As Elon Musk targets fathomless waste in the federal government, protests ring out that the DOGE boss is not elected. As Victor Davis Hanson points out, neither was Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan or other powerful players in government.

Elon Musk has “far more legal authority than did FDR’s best friend Harry Hopkins. He moved into the White House and de facto set U.S. foreign assistance policies toward Stalin’s Russia.” Trump’s DOGE boss is more like Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser, and William Knudson, “appointed by FDR to run the wartime economy.”

Musk’s critics from California also seem unaware that the Golden State once boasted an intrepid foe of government waste and fraud. For state auditor Elaine Howle, California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) was a primary target.

As the title of her report explained, “EDD’s Poor Planning and Ineffective Management Left it Unprepared to Assist Californians Unemployed by COVID-19 Shutdowns.” That all took place on the watch of Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for labor secretary, never confirmed by the Senate.

Howle also rode herd on the state’s vaunted “bullet train,” which carries no passengers but maintains a Sacramento headquarters and three regional offices. The state’s High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) once took down thousands of pages of public records from its website, but Howle was able to uncover conflicts of interest with HSRA and contractors. The auditor titled her report “California High-Speed Rail Authority: Its Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System’s Construction.” This boondoggle did not distract Howle from the vaunted University of California.

In 2013, the state’s choice for president of the 10-campus UC system was former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, who headed President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. Napolitano had no experience as an educator but UC Regent Sherry Lansing hailed her as “a distinguished and dedicated public servant who has earned trust at the highest, most critical levels of our country’s government.” As UC boss, it didn’t exactly turn out that way.

As Elaine Howle revealed in 2017, Napolitano maintained a hidden slush fund of more than $175,000,000, a lot of money by any standard. As the auditor wondered, “Why did we need to increase tuition if the Office of the President has $175 million in reserve that nobody knew about?” In her April 2017 report, Howle revealed, that Napolitano’s office “intentionally interfered” with the audit. Despite the outcry from embattled UC students, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra declined to investigate. It was hardly Napolitano’s only brush with California law.

The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), the victorious Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot, eliminated racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. In 2020, Napolitano supported Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5, which targeted CCRI for repeal. California voters opted to keep the law in place, by a margin greater than in 1996. That did not prevent the University of California from establishing a costly DEI bureaucracy producing no educational benefit.

Elaine Howle retired at the end of 2021 and her reports prompted little if any reform in state government. Despite no path to completion, the bullet train continues to waste taxpayer dollars. By contrast, Elon Musk’s DOGE has recovered billions and made a strong case that some bureaucracies deserve elimination. Such agencies can also be found in California.

The unelected California Coastal Commission (CCC) overrides scores of elected city and county governments—and by extension, the voters—on land-use issues. The CCC takes a dim view of Californians’ property rights and discourages the clearing of brush, which provides kindling for wildfires. By nixing desalination projects, the Commission prevents California from fully accessing its major natural resource, the Pacific Ocean.

Consider also the unelected California Air Resources Board (CARB) which seeks to achieve the state’s carbon neutrality goals by 2045. CARB is fond of imposing new regulations on gasoline, particularly when prices are running low, as in 2014. CARB boss Mary Nichols, like Napolitano, a lawyer, had been pushing for $5-a-gallon prices since the 1990s. Nichols also kept on staff Hien Tran who bought his statistics Ph.D. in a New York City diploma mill and fudged air pollution figures.

CARB offers no hard data to back claims that its low carbon fuel standards benefit public health and environmental quality. On the other hand, it remains clear that inflated gas prices punish all Californians, particularly the workers. If Californians thought that was CARB’s ultimate goal it would be hard to blame them.

CARB and the CCC make a strong case for their elimination, but in his quest to “Trump-proof” California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced no plans to reform or eliminate any state bureaucracy, however inefficient, counterproductive, or unaccountable. In these conditions, more waste, fraud, and wildfires will come as no surprise.