In its first hearing, the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) cited “hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted on improper payments and fraud.” The DOGE revelations include $20 billion at the Environmental Protection Agency, money the EPA bosses “knew they were wasting.”

With April 15 looming, taxpayers should be aware of one reason such colossal waste occurs: the government gets their money before they do. As Robert Higgs (Crisis and Leviathan) explains, this is a relatively new development.

Before World War II, individuals who owed federal tax on their income paid during the following year in quarterly installments. As Higgs explains, “Wars have always been the most important occasions for the introduction of new forms of taxation.” A gigantic global war imposed huge revenue demands, so the government devised a plan to withhold tax from workers’ paychecks.

One of the architects of this system was economist Milton Friedman, who admitted that he helped “develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize severely as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom.” Withholding was supposedly a wartime measure, but the government conveniently kept it in place.

Higgs cites the observation of Charlotte Twight in Dependent on D.C. that “withholding is the paramount administrative mechanism that since 1943 has enabled the federal government to collect, without significant protest, sufficient private resources to fund a vastly expanded welfare state.” As DOGE now reveals, the welfare state is also an expanded, wasteful state.

Politicians and government bureaucrats appear to believe they have a prior claim to what American workers earn. As a matter of right, everything a worker earns belongs to the worker. The so-called “take-home pay” is what remains after the government grabs the worker’s money first.

Workers should get everything they earn and pay their income taxes in quarterly installments, just as freelance writers and other self-employed Americans do now. Writing quarterly checks to the government will raise consciousness of how much the government is taking. Thanks to DOGE, the people are learning how much of their money the government is wasting.

Judging by their shrill complaints, government bureaucrats seem to think there’s something wrong with accountability. Musk’s demand for them to show five accomplishments from the previous week really set them off. Imagine if that email had shown up with John Beale, once the highest-paid employee at the Environmental Protection Agency. In his long career, Beale never produced anything of value.

With degrees in political science, administration, and law, Beale boasted little if any scientific expertise for his job as a “senior policy adviser” in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. In 1994, Beale told his bosses he was a secret agent for the CIA, but nobody at the EPA bothered to check.

While claiming to be in London, India, and Pakistan, Beale was actually performing no work of any kind. He pulled off the CIA ruse for nearly 20 years, bilking taxpayers of nearly $1 million, and even got retention bonuses after he retired. For details, see the hearings shown on C-SPAN. This all went down at the EPA, whose bosses knew they were wasting $20 billion. Taxpayers can be forgiven for thinking the Department of Justice should look into it.

As DOGE reveals fathomless waste and fraud, President Trump should push for the elimination of tax withholding at first opportunity. The Internal Revenue Service—bloated by $80 billion under Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” should not get taxpayers’ money before the workers who earned it. That will restrain government power and help prevent waste, fraud and abuse from happening in the first place.