to save Israel, he would need the law on his side. He wouldn’t be able to use the government like he needed to without the legal structure behind him.”

The first time Trump was elected, officials loyal to Barack Obama tried to subvert his agenda while hiding behind the false notion that they were acting as a constitutional check on the president. Yet a number of recent Supreme Court cases have clarified this very issue and held that federal officials cannot usurp legislative authority and that they possess only as much executive authority as the president delegates to them. This means that President Trump is likely to succeed in trimming back the sprawling, oppressive, wasteful, unconstitutional bureaucratic mass into a smaller, more efficient agency that actually helps him enforce the laws that representatives in Congress see fit to pass, like the founders intended.

When Amos 7:12-13 refer to the kingdom’s “court,” it uses the Hebrew word bayi, which is usually translated as “house.” This word does not refer to a village or city full of millions of people, but rather a household or courtyard full of people dedicated to enforcing the kingdom’s laws. This word aptly describes the type of constitutional government that Elon Musk and the doge movement want to see in America.

It is refreshing to see America waking up to the fact that it must balance its budget and shrink its government. Yet the resurgence brought about by this end-time Jeroboam will only be temporary unless the American people make much more drastic, permanent changes. The context of Amos 7:12-13 is religious people rejecting God’s prophecies in the time of Jeroboam and the kingdom’s court. The fact that Donald Trump is making such swift progress toward getting control of his divided government may be a harbinger of things to come. Once the founding idea that it is the elected representative of the people who runs the government has been restored to America, the nation will have to take a long, hard look at the character of the people themselves.