1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

Subject: We Told You So I would like to extend my sincerest congratulations to everyone who assured us that DOGE would make government more efficient. As it turns out, firing experts, slashing programs, and treating government agencies like a struggling social media company may not have been the brilliant strategy we were promised. Many Americans warned that these cuts would have consequences. We were told not to worry. We were told the programs being eliminated were wasteful. We were told the experts being shown the door were unnecessary. We were told efficiency would save the day. Now we are discovering, one preventable crisis at a time, exactly why those programs existed in the first place. Whether it is agricultural protection, food safety, public health, disaster preparedness, or countless other services Americans depend on every day, the pattern is becoming painfully obvious: the things being cut were often doing important work. Their value simply wasn’t noticed because they were quietly preventing problems before they happened. That is how competent government works. Success is often invisible until someone dismantles it. The irony is hard to ignore. We were promised savings, yet taxpayers are increasingly left paying for the consequences of shortsighted decisions. We were promised efficiency, yet agencies are scrambling to rebuild lost expertise. We were promised better government, yet Americans are left wondering why leaders ignored repeated warnings from the people who actually understood these systems. None of this was unforeseeable. Many of us saw it coming from the beginning. The question now is whether Congress will continue pretending these outcomes were unexpected or finally acknowledge that governing requires more than slogans, budget-cutting contests, and publicity stunts. Americans deserve serious leadership. We deserve decisions based on evidence, expertise, and long-term consequences—not ideological experiments that leave taxpayers cleaning up the mess.