Jeff Jackson takes a stand for government inefficiency

Conventional wisdom has photogenic North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson as a rising star among state and even national Democratic officeholders. Despite Donald Trump’s November victory, Jackson won the AG race by several percentage points, albeit not by nearly the margin of victory achieved by current governor Josh Stein. In fairness, Jackson wasn’t running against Mark Robinson, though he did benefit from Robinson’s deleterious presence at the top of the NC Republican ticket.

Jackson’s first major move in office was to join a lawsuit launched by 19 state Democratic attorneys general to prevent Treasury Department documents from being released to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). For some reason, the Democrats decided to bring the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Manhattan, presumably because there is no federal court in Martha’s Vineyard.

Musk has articulated how Treasury has failed to keep even rudimentary track of the massive payouts which it makes, making an audit either impossible or very difficult. One might wonder what the motive would be — other than rank partisanship — for not wishing to place the Treasury Department under greater scrutiny and accounting discipline, which would invariably result in savings to the taxpayers.

Trump, as you will remember, was elected president in decisive fashion. One of Trump’s explicit campaign promises was to try to place Musk as the head of an agency that would be looking into government fraud and waste. “I think Elon would be great at it, if he would do it,” Trump said at the time. When the people voted for Trump, they were certainly voting in support of proposals that he made, in addition to his general populist/reformist/destructor persona. There is little doubt that his promise to cut government inefficiency was one of his biggest selling points.

So, when Democrats immediately run to the courts to thwart one of President Trump’s major initiatives, supported even by many who did not vote for Trump but aren’t huge fans of government profligacy, it begs the question of who the actual “threat to democracy” is here.

It is telling that the spokesperson for the 19 attorneys general suing DOGE is New York Attorney Letitia James, who ran on a promise to make Donald Trump a felon. James claimed that the US Department of the Treasury “has given Musk access to Americans’ personal private information, state bank account data, and other information that is some of our country’s most sensitive data.” The Department of the Treasury responded that DOGE was given limited “read only” access to its systems and that such access cannot affect department expenditures.

The first stage of the lawsuit was successful, with a New York judge granting a preliminary injunction preventing DOGE from accessing Treasury documents.

The arguments of the Democratic state law enforcement officers seem rather specious. They claim to be concerned with the leaks of sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, by Musk’s team of allegedly unvetted young tech savants. This argument ignores the fact that such data can already be misused by millions of existing federal employees, some of whom have shown themselves to be less than impartial “civil servants.” Witness the leak of Donald Trump’s tax return to the New York Times during his first term. 

Another protest made by those opposed to DOGE is that Elon Musk was not elected to anything, though I presume that Jackson and his compatriots are too intelligent to make such an assertion (Democratic members of Congress have demonstrated that they are not so constrained). When citizens elect a president — the only Executive Branch officer to be elected apart from vice president — they are trusting the president to appoint qualified people to carry out executive functions, not all of whom are subject to Senate confirmation.

A couple of days after injunction against DOGE was granted, the first hearing of the US House Subcommittee for Delivering on Government Efficiency was held.

Lawmakers heard testimony that Covid relief payments of over $1 trillion were made to various criminals and criminal enterprises exploiting US government payment systems, including $191 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits and $200 billion in stolen loans from the Small Business Administration.

Stewart Whitson, a government accountability expert and former FBI agent, testified that improper Medicaid payments caused primarily by eligibility errors were on track to cost taxpayers $1 trillion over the next 10 years.

It is this kind of stupefying fraud and mismanagement that DOGE is trying to sink its expertise into. And it is Jeff Jackson and other Democratic operatives who are using the judicial system to thwart these efforts, in effect standing up for bureaucratic unaccountability. Yes, DOGE may commit a misstep here or there, but the general project is one that was voted for and overwhelmingly supported by the public.

The North Carolina press corps showed off its obsequiousness by largely giving a pass to the prior governor and his health secretary on their arbitrary and capricious Covid restrictions.  This time they should man (and woman) up and ask Jeff Jackson some tough questions.

A good place to start would be a basic query: Why are you deciding not to respect the will of North Carolinians as voiced in a presidential election, a keystone of the democratic process that those in your party so revere?