Jeff, you’re missing the true genius of this. Elon named it DOGE, which is an acronym for Department of Government Efficiency AND IT’S ALSO the name of an internet meme.
You think you’re that smart? Come on. Only a real genius could make something so good.
Easily the most cringe part of Elon isn't that he is always talking in memes, it's that he's always talking in memes that were dead and buried a decade ago.
What's next? Working with RFK on the Department of Can Haz Cheezburger? Doing the Gangnam Style dance on a state trip to South Korea? Starting a DOGE hiring agency called Youth Outreach Liaison Organization (YOLO)?
Hey, now: It's not the size of one's budget cuts that matters. There are plenty of women out there who find $1T cuts too big, painfully big. They can get a lot more satisfaction from $150B cuts applied to just the right place.
“Most of Musk’s cuts are not obvious fraud that no sane person would support, but rather spending that conservatives don’t like.”
This is really it. I genuinely can’t tell if the DOGE effort was a ketamine-fuelled fantasy that they really could eliminate a trillion dollars of true waste and fraud, or an attempt to be cunning to bypass Congress in cutting stuff that conservatives don’t like without having to face the voters or make any hard tradeoffs or pay political capital.
If it’s the latter: it’s still bad but it’s a little more understandable. Believe it or not there was like a quarter of people up here in Canada who supported Trump at first, because of the “war on woke” that he was going to do. I distinctly remember people here in January just before Trudeau resigned cheering on Musk and wishing he’d come here next! And nobody gives a shit if they save the US taxpayer money or reduce the US debt, they just wanted Musk to kill social justice oriented programmes. (And then Trump started, you know, threatening our sovereignty, and putting destructive tariffs on everything, and that ended quickly.)
DOGE is going to be something that people sorta kinda remember as an event that's a footnote to the rat fucking the rest of the administration is doing to America and the world.
Thank you for your service in spreading the word on DOGE's epic level of idiocy. Unfortunately I think we may be suffering from mismatched definitions regarding DOGE's purpose. Like most decisions coming from the current mis-administration the goal is not to improve outcomes, but to make as big a mess as possible and then shrug, "See, gubmint just don't work!" And then dismantle more services and support that US citizens pay for and need to live "first world" lifestyles (enjoy it while you can). So the true test of DOGE's efficacy will ultimately be how much it allows Tr*mp and his cronies to gut Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. But I suspect you already understand this.
I enjoy the "incompetence" explanation more than the "it was all a pretext to hack the government's computers" explanation but if I'm being honest I don't enjoy either of those very much.
You're missing a big part of Elon's motivation. The "saving money" part is just a charade. The real issue is eliminating regulators who could be bothersome for Elon's vaporware empire, canceling contracts with competitors and assigning them to his companies, and eliminating bureaucracies to replace them with AI contraptions provided by guess who?
One of my favorite comedian/commentators is David Mitchell. I think this blog mentioned Peep Show once, his most famous show. Mitchell had a youtube series of short screeds around a decade ago and DOGE made me think of his one on government waste:
Summing it up (although please watch), targeting waste is always going to be a false promise, simply because there's always going to be certain amount of waste. Differences in budget are going to either a result of raising more money through taxes* or buying less things. Neither of these suggestions are popular so candidates suggest a magical third option of "eliminating waste" that no one opposes. But obviously the other party also wants to eliminate waste so it's a matter of competence. But both mainstream parties have access to people of the same competence. Like if you think McKinsey is the epitome of competence, either Tom Cotton or Pete Buttigieg are going to be in government and roughly equally good at administrating even if they want to administer different things. And that's ignoring that most of the actual work where waste can happen is done by bureaucrats unaffected by elections. The guy managing the kitchen at Fort Bragg or hiring park rangers isn't usually affected by politics. Waste - as in unintentional spending - simply isn't something that can be improved too much by switching from one group of ivy leaguers to another at the top of an organization.
Also notable is that this argument about parties of roughly equal competence only works for the mainstream parties. Fringe parties or groups simply aren't able to attract as many competent people. That's why we have a major government organization mostly run by 22 year olds. Trump and DOGE are not going to be able to attract big four accountants or anyone actually good at auditing. So even someone that supports DOGE's goals or ideology should question whether they actually have the ability to implement it.
