One could argue that things were *more* transparent pre-DOGE. Just because people didn't know where to look doesn't mean the information didn't exist.

> In theory I guess, but hasn’t all this gov spending essentially been hidden?

No, it was all publicly debated and passed by Congress, and openly available for anyone to see.

It just never served anyone's political agenda to nitpick and distort and publicize it until the current Administration.

Honestly it's hard to guess what your talking about here. As far as things the administration has used as examples they are pretty much all incorrect (e.x. condoms for Hamas) or wildly distorted so I wouldn't call it a win for transparency, or revealing something "essentially hidden".

If your talking things like their "org chart"* maybe, sort of. There's nothing there that wasn't already available pretty easily via OPM, but one could argue it's a nicer interface. To the extent that it's actually revealed anything to anyone is argue that it has more to do with it being the trending news so people actually bother to look, rather than it being "hidden" before.

https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106...

Almost nothing DOGE has found is true, or as bad as DOGE implies