It's also worth noting that one specific party and their very special media has been trumpeting Fraud Abuse Waste as if it's a real thing, on and on. There is a deliberate propaganda campaign that has been going on to convince people that there always has been rank corruption problems festering away, doing incredible harm.
DOGE was going to save us billions, perhaps even 0.2-0.4% of the 7T budget. Incredible! It was of course a sham, has found incredibly little, and was just a political chainsaw The Purge night. But that vocabulary is back again, has been faking the rounds once again, with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson using it quite a lot again.
A huge part is that this is projection, sure. That these corrupt people are doing the time honored tactic: accuse the other guy of exactly what you are doing. But also, we should take seriously the other upside for them/downside for the world: that terrormongering, telling us we are under attack, making us believe in a callous entropic world of horrors where everything is out to get us just makes us spiritually weak. That having no belief in anything, that undermining our spirit: that makes it much easier to loot and plunder the nation, and to keep quietly lobbying to bend all the rules to suit their amassed wealth.
Reminder again: in Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century he doesn't argue we should tax rich people through the nose to raise revenue. He says it's vital because otherwise unchecked wealth translates itself to media power, political power, that it becomes an ever larger ever more lopsided threat against democracy, and that we must take the rich to keep a democracy. The story telling here, that corruption is rank, often comes from the most corrupt, and weirdly, if delivered broadly, the risk is it yet again helps them, creates a disbelief in governance broadly, that prevents people from striving and hoping for better.