*Interestingly Trump avoided campaigning on increased taxes or decreased services by a different third option - raising funds from non-Americans. It's Mexico paying for the wall, foreigners paying tariffs or Danes giving us Greenland.
There are hidden objectives behind these actions that make them add up to less than stupid. The biggest is the diversion they createwhile the GOP picks the national pocket to the tune of $7T. I mean they are stupid because we have one foot in the grave to begin with , and doge not only reversed all progress we mightve made in staving that off, but has greatly accelerated our race to that precipice. And they live on this planet like us all, despite musks fantasies
I'd prefer if Musk and his DOGGIES (the acronym means nothing now that I did that) never touched a cent of funding, and I say this as someone who is generally against what seems to be the entitement of team "Everything We Do Is an Obvious and Inarguable Good Because Our Professors Told Us So."
Nevertheless, a few moments of reflection should suffice to satisfy that more congressional oversight and greater transparency were far better paths forward than what's been happening. I understand the argument against: it would take too long; Dems wouldn't allow anything to be defunded. To which I say, "Oh, well." I may not like it either, but that's our democracy at work. If you don't like where your tax dollars are going, vote the bums out.
I would also point out that the maximalist rhetoric of the Fortune article doesn't strike me as entirely level-headed and trustworthy. I mean, are we supposed to just nodded sagely in agreement when scientists, who are being paid through grants, call the reductions a "death blow" when maybe they're underselling self-interest as part of the equation?
We've learned of fraud in peer-review journals; I think one Ivy League prof noted that grants are constantly being written to keep labs and staff operational (while defending the practice); Covid wasn't exactly a banner moment for The Science; and the United States has the worst healthcare performance among 10 nations. And that's while spending more than all of them on health care as a percentage of GDP. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024
So maybe, when a Johns Hopkins director dramatically proclaims, "It's the end of science as we know it" and another says the cuts will impact our ability to "provide ways of improving the lives of our citizens," we might gently push back and ask "How well is that going in the current system? Is there nothing we can be better at? The funding for indirects, the types of research being conducted —is it all off the table?"
There's good reason to think that DOGE is working just as it was intended to. But that it was never about efficiency, even a cack-handed version of it.
So far I still think it was worth it just to kill USAID. Either you believe their own account and they were mostly doing stupid things that sound like a right-wing parody of leftism, or you don't believe their stories and they were a CIA arm. Given the lovey-dovey relationship between them and John Bolton, I'm leaning toward the latter.
Also I love the consistency between:
> I would even tastefully applaud the “Good Ol’ College Try” scenario, in which Elon doesn’t reach the $1-$2 trillion that he promised, but still identities substantial savings
and
> Last week, DOGE downgraded its estimated saving to $150 billion. So: Welcome to the first installment of my insufferable gloating
Hey that's terrific. Really spicy work. You have given that horse another solid beating. Do you have any suggestions though for h ow to get the deficit, which is slowly choking the life out of America, under control. I have been a Republican for some several decades now. Telling me of all people that a budget control plan proposed by a Republican administration isnt working out the way it was intended isn't news. Certainly, musk and Trump have gotten farther than anyone else who has tried in the last fifty years, which is a sad statement indeed.
You have to know though that Trump cant run again, so the lackluster failure of DOGE wont actually hurt the electoral chances of any Republican. Throw in the fact that any single Democrat I vote for wont even try to cut anything. They will simply fire up the money printer and levy some higher taxes on anything they can. Democrats are objectively worse to vote for for anyone who cares about the Governments fiscal incontinence.
Im thrilled to keep reading your startling analysis that Washington is an ever consuming black hole of tax dollars. And in a way I wouldn't mind that it was such a thing if we got any sort of value for it. Throwing the Department of Education away wont really do a lot to close the gap. All of DOGEs efforts will ultimately be swallowed by entitlement payments and defense costs unless something is done about it. Those somethings will have to be slashing Medicare/Cade and Slashing Social Security. There really is no other option. If Musk foolishly believed otherwise it is a sort of noble foolishness, and though he only seems to have done a tenth of what he wanted, that is a tenth more than I as a Republican have been offered in decades.
The thing I see coming from y ou though is just smarmy cataloging of facts that any Republican who lived through the Tea Party Movement and The Rise and Fall of Paul Ryan could have told you.
