How’s this for irony?  An unelected bureaucrat sets up a new agency to set rules on who gets the funding that Congress already approved by law, then justifies these rules by delivering a report in which he equates agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats and applied to laws passed by Congress as being unconstitutional.

This actually did happen. The unelected bureaucrat is a government employee hired by President Trump. His name is Elon Musk. The agency that he set up is called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the report is called the “Unconstitutionality Index”, one of the many reports that appeared on the official DOGE.gov web site before being taken down. 

What was Musk thinking? Did he assume we wouldn’t notice the hypocrisy? Did he even notice it, himself? Or does it even matter in the bigger scheme of things? And it’s not just the hypocrisy that I am writing about. This report is filled with errors and misconceptions that are so easy to see with just common sense and a basic 5th grade understanding of U.S. Government, that’s it’s hard to imagine how ANYONE can be fooled by it.

For instance, the heading says “This is the number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress…in 2024” and yet, it shows rules and laws going all the way back to 2010.  Also, the chart doesn’t actually show the number of rules for each law passed by Congress because it doesn’t break it down to that level of detail. Instead, we have the total number of laws and the total number of rules for each year. There is no correlation between specific rules and laws at all. I gotta say, my 15 years of experience in business intelligence systems is screaming at the shoddiness here. Even the use of two-digit decimals to indicate intervals expressed in thousands is pretty damned stupid.

But I don’t want to get hung up on the poor quality of the report here because the real crime is in the message. It appears that the main thrust of the report is a focus on how the overbearing blue bars representing “rules by unelected bureaucrats” (boo, hiss) utterly dominate the little green bars representing legitimate laws. Together with the title, boldly displayed across the top, “Unconstitutionality Index”, it seems the hope is that you will immediately conclude that the “unelected bureaucrats” are overpowering our elected legislators, with towering stacks of  “unconstitutionality”. 

Again, we don’t even have to verify the data to see the bullshit here because it’s not even about the data. It’s about optics. The visual representation of data is a powerful tool for deception because when a reader switches from text to image, his brain recalibrates to draw conclusions from shapes and colors. Now all of a sudden, for a lot of people, it doesn’t actually matter what the data says or what comments are made about it… the picture says it all. Our brains are inclined to tell us that.

Anyone who has spent any time in marketing can tell you that the psychology behind visual representation is enormous. Still, this kind of manipulation is less effective on people who have a citizen’s understanding how their government works. They will know that what DOGE is portraying as an unconstitutional bureaucracy is actually the Executive Branch operating under the President and that large number of rules created by the Executive Branch that are associated with the small number of laws passed by Congress are actually the many policies it takes to implement those relatively few laws. 

To use an everyday analogy, you can compare the process to ordering food at a restaurant, where Congress is the customer ordering a steak dinner and the Administration is the restaurant tasked with making that happen. There may only be one order from the customer but there are many rules surrounding the preparation of food that can vary from state to state.

The other trick DOGE is trying to fool us with here is the emphasis on bureaucrats being unelected and the implied suggestion that it’s unconstitutional for them to create rules. Another sleight of hand by a department that is ironically itself, a rule-creating department of unelected bureaucrats with one mind-blowing difference…

Every other department in the Executive Branch is led by an unelected bureaucrat that is nevertheless VETTED and CONFIRMED by our elected representatives in Congress which is what makes them constitutionally legitimate. DOGE is actually the exception. Indeed, Trump is the first and only president to EVER allow an unelected AND unvetted EMPLOYEE to make top level policy decisions.

So all things considered, this DOGE report is one of the most blatant forms of misinformation and hypocrisy that I’ve ever seen. Designed to sway people with a weak understanding of the government, this “Unconstitutionality Index” fails to point to ANY violation of the Constitution at all but makes the false accusation anyway in an effort to justify its budget cuts which are themselves being found by the Supreme Court as true violations of the U.S. Constitution.