This is an opinion column.

There was a curious story in the Wall Street Journal last week about the Elon Musk-led extra-governmental entity tasked by President Donald Trump with some kind of audit.

DOGE is supposed to seek out waste in the federal government.

When it comes to audits, I’ve seen my share, from Jefferson County’s record-setting municipal bankruptcy to executives sifting the rubble of HealthSouth fraud.

But never anything like this.

According to the report in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, DOGE had claimed about $55 billion in savings through its work. However, when the Journal reporters went looking for those savings, they identified only $2.6 billion.

The DOGE team has since revised its number down, but not yet nearly as low as the Journal’s figure.

The Journal was not alone in its findings. The Washington Post and the New York Times also scrutinized DOGE’s claims and came to similar conclusions. The Times found that DOGE had claimed $8 billion in savings with one canceled contract when it had saved only $8 million. Meanwhile, the Post discovered that many of the contracts DOGE had canceled yielded exactly $0 in savings.

By paying people to identify those supposed savings, DOGE cost somebody more money.

This week, DOGE deleted its biggest cost-saving claims from its website in the apparent hope that no one would notice. They did, anyway.

Some kind of audit, huh?

If the gas gauge on your car was this dependable, you’d quickly find yourself stuck on the side of the road. If you hired an accountant to file your taxes and that accountant had an error rate greater than 90 percent, you would find yourself in trouble (supposing the IRS stil has auditors).

Let’s be clear here. What DOGE is doing is not an audit.

It’s a wrecking ball smashing through the office windows of the federal government. Or perhaps we should use Musk’s preferred metaphor, the chainsaw he danced around with on stage at last weekend’s CPAC freak show.

Not just DOGE but the whole Trump administration is here to cut first and ask if that’s a vital organ later.

Alabama recently learned this the hard way after the Trump administration froze federal funding at research institutions, including UAB.

RELATED: Alabama learns what happens when senators don’t do their jobs

Alabama Sen. Katie Britt said she would talk to chief vaccine-denier Robert Kennedy Jr. about that, but the federal courts got there first, unfreezing those funds, at least for now.

I gave Britt some grief for approve-first/ask-questions later approach to the president’s appointments, in the hope that she might learn something from the experience.

And what did she learn?

Not a thing.

Instead of being a voice of discernment in the U. S. Senate, the very next week Britt sang the praise of Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education and the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment.

That’s right, Trump has chosen the head of a professional wrestling company (rasslin’ as we sometimes call it) to lead the U. S. Department of Education.

You do not pick such a person to head such a department unless you want her to kill it. Trump isn’t even pretending this time. He said so in a press conference in the Oval Office.

“I told Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,” Trump told the White House press.

McMahon’s mission should be clear to everyone. And Britt and Alabama’s senior senator, Tommy Tuberville, seem fine with it. Whatever Trump wants, they’re for it.

But it’s worth considering what that means for Alabama.

Last year, Alabama received more than $1.8 billion in federal funding for education. For Title 1 funding, which supports students and schools struggling with poverty, Alabama received more than $300 million, or about 3,500 teachers’ worth.

What happens to that money if there’s no Department of Education to administer it? Or what happens to students with disabilities the department protects? Or school lunch support for kids in poverty?

Those would have been good questions for Alabama’s senators to ask, but instead, Tuberville went on a rant about cell phones in schools when he was a college football coach.

“I told them put that damn phone up,” Tuberville said, tapping the dais with his finger. “I told them don’t bring that in my dressing room because I want you to listen and learn.”

Alabama’s senators say they want our children to learn, but they haven’t led by example. Instead of a genuine public inquiry into the qualifications of presidential cabinet appointments, they show us how little they know or care about the people who rely on the agencies those appointees will soon lead.

They haven’t learned a thing.

They aren’t here to perform an audit but rather to help crank the chainsaw and get out of the way.

And only later, after it’s too late, will Alabama learn where it gets cut next.

Kyle Whitmire is the Washington watchdog columnist for AL.com and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. You can follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter (he doesn’t call it by that other name), Threads and Bluesky.

You can also subscribe to his weekly newsletter Alabamafication here.