Please, by all means. Bring your saltiest comments about Elon Musks penis size and your dirtiest slams on whatever else you like. Then follow it up with how we should go into a lot more debt to pay for gender reassignment surgeries and windfarms dotting the land as far as they eye can see, while putting European style Carbon taxes on anything and everything.
I will evaluate the two positions and take the one that is saving me a thin dime, over the one that promises the Green Nude Eel but even bigger and more expensive,.
I am not a doctor, but if somebody proposed applying mercury directly to an open wound "to bring the body in alignment with Pisces", I would not feel obligated to offer a better solution than "don't do that, you fucking moron".
Thats what you get out of DOGE trying to do what they are doing/ Then you dont have a better idea, because you arent being honest about their goals. Sure, you can think they suck at what they are doing, but we need to spend less. We are trillions in the red per year. It simply can not continue. Saving twenty bucks now is saving hundreds of dollars in debt payments. Have you ever had a credit card?
Again. No one else is pitching any sort of of proposal and while DOGE is doing less than they thought and less then I want, someone either needs to bring me ideas how to make DOGEs mission work, or an alternative plan that does put us on the Laffer curve to hell. Otherwise y our just kvetching while trillions in debt to China piles up.
Great. Lets do it. We just need a Dot Com boom to accompany the birth fo this new Internet thing, a lot more working age people as a ration to people on entitlements, a similar illegal immigrant population (What did Clinton have, a few million?) and .....
Bring me the federal budget as a percentage of GDP that Clinton had. When he was President it was 19 or so, Now its what, 27?
I am all for doing it the Clinton way as long as we can get back to at least the Budget/GDP ration going back to what it was and we can find some new economic sector we can expand and exploit (And actually I think we do have that in the chance to give birth to a true in space economic zone, with mining and manufacturing in orbit or on the moon. This would be at least the size of the internet and probably a lot bigger if we work our tails off for the next thirty years).
Also, Clinton did have a balanced budget but didnt do hardly anything to actually pay down the debt, which then of course exploded even more when he left.
"All of DOGEs efforts will ultimately be swallowed by entitlement payments and defense costs unless something is done about it. Those somethings will have to be slashing Medicare/Cade and Slashing Social Security."
You list two things that take all the money, but then only pick one of them for slashing. Why is that?
Also- "...we should go into a lot more debt to pay for gender reassignment surgeries [note: about $500k, if that] and windfarms dotting the land as far as they eye can see [note: maybe $4-$5 billion]..."
But of course those things generally speaking do NOT really contribute the debt we are in- entitlement payments and defense costs do, as you said. And if you just want to bitch about shit the government should not be spending money, there are just as many items the Republicans are happy to spend money on. I'll go next: how about removing all subsidies from the meat and dairy industry, please? That would save $38 billion.
The funny thing is, I'm all in on fiscal responsibility, so I genuinely want to know how you, as a Republican voter, perceive that they somehow save you that thin dime over the Dems. Because my perception is that they, for all their screaming about tax cuts and shutting the government down, have contributed more to the debt than any of the Democratic administrations, for all their supposed taxing and spending. DOGE appears to be just one more example of that.
Like I said. As a Republican I am used to debt cutting plans not working. I will note several things they have tried to do have been stopped by court orders, and what they really need, help from Congress, has not been forth coming. Look at the Social Security work they have done. They have tried to streamline some of it, reworking data centers, firing unwanted employees,, etc, and for their efforts it has been "REPUBLICANS WANT TO THROW GRANNY OFF A CLIFF AND END ALL SS PAYMENTS!!!! PANIC!!!!" and similar wildly dishonest rhetoric. Social Security and Medicare arent called the Third Rail for nothing.
I know the things I said about fringe expenses were fringe expenses and small potatoes stuff but we are broke. Broke. We spend Debt. We do not actually have any spare cash for anything. If any politician proposes one new dollar of federal spending for anything they are proposing more and more debt on top of the trillions we have. We Must Stop. There is nothing else to do. Literally, the feds paying for migrant transgender operations and studying the effect of climate change on LGBTQ populations in Brazil or whatever is money we spend on a credit card, and debt that contributes to our ruin. Even if somehow those expenses are "good" for America, we are only financing them with endless debt. It must stop.
"Any suggestions on how to get out of the deficit?" - step 1: do not extend tax cuts for rich people. Oh wait, remind me, what is the number 1 priority in Trump's bugdet?
