(Daily Signal)—President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have proven they have a successful media strategy to make the case for a second round of DOGE, they just need to implement it.
A few weeks ago, it might have been inconceivable for the two to pair up again, but the president and the CEO seem to have mended their rift from the summer, and this may bode well for a second round of DOGE.
Americans broadly support rooting waste, fraud, and abuse out of the federal government, but the DOGE effort got an undeserved bad rap, and as a conservative journalist, I have some advice on how to revitalize the image and promote a potential second round.
First, the good news: Americans support DOGE’s goal. A February Harvard-Harris poll found that 70% of voters said that government expenditures are “filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency,” and 69% supported the goal of “cutting $1 trillion of government expenditures.”
Yet, after Trump and Musk implemented DOGE, Americans seemed to sour on the effort.
Only 35% of respondents approved of Musk’s job in the administration, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll in April. A poll from the Center Square that same month found independents souring on DOGE. Almost half (47%) of registered voters said DOGE had been cutting “too much,” while only 28% said DOGE had been “getting it right,” and another 12% said, “DOGE is not cutting enough.” (To be fair, DOGE only cut a few billion dollars, far short of the $1 trillion goal.)
So, what went wrong?
It should come as no surprise that the Media Research Center’s analysis found that ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News gave DOGE 97% negative spin, but Donald Trump and Elon Musk have proven they can beat the legacy media at its own game.
The Trump-Musk Media Strategy
In the 2024 election, Trump embraced new media, helping his message reach more voices. He has also opened the White House up to new media outlets and conservative journalists, empowering them to share his news. Musk, for his part, not only purchased a major social media platform for news, but also pulled off a PR coup in the Twitter Files.
When Musk bought Twitter, he gave independent journalists access to the company’s internal files, allowing them to reveal just how bad the platform’s previous liberal bias had been. Musk allowed influential journalists such as Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger to tell the story, and this worked like a megaphone, giving each reporter an incentive to share the news and show the public how much Musk’s takeover was necessary.
Why Didn’t DOGE Do This?
For some reason, DOGE did not employ this kind of strategy.
To be sure, DOGE needed some insulation to carry out the mission. DOGE didn’t just trust heads of federal agencies to cut waste, fraud, and abuse—it worked across agencies to identify duplicative programs and ask, “do we really need this?”
This outsider perspective was vital to the mission, especially in a Washington where “good governance” often amounts to extra layers of red tape that makes common sense cost-cutting increasingly hard to come by.
While DOGE could have gotten more of its reforms into law by working with Congress from the beginning (and it should partner with Congress more going forward), many members of Congress would have balked at cutting federal contracts that sent money to their districts. Some insulation from Congress makes sense, at least at first.
However, the insulation from conservative media made no sense.
Secrecy Backfires
DOGE cut contract after contract, and it didn’t give conservative reporters the scoop. It left the story to liberal outlets that presented each severed contract as an open wound, rather than a positive step toward fiscal sanity.
Rather than a tour-de-force through the media like the Twitter Files, DOGE appeared to be a secretive effort, which inspired left-leaning journalists to search for a hidden scandal.
Rather than “why was our government wasting so much money?” the main takeaway became “What is Elon Musk doing behind the scenes?”
Laws like the Freedom of Information Act allow the public to access key government documents. This means that whatever DOGE did would always become public, eventually. Sure, DOGE didn’t want to tip off some people about what cuts were coming, but it could have strategically given friendly journalists key information to help shape the narrative.
The Twitter Files worked because Musk enlisted many journalists to tell the story. Different reporters could focus on different aspects of the company’s corruption, and each of those journalists owned the story—it was in their interest to share it far and wide. This approach drew more attention to each new revelation, and gave Musk far more PR power than a mere press release or Fox News hit.
The next round of DOGE should approach media more like the Trump White House and the Twitter Files.
Conservative journalists like me are eager to go through government documents, to follow the money, and to support rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. I’m sure many liberal journalists would also love to expose when big corporations receive far too much taxpayer dough.
With the right messaging, DOGE could get buy-in from conservatives who are anxious to support it; independents who oppose waste but may be apprehensive at first; and liberals who might begrudgingly admit that at least a few of the contracts that fell under Elon Musk’s chainsaw deserved to die an ignominious death.
I think DOGE’s work is far from over, and I’d be eager to work with DOGE to highlight its successes and the need for its continued operation. I can also recommend a team of my fellow conservative reporters who would love to jump into the fray.
Throw me in, coach!
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.