Petards, hoisting, some assembly required. By Democrats.

For the past three weeks, Democrats have screamed about how an unelected multi-billionaire has gained access to the levers of federal spending, mainly to pull them to the OFF position. At first they claimed that Elon Musk had no authority to operate his DOGE project or access government information, until it turns out ... he did. 

As attorney Tom Renz explained in a lengthy Twitter/X thread, Trump took an agency launched by Barack Obama in 2014 called the US Digital Service and renamed it the US DOGE Service, and made Musk a special adviser to it. Trump then installed Musk's team as US DOGE Service staff and retasked the agency to find and expose all government spending in the executive branch.

How was Trump able to do this? The Daily Wire's Luke Rosiak did a deep dive of his own and discovered that Trump has Joe Biden to thank. Trump largely ignored the previous iteration of USDS, assuming its work revolved around its ostensible mission of improving exec-branch information technology. Instead, it became a beehive for left-wing activists, and Biden reversed Trump's action to protect it from political interference once in office.

Oh, and even better -- it has an ObamaCare angle, too! Emphasis mine:

DOGE took over the U.S. Digital Service, a 300-person technology office President Barack Obama set up inside the Executive Office of the President in 2014 to fix his beleaguered HealthCare.gov. Bureaucrats had bungled the site, so USDS sought out Silicon Valley innovators, and was authorized to circumvent federal hiring procedures to get them. Hiring young people from the tech world and putting them together to work for Obama, unmoored from the stuffy rules of a typical government building, led to an environment of overt left-wing advocacy.

Let’s just roll that irony around in our mouths for a while to truly enjoy all the nuances of the taste. Obama’s incompetent rollout of ObamaCare necessitated the creation of USDS to rescue his bureaucrats from the debacle they created. They sought out younger experts for that rescue, while exempting them from the red tape that applies to other agencies. They then left them alone rather than strictly proscribe the work to the declared USDS mission.

What does that sound like? 

Anyway, it paid off for Democrats for a few years, even during Trump’s presidency:

Obama designed it that way, making the USDS administrator, its top employee, a political appointee. When Donald Trump took over in 2017, he didn’t attempt to turn the tables. Instead, he turned the other cheek. He reclassified USDS’s top job as a career position, not a political one, signaling that he trusted the employees to simply carry out the unglamorous job of fixing government IT.

But USDS staff abused that trust, using it, incredibly, to run left-wing activism from inside Trump’s first White House. During his first term, it hired multiple people who had worked in the porn industry, one who’d worked in a gender studies department, and a transgender activist. USDS leadership subjected staff to memos lecturing them on “toxic masculinity” while devoting significant effort to DEI hiring, a Daily Wire review found.

Obviously, Trump learned a few lessons the hard way in his first term, but at least he learned this one. In this business, turning the other cheek only gets the other side of your face kicked in. Rosiak agrees, and believes this particular betrayal may have steeled Trump even more to do what he promised in the first place -- drain the swamp, and this time at scale. 

Fortunately, his opportunity for vindication got teed up by Joe Biden himself:

Trump wasn’t rewarded for his attempt to give federal employees autonomy. Democrats have continued to claim that he was trying to “politicize” the federal workforce. And when Joe Biden won the presidency, he didn’t even make a pretense of maintaining the nonpartisan nature: He promptly changed the top role back to political appointment, and even granted his appointee waivers exempting her from ethics rules.

"The irony," Rosiak writes, "is that Democrats built a ticking time bomb." He means that in terms of bureaucrats antagonizing Trump, but it also applies almost literally in this case. Barack Obama built the USDS ostensibly for data system development, but allowed it so much autonomy that it attracted people who used its power for political activism. That actually accelerated during Trump's benign neglect of USDS, and exploded into full bloom under Biden, who made USDS explicitly political rather than technocratic. 

As with much of the Democrat hysteria over the last three weeks about USAID and other DOGE targets, the real lesson is that they have been hoist by their own executive-power petards. They built the machines by which Trump and Musk have engineered the destruction of their bureaucratic activism. They can't stop him now because Democrats designed these engines to prevent them from being stopped at all. 

The overarching lesson is to limit executive power — and to eliminate unaccountable agencies. Had Democrats never passed ObamaCare, they wouldn’t be in this disaster now, watching Republicans use their machinery to dismantle their corrupt grift one agency and department at a time. Perhaps all Americans will learn a lesson about the wisdom of limited powers, checks and balances, and the virtues of federalism from this swamp-draining exercise. Once the former beneficiaries of the grift fall silent, of course.