Musk doesn't have illusions about the large entitlements, I would wager. The only ones who seem to have illusions about that are people who need to have those illusions to get elected. Like Donald Trump, who plans to not touch the entitlements, and pretty much anyone else who isn't a bit of a maverick.
Frankly, the bigger problem here is the lack of understanding what government "waste" really is. Yes, some of it is programs. Most of it is simply processes that are not efficient, automation that could be done, etc. Musk *could* try to clean up those sorts of things, but doing so would take 20 years and by the time you finished, you need to start all over again.
We *are* going to need a cut of some kind in entitlements. But no one party is going to do it on their own. It's going to be unpopular even if necessary, and they both need to jump into the pool together.
"Paid for" maybe in a political sense, but the government is paying out more every year than it's taking in. By law the cuts become mandatory around 2035.
Just this year, in 2025, a giveaway was done to people who had a different government pension system, and were covered by that instead of Social Security. But they now get to claim SS benefits, too. That took about 6 months off the life of the program by itself.
The government didn't take your SS taxes and put them into a money market fund for you and then give them back at retirement. It's a PAYGO system. Every single dollar that Social Security pays out to someone this year either comes from taxes the government collects this year or borrowing the government does this year.
The government in the 1980s did small changes to Social Security to extend its life through the 2030s. Small changes at that point made a big difference. Since then our leaders have done fuck-all about it, even making it worse like the law earlier this year.
Since we're waiting until the last minute, we're going to get massive benefit cuts and/or the biggest tax increase in history. I'll be retired by then and my entire voting cohort is going to say "yes, tax the working people more. After all, we **paid** for this, even though by definition the program is unsustainable since it was ignored over our entire working and voting life. Too bad, still-employed workers! We earned it!"
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
*EDIT* Oh, and for cutting defense spending first
1. Social Security
2. Interest on the debt
3. Health
4. Medicare
Each of those categories, by itself, is already bigger than the entire defense budget. They're all probably going to keep growing, too, faster than GDP+inflation.
It's a shame because there actually is plenty of waste to go after (albeit not as much as stated). Intelligent targeted cuts could make a difference. Instead there is going to a big backlash, plenty of disruption of spending even the average republican might agree with, and extra costs that don't net out. As you say, we need to look the welfare state for real cuts, which again needs to be done surgically or there will be huge opposition (which will prevent anything from succeeding), especially on social security. What we really need to cut through is the regulatory red tape that strangles business, that would unleash much more growth than any cost savings or tariffs to protect business.
It's all such a wasted opportunity. He started with a certain amount of credibility and instead of getting a few small wins to demonstrate competence and build momentum, he immediately began burning it.
Do you remember "$1 billion for a survey that could've been done on Survey Monkey?"
Even Daily Caller wanted to believe this, but they updated the article to lay out how it's bullshit.
Imagine someone took over WalMart and to save money issued a stop-work order to a random 10% of employees. Well, a bunch of truck drivers pull over their big rigs and their refrigerated contents spoil. Things pile up on the loading dock. Things aren't being restocked and sales aren't happening. The damage done to the company is very real and very fast and even starting it all back up it will take a while to recover.
A lot of the cuts are stupid, or stuff where maybe we shouldn't have spent the money but we've already spent most of it and now the smart money is to just finish the job.
> “We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day like that passes, our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. So far we are succeeding,” Musk added.
I respect that he's trying to be funny. But he also seems to be serious about his "critique".
However he's just doing what the rest of the leftoid hissy fitters do, taking half arsed clearly partisan takes from left wing media and running with them as if they are "facts". Because if Washington Post says it, it is definitely true but if Elon says it, it's definitely not.
For instance, his 500 billion less tax figure comes from a wapo article that quotes supposed estimates from "IRS insiders" who wish to remain anonymous. So we have a figure completely pulled out of thin air by people who won't go on the record, and likely despise trump, published by people who definitely despise trump, used to whack trump.
And he runs with that figure like it's come from a study or it's a real number somehow rather than a completely biased opinion reported by a reporter with a completely biased opinion. He's generous enough to halve the completely made up number though so I guess that's balance or something.
Maybe it's just super deep satire, he's satirizing musk by satirizing himself by satirizing how media currently references itself and a bunch of anonymous insider opinion to make itself look cleverer than it is. And then he references them to make him seem cleverer than he is in order to satirize musk who thinks he's cleverer than he is.
