The Department of Government Efficiency, the task force spearheaded by Elon Musk, will "slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies," according to President Donald Trump.
That's why it was so peculiar when Public Citizen co-presidents Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert sent a letter to Trump transition co-chairs Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon requesting to be appointed as members of DOGE.
Public Citizen has spent more than 50 years lobbying in opposition to everything DOGE hopes to accomplish. The Ralph Nader-founded group has pushed for more regulations, greater government spending, and higher taxes.
Want proof?
Just two days after begging to join DOGE, Public Citizen released a statement attacking DOGE and outlining why America needed additional regulatory burdens, more federal spending, and a $52 trillion Green New Deal.
I've spent my 25-year career exposing government waste, fraud, and abuse as one of America's leading government watchdogs and taxpayer advocates. I've uncovered hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending at the federal, state, and local levels, saving taxpayers over $60 billion along the way.
Public Citizen has never joined me in the fight to save taxpayers money.
In fact, they are always on the other side — always demanding that the government spend even more of taxpayers' hard-earned money.
For example, Public Citizen championed a Bernie Sanders-sponsored "Medicare for All" scheme that would increase U.S. healthcare spending by $2.4 trillion annually, according to RAND. It then applauded a California law that provided taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants.
The group demands tax dollars to promote equity and racial justice to fight climate change, encourages keeping President Biden's ludicrous liquefied natural gas export ban in place, and supports forcing taxpayers to subsidize EV purchases.
Weissman said it was a "very good day for America" when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act boondoggle." He called the House's adoption of the pork-filled $2.1 trillion Build Back Better Act "a great and momentous day for America."
The difference between a "good day" and a "great day" for Weissman? Evidently, it's about $900 billion of other people's money.
Public Citizen has never seen a tax it didn't love, promoting a federal sales tax on each investment transaction, a massive global sales tax on most soda and fruit juice, a $313 billion tax increase on job-creators, and a massive $1.3 trillion corporate tax hike.
The shady Soros-funded group even celebrated the widely criticized Democrat plan which spent $80 billion to hire more IRS agents to harass taxpayers.
If Public Citizen's views on government spending are out-of-touch, the outfit's positions on intellectual property rights are downright idiotic — and a threat to the entrepreneurial spirit America was founded on.
In a recent open letter to Musk and former DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy, Public Citizen demanded the government use an obscure World War I-era policy to steal patents from inventors.
The statute, Section 1498, was intended to ensure patent and copyright owners receive fair compensation if the government uses their technology without permission during a war or other crisis.
But Public Citizen wants the government to abuse Section 1498 to make generic weight loss drugs.
If the group succeeds in this troubling effort, it will set the precedent that the government can seize and give away the intellectual property of America's greatest innovators just because it wants to.
Once inventors and innovators can be stripped of their patents simply because the government wants to control the IP, what incentive do people have to create critical new technologies? This question is particularly important in the healthcare industry, where companies have invested more than $1.5 trillion in the past decade to develop new lifesaving medicines.
U.S. patent laws protect medicines for only 20 years. By the time most medicines hit the market, though, they have far less time than that left on their patent. For example, the patents and market exclusivity protections that underpin the most popular weight loss drug, Ozempic, expire in the United States in 2032 — meaning the manufacturer has just 7 more years to recoup its massive development cost and earn returns that will continue to attract investors betting on breakthrough medicines.
It takes 10 to 15 years for the average drug's development and regulatory approval, and pharmaceutical companies spend an average of $1.8 billion to bring a prescription to market.
As a result of this enormous risk and expense, if Public Citizen is successful in making patents worthless, it would be nearly impossible for investors to recoup money spent creating innovative new medicines. Research and development of new cures would grind to a halt, causing the needless suffering and death of millions of people.
Public Citizen's relentless push for more regulations, higher taxes, and excessive government intervention stands in stark contrast to the goals of the Department of Government Efficiency.
While DOGE aims to streamline bureaucracy, reduce waste, and foster innovation, Public Citizen's agenda represents a vision of bigger, costlier, and more intrusive government. Their advocacy for stripping innovators of intellectual property rights, and saddling taxpayers with exorbitant spending priorities like the Green New Deal and colossal tax increases, shows just how wildly the goals of Public Citizen differ from those of Elon Musk and DOGE.
If President Trump is to succeed in reducing the size and scope of government, while encouraging a new era of investment and innovation, it's absolutely vital to keep Public Citizen — and the group's extremist ideas — as far from DOGE as possible.
Drew Johnson is a budget policy analyst and government watchdog who was the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for Congress in Nevada's 3rd Congressional District in 2024. Read Drew Johnson's Reports — More Here.
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