‘Waste, fraud and abuse’ is a political fight older than the nation.
President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, opened the latest chapter for a phrase hailed as common sense and derided as propaganda.
“It’s a very broad idea,” said Matt Weidinger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “But this phrase ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ obviously means different things to different people.”
The seemingly far-away government has always been a bogeyman
Pinpointing the genesis of “waste, fraud and abuse” as political rhetoric is difficult. But the concept and resulting battles are older than the nation: Think “taxation without representation” and the break from Great Britain.
After winning independence, the early American republic reprised the arguments.