Meta humour is a bit hard for a meat sack like me who generally believes the government is not my friend which also makes me evil as well as stupid. That from a left that seemed to sleep through the whole GFC / COVID bullshit where the government endlessly shat in all of us while the rich and powerful kept getting their bonuses and kept going to nice restaurants without masks.
Oh and the guy they had in charge for the last 5 years was clearly a retard and some random cabal of people behind him that nobody voted for, must have been running the show because he was clearly too demented to do it himself.
But sure, having Elon and Doge is like unelected fascism or something and we should burn Tesla's.
It becomes yet another boring partisan take hiding behind the odd good joke here and there.
Jeff, you’re missing the true genius of this. Elon named it DOGE, which is an acronym for Department of Government Efficiency AND IT’S ALSO the name of an internet meme.
You think you’re that smart? Come on. Only a real genius could make something so good.
Easily the most cringe part of Elon isn't that he is always talking in memes, it's that he's always talking in memes that were dead and buried a decade ago.
What's next? Working with RFK on the Department of Can Haz Cheezburger? Doing the Gangnam Style dance on a state trip to South Korea? Starting a DOGE hiring agency called Youth Outreach Liaison Organization (YOLO)?
Saying "how do you do, fellow kids?"
Elon released an ironic rap song about Harambe in 2019. Completely baffling.
Plus, the acronym "DOGE" can stand for "Department of Government Evisceration," so it's not *completely* dishonest.
"Much saving! Very wow!"
Hey, now: It's not the size of one's budget cuts that matters. There are plenty of women out there who find $1T cuts too big, painfully big. They can get a lot more satisfaction from $150B cuts applied to just the right place.
“Most of Musk’s cuts are not obvious fraud that no sane person would support, but rather spending that conservatives don’t like.”
This is really it. I genuinely can’t tell if the DOGE effort was a ketamine-fuelled fantasy that they really could eliminate a trillion dollars of true waste and fraud, or an attempt to be cunning to bypass Congress in cutting stuff that conservatives don’t like without having to face the voters or make any hard tradeoffs or pay political capital.
If it’s the latter: it’s still bad but it’s a little more understandable. Believe it or not there was like a quarter of people up here in Canada who supported Trump at first, because of the “war on woke” that he was going to do. I distinctly remember people here in January just before Trudeau resigned cheering on Musk and wishing he’d come here next! And nobody gives a shit if they save the US taxpayer money or reduce the US debt, they just wanted Musk to kill social justice oriented programmes. (And then Trump started, you know, threatening our sovereignty, and putting destructive tariffs on everything, and that ended quickly.)
DOGE is going to be something that people sorta kinda remember as an event that's a footnote to the rat fucking the rest of the administration is doing to America and the world.
Dep't. Of Gimme Everything.
Thank you for your service in spreading the word on DOGE's epic level of idiocy. Unfortunately I think we may be suffering from mismatched definitions regarding DOGE's purpose. Like most decisions coming from the current mis-administration the goal is not to improve outcomes, but to make as big a mess as possible and then shrug, "See, gubmint just don't work!" And then dismantle more services and support that US citizens pay for and need to live "first world" lifestyles (enjoy it while you can). So the true test of DOGE's efficacy will ultimately be how much it allows Tr*mp and his cronies to gut Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. But I suspect you already understand this.
I enjoy the "incompetence" explanation more than the "it was all a pretext to hack the government's computers" explanation but if I'm being honest I don't enjoy either of those very much.
Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily broadcast, pronounces it "DOGGY"
which I've been doing since I first saw it. Seems fitting.....
You make a solid point about Jack the Ripper. For all his faults, he did get a lot of prostitutes off the streets.
"Jack the Ripper has gotten over 8 billion prostitutes off the streets."
What's been done has been so horribly destructive and damaging that there is no wit that can scale to meet it.
You're missing a big part of Elon's motivation. The "saving money" part is just a charade. The real issue is eliminating regulators who could be bothersome for Elon's vaporware empire, canceling contracts with competitors and assigning them to his companies, and eliminating bureaucracies to replace them with AI contraptions provided by guess who?
