Our country is in crisis, a crisis of vocabulary. Words matter. They have consequences, and yet words get thrown around carelessly in the middle of political fights. 

President Donald Trump took office ushering in an intentional tidal wave of activities, one of which was the stated goal of making the federal government more efficient. The words “waste, fraud and abuse” are stitched together to validate the mission Elon Musk and others are highlighting with their actions. 

But all of those words mean different things, and they usually don’t even apply to what Republicans are complaining about and want to eliminate. 

There’s almost certainly some waste — “expending carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose” — within a $6 trillion federal budget. But by locking the doors of agencies and taking pictures off the walls within days, or even hours, of Trump taking office, his administration proved that the broad spending and program cuts were predetermined rather than discovered through a thoughtful review.

As with any large company or organization, there will be some bad apples among 2.4 million federal workers, and thus fraud — or “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain” — is possible. But there’s been no time to investigate or determine that with any degree of certainty. The administration has yet to file criminal charges against anyone over alleged spending misconduct or prove that specific individuals are benefiting financially beyond their salaries.

And abuse means to “use something to bad effect or for a bad purpose” or “misuse.” For many of these eliminated programs, the intent is exactly the opposite of abuse. Many USAID programs have the express goal of helping people around the world with basic necessities, including food, water and medicine.

There’s plenty of room to argue about spending priorities, efficiency and effectiveness, but a lot of the initial spending cuts highlighted by Trump, Musk and their allies are about differences in ideology, the size of government, the United States’ role in the world and partisanship — not waste, fraud and abuse.

The White House admitted as much recently. 

Asked about her screenshots of a $36,000 “DEI contract” for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a $3.4 million contract for a Council for Inclusive Innovation at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and $57,000 dollars for climate change in Sri Lanka, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the spending was “against the president’s policies in his ‘America First’ agenda.”

“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent, they are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayers’ dollar,” Leavitt declared in her Feb. 12 briefing. “This is not what the government should be spending money on. It’s contrary to the president’s priorities and agenda.”

Right now, “waste, fraud and abuse” often means spending money on things I don’t like or don’t understand.

So what?

Why do these distinctions even matter?

Labeling everything as “waste, fraud and abuse” leads people to believe that the entire government and all of the country’s institutions are fundamentally corrupt and filled with people intent on evil and personal gain. 

First of all, I don’t believe that’s the case. But, more importantly, a person who believes the government is rotten to the core will accept any punishment or consequence against perceived enemies and justify any quasi-legal actions by allies. It’s the mentality that leads to Jan. 6, 2021. And if everyone is doing something wrong then your friends are smart to get their own piece of the pie.

For most people, their default position is partisanship, whether they want to admit it or not. Anyone on your side is given the benefit of the doubt, while anyone on the other side is guilty until proven innocent.

Demonizing the government and all federal workers also makes people numb to basic humanity. No one should be granted a job for life (other than Supreme Court justices, I guess), but even federal workers deserve some level of decency and notice upon termination, particularly if there’s no evidence of corruption or wrongdoing. 

The workers being fired have names, faces and families. But because too many people believe the government is a safe haven for criminals, it’s apparently OK to treat people this way. And, unfortunately, the pain and suffering is too often intended. One top Trump aide has said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”

If you consider people to be “other,” then you do or say all sorts of things you wouldn’t do or say to a peer. I don’t believe corruption is the country’s most pervasive issue. The bigger problem is how we treat people with whom we disagree and who are different from us.

The same party that brought up President Joe Biden’s flawed and fatal exit from Afghanistan throughout the election appears to have no regard for the physical or financial fallout from cutting off aid to people in need. But because those foreign recipients or government workers are considered “other,” it doesn’t matter.

Yes, elections have consequences and Trump won the 2024 election. But he was elected president of the United States, not the king of Congress or chief justice over the entire judicial branch. 

Republicans would be apoplectic if any Democrat exerted even a fraction of the power Trump is demonstrating now. Republicans would be out of their minds if Democrats’ top donor, who has business interests with the government, had unfettered authority and access to the country’s critical government infrastructure. But because of the fundamental distrust of government, people with outsider profiles such as Trump and Musk enjoy the benefit of the doubt with Republicans.

If Trump, Musk and Republicans want to reform, reshape and resize government through spending cuts, then work together with the other two branches of government, including the one with the spending authority that Republicans control. Instead, they demonize the entire system to create an appetite for executive overreach.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump posted recently on social media. After years of seeing him in action, I take him seriously and literally.

Mandate?

Republicans justify the president’s actions by pointing to the election results. A combination of Trump winning the Electoral College and the national popular vote (with 49.9 percent) and his party gaining the Senate majority and narrowly holding on to the House (albeit with a net loss of one seat) is enough for Republicans to use the word “mandate” to cudgel any opposition.

“He’s doing what he said he was going to do,” is another common GOP refrain. 

But that’s not quite right.

More than 77 million people voted for a Republican nominee who intentionally backed away from Project 2025, which contained policies that had the potential to hurt his election chances.

“[Democrats have] been told officially, legally, in every way, that we have nothing to do with Project 25,” Trump said in August. “They know it, but they bring it up anyway. They bring up every single thing that you can bring up. Every one of them was false.”

And yet Trump has reinstalled one of Project 2025’s architects as director of the Office of Management and Budget and is implementing some of the core tenets of the conservative blueprint to transform government. 

“The next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre-COVID-19 pandemic budget level,” it says in Chapter 9, page 254, of Project 2025. “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” reads the first sentence of Chapter 11 on page 319. 

While sowing and cultivating seeds of distrust in the country’s major institutions looks politically prudent now, there will be unintended consequences down the road. But, right now, Trump is operating under a perceived mandate from the 2024 election and little to no accountability to Congress, the courts or the voters.