Near the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel I am reading for the first time, we meet Mrs. Jellyby—a Victorian era philanthropist obsessed with bringing education, colonizers, and the coffee trade to a remote region of Africa, Borrioboola-Gha. She spends her waking hours either conversing with others about her cause or dictating letters, memos, and policy statements to a drably attired and much put-upon scribe, who, we quickly learn, is her eldest daughter.

Meanwhile, neglect has transformed the Jellyby home into a sty of clutter, dust, and grime. The stairwell, windowpanes, doors, furniture: all are filthy. Papers, books, unwashed plates and cups, and trash litter the floors and tabletops. Hot water is in short supply, and though food is plentiful, the cooking leaves so much to be desired that meals are nearly inedible.

Even worse is the condition of Mrs. Jellyby’s wild tribe of offspring. Ignored by their mother—education, discipline, and even love departed these premises long ago—these children are unwashed, blotted by bruises and cuts from accidents, their clothes ragged and stained. To all this chaos, dirt, shouting, and crying, Mrs. Jellyby is deaf and blind.

The more I learned about Mrs. Jellyby’s neglect of her household and children, the more she struck me as a metaphor for our federal government and its neglect and abuse of American taxpayers and citizens.  

Thanks to the work of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), this comparison can be seen as apt. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, DOGE has made Americans painfully aware of the massive waste and fraud of our government and our Mrs. Jellyby bureaucracy.

In an article for the Epoch Times, Mark Tapscott describes some projects funded by monies dispatched through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to Ukraine on top of the billions the United States has spent on that country’s military. Some $300,00 went to a manufacturer of dog collars, $148,000 for a pickle-maker, whatever that is, $225,000 to an organic tea and coffee producer, and $114,000 to support “a premium, limited-edition furniture line.” These are but slivers from the iceberg of waste in government, but reading them over, we should wonder why these funds would go to any overseas manufacturer at all.

Here at home, we find a similar abuse of taxpayer dollars. DOGErs discovered that Jellybys at the Department of Education had wasted more than $900 million, including more than $100 million on Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion training. Lee Zeldin, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, declared that he wanted to end the $20 billion provided to the previous administration’s clean energy project, which Republican critics have decried as a slush fund for leftists.  

Opposing these investigations by the DOGErs are the artful dodgers, those bureaucrats and politicians bobbing and weaving to evade accusations of ineptitude or corruption. The dodgers bring suits against the administration to block DOGE’s queries, or eliminate evidence of transgressions and waste by clicking the delete buttons on their keyboards, or simply refuse to cooperate. Behind those dog collars and pickle-makers hide trillions more dollars unaccounted for, deliberately or not, by the racketeers of government.

And like Mrs. Jellyby’s household, the American people pay the price for this extravagance and misspending.       

In the Dickens novel, Mr. Jarndyce, owner and master of Bleak House, asks his ward Esther Summerson what she thinks of Mrs. Jellyby, whom Esther and two other young people have just met. She replies with some hesitancy, “We thought that, perhaps, it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them.”

For years now in the United States, government Jellybys have neglected the obligations of home. They left open the doors and windows of our house, allowing an invasion of strangers. They promoted false ideas of race and gender which separated and divided the family. They ignored repairs necessary for the upkeep of the house and shrugged off the criminals attracted by such decay. They threw money at problems rather than solving them. Some of them even attempted to silence the residents of the home by shaming or arresting them.

Now a reckoning is at hand. A band of DOGErs and their allies have exposed these Jellybys and artful dodgers have put some of them to flight. While the final outcome of this thrust-and-parry contest remains unclear, one thing is certain. Americans now fully grasp, and will long remember, the ineptitude and deceptions of their ersatz property managers.