One of my favorite comedian/commentators is David Mitchell. I think this blog mentioned Peep Show once, his most famous show. Mitchell had a youtube series of short screeds around a decade ago and DOGE made me think of his one on government waste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoz5EuIF_y8
Summing it up (although please watch), targeting waste is always going to be a false promise, simply because there's always going to be certain amount of waste. Differences in budget are going to either a result of raising more money through taxes* or buying less things. Neither of these suggestions are popular so candidates suggest a magical third option of "eliminating waste" that no one opposes. But obviously the other party also wants to eliminate waste so it's a matter of competence. But both mainstream parties have access to people of the same competence. Like if you think McKinsey is the epitome of competence, either Tom Cotton or Pete Buttigieg are going to be in government and roughly equally good at administrating even if they want to administer different things. And that's ignoring that most of the actual work where waste can happen is done by bureaucrats unaffected by elections. The guy managing the kitchen at Fort Bragg or hiring park rangers isn't usually affected by politics. Waste - as in unintentional spending - simply isn't something that can be improved too much by switching from one group of ivy leaguers to another at the top of an organization.
Also notable is that this argument about parties of roughly equal competence only works for the mainstream parties. Fringe parties or groups simply aren't able to attract as many competent people. That's why we have a major government organization mostly run by 22 year olds. Trump and DOGE are not going to be able to attract big four accountants or anyone actually good at auditing. So even someone that supports DOGE's goals or ideology should question whether they actually have the ability to implement it.
*Interestingly Trump avoided campaigning on increased taxes or decreased services by a different third option - raising funds from non-Americans. It's Mexico paying for the wall, foreigners paying tariffs or Danes giving us Greenland.
There really is no equal to cutting British wit! Good recommendation.
There are hidden objectives behind these actions that make them add up to less than stupid. The biggest is the diversion they createwhile the GOP picks the national pocket to the tune of $7T. I mean they are stupid because we have one foot in the grave to begin with , and doge not only reversed all progress we mightve made in staving that off, but has greatly accelerated our race to that precipice. And they live on this planet like us all, despite musks fantasies
🤦🏼♂️
I'd prefer if Musk and his DOGGIES (the acronym means nothing now that I did that) never touched a cent of funding, and I say this as someone who is generally against what seems to be the entitement of team "Everything We Do Is an Obvious and Inarguable Good Because Our Professors Told Us So."
Nevertheless, a few moments of reflection should suffice to satisfy that more congressional oversight and greater transparency were far better paths forward than what's been happening. I understand the argument against: it would take too long; Dems wouldn't allow anything to be defunded. To which I say, "Oh, well." I may not like it either, but that's our democracy at work. If you don't like where your tax dollars are going, vote the bums out.
I would also point out that the maximalist rhetoric of the Fortune article doesn't strike me as entirely level-headed and trustworthy. I mean, are we supposed to just nodded sagely in agreement when scientists, who are being paid through grants, call the reductions a "death blow" when maybe they're underselling self-interest as part of the equation?
We've learned of fraud in peer-review journals; I think one Ivy League prof noted that grants are constantly being written to keep labs and staff operational (while defending the practice); Covid wasn't exactly a banner moment for The Science; and the United States has the worst healthcare performance among 10 nations. And that's while spending more than all of them on health care as a percentage of GDP. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024
So maybe, when a Johns Hopkins director dramatically proclaims, "It's the end of science as we know it" and another says the cuts will impact our ability to "provide ways of improving the lives of our citizens," we might gently push back and ask "How well is that going in the current system? Is there nothing we can be better at? The funding for indirects, the types of research being conducted —is it all off the table?"
There's good reason to think that DOGE is working just as it was intended to. But that it was never about efficiency, even a cack-handed version of it.
https://substack.com/@veteransupportingdemocracy/note/c-108159751
https://americanmanifesto.news/p/whistleblower-doge-exfiltrated-sensitive-data-and-exposed-us-systems-to-russia
https://www.wired.com/story/federal-auditors-doge-elon-musk/
https://www.avindman.com/p/how-is-doge-like-a-beirut-bank-heist
https://thucydidesii.substack.com/p/steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich
So far I still think it was worth it just to kill USAID. Either you believe their own account and they were mostly doing stupid things that sound like a right-wing parody of leftism, or you don't believe their stories and they were a CIA arm. Given the lovey-dovey relationship between them and John Bolton, I'm leaning toward the latter.
Also I love the consistency between:
> I would even tastefully applaud the “Good Ol’ College Try” scenario, in which Elon doesn’t reach the $1-$2 trillion that he promised, but still identities substantial savings
and
> Last week, DOGE downgraded its estimated saving to $150 billion. So: Welcome to the first installment of my insufferable gloating
Hey that's terrific. Really spicy work. You have given that horse another solid beating. Do you have any suggestions though for h ow to get the deficit, which is slowly choking the life out of America, under control. I have been a Republican for some several decades now. Telling me of all people that a budget control plan proposed by a Republican administration isnt working out the way it was intended isn't news. Certainly, musk and Trump have gotten farther than anyone else who has tried in the last fifty years, which is a sad statement indeed.
You have to know though that Trump cant run again, so the lackluster failure of DOGE wont actually hurt the electoral chances of any Republican. Throw in the fact that any single Democrat I vote for wont even try to cut anything. They will simply fire up the money printer and levy some higher taxes on anything they can. Democrats are objectively worse to vote for for anyone who cares about the Governments fiscal incontinence.
Im thrilled to keep reading your startling analysis that Washington is an ever consuming black hole of tax dollars. And in a way I wouldn't mind that it was such a thing if we got any sort of value for it. Throwing the Department of Education away wont really do a lot to close the gap. All of DOGEs efforts will ultimately be swallowed by entitlement payments and defense costs unless something is done about it. Those somethings will have to be slashing Medicare/Cade and Slashing Social Security. There really is no other option. If Musk foolishly believed otherwise it is a sort of noble foolishness, and though he only seems to have done a tenth of what he wanted, that is a tenth more than I as a Republican have been offered in decades.
The thing I see coming from y ou though is just smarmy cataloging of facts that any Republican who lived through the Tea Party Movement and The Rise and Fall of Paul Ryan could have told you.
Please, by all means. Bring your saltiest comments about Elon Musks penis size and your dirtiest slams on whatever else you like. Then follow it up with how we should go into a lot more debt to pay for gender reassignment surgeries and windfarms dotting the land as far as they eye can see, while putting European style Carbon taxes on anything and everything.
I will evaluate the two positions and take the one that is saving me a thin dime, over the one that promises the Green Nude Eel but even bigger and more expensive,.
I am not a doctor, but if somebody proposed applying mercury directly to an open wound "to bring the body in alignment with Pisces", I would not feel obligated to offer a better solution than "don't do that, you fucking moron".
Thats what you get out of DOGE trying to do what they are doing/ Then you dont have a better idea, because you arent being honest about their goals. Sure, you can think they suck at what they are doing, but we need to spend less. We are trillions in the red per year. It simply can not continue. Saving twenty bucks now is saving hundreds of dollars in debt payments. Have you ever had a credit card?
"Something must be done, and this is something, ergo it must be done."
Again. No one else is pitching any sort of of proposal and while DOGE is doing less than they thought and less then I want, someone either needs to bring me ideas how to make DOGEs mission work, or an alternative plan that does put us on the Laffer curve to hell. Otherwise y our just kvetching while trillions in debt to China piles up.
Clinton did it.
Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased?
A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/
Great. Lets do it. We just need a Dot Com boom to accompany the birth fo this new Internet thing, a lot more working age people as a ration to people on entitlements, a similar illegal immigrant population (What did Clinton have, a few million?) and .....
Bring me the federal budget as a percentage of GDP that Clinton had. When he was President it was 19 or so, Now its what, 27?
I am all for doing it the Clinton way as long as we can get back to at least the Budget/GDP ration going back to what it was and we can find some new economic sector we can expand and exploit (And actually I think we do have that in the chance to give birth to a true in space economic zone, with mining and manufacturing in orbit or on the moon. This would be at least the size of the internet and probably a lot bigger if we work our tails off for the next thirty years).
Also, Clinton did have a balanced budget but didnt do hardly anything to actually pay down the debt, which then of course exploded even more when he left.
"All of DOGEs efforts will ultimately be swallowed by entitlement payments and defense costs unless something is done about it. Those somethings will have to be slashing Medicare/Cade and Slashing Social Security."
You list two things that take all the money, but then only pick one of them for slashing. Why is that?
Also- "...we should go into a lot more debt to pay for gender reassignment surgeries [note: about $500k, if that] and windfarms dotting the land as far as they eye can see [note: maybe $4-$5 billion]..."
But of course those things generally speaking do NOT really contribute the debt we are in- entitlement payments and defense costs do, as you said. And if you just want to bitch about shit the government should not be spending money, there are just as many items the Republicans are happy to spend money on. I'll go next: how about removing all subsidies from the meat and dairy industry, please? That would save $38 billion.
The funny thing is, I'm all in on fiscal responsibility, so I genuinely want to know how you, as a Republican voter, perceive that they somehow save you that thin dime over the Dems. Because my perception is that they, for all their screaming about tax cuts and shutting the government down, have contributed more to the debt than any of the Democratic administrations, for all their supposed taxing and spending. DOGE appears to be just one more example of that.
Like I said. As a Republican I am used to debt cutting plans not working. I will note several things they have tried to do have been stopped by court orders, and what they really need, help from Congress, has not been forth coming. Look at the Social Security work they have done. They have tried to streamline some of it, reworking data centers, firing unwanted employees,, etc, and for their efforts it has been "REPUBLICANS WANT TO THROW GRANNY OFF A CLIFF AND END ALL SS PAYMENTS!!!! PANIC!!!!" and similar wildly dishonest rhetoric. Social Security and Medicare arent called the Third Rail for nothing.
I know the things I said about fringe expenses were fringe expenses and small potatoes stuff but we are broke. Broke. We spend Debt. We do not actually have any spare cash for anything. If any politician proposes one new dollar of federal spending for anything they are proposing more and more debt on top of the trillions we have. We Must Stop. There is nothing else to do. Literally, the feds paying for migrant transgender operations and studying the effect of climate change on LGBTQ populations in Brazil or whatever is money we spend on a credit card, and debt that contributes to our ruin. Even if somehow those expenses are "good" for America, we are only financing them with endless debt. It must stop.
One suggestion he had in the article was to not cut the IRS. Avoiding firing 20,000 IRS employees would decrease the deficit by around $500 billion.
"Any suggestions on how to get out of the deficit?" - step 1: do not extend tax cuts for rich people. Oh wait, remind me, what is the number 1 priority in Trump's bugdet?
Musk doesn't have illusions about the large entitlements, I would wager. The only ones who seem to have illusions about that are people who need to have those illusions to get elected. Like Donald Trump, who plans to not touch the entitlements, and pretty much anyone else who isn't a bit of a maverick.
Frankly, the bigger problem here is the lack of understanding what government "waste" really is. Yes, some of it is programs. Most of it is simply processes that are not efficient, automation that could be done, etc. Musk *could* try to clean up those sorts of things, but doing so would take 20 years and by the time you finished, you need to start all over again.
We *are* going to need a cut of some kind in entitlements. But no one party is going to do it on their own. It's going to be unpopular even if necessary, and they both need to jump into the pool together.
Like all such changes, it will be done when it’s an emergency.
They are things we've paid for, though. Cut some from the pentagon before you cut the benefits we worked our lives for and paid for. No?
"Paid for" maybe in a political sense, but the government is paying out more every year than it's taking in. By law the cuts become mandatory around 2035.
Just this year, in 2025, a giveaway was done to people who had a different government pension system, and were covered by that instead of Social Security. But they now get to claim SS benefits, too. That took about 6 months off the life of the program by itself.
The government didn't take your SS taxes and put them into a money market fund for you and then give them back at retirement. It's a PAYGO system. Every single dollar that Social Security pays out to someone this year either comes from taxes the government collects this year or borrowing the government does this year.
The government in the 1980s did small changes to Social Security to extend its life through the 2030s. Small changes at that point made a big difference. Since then our leaders have done fuck-all about it, even making it worse like the law earlier this year.
Since we're waiting until the last minute, we're going to get massive benefit cuts and/or the biggest tax increase in history. I'll be retired by then and my entire voting cohort is going to say "yes, tax the working people more. After all, we **paid** for this, even though by definition the program is unsustainable since it was ignored over our entire working and voting life. Too bad, still-employed workers! We earned it!"
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
*EDIT* Oh, and for cutting defense spending first
1. Social Security
2. Interest on the debt
3. Health
4. Medicare
Each of those categories, by itself, is already bigger than the entire defense budget. They're all probably going to keep growing, too, faster than GDP+inflation.
It's a shame because there actually is plenty of waste to go after (albeit not as much as stated). Intelligent targeted cuts could make a difference. Instead there is going to a big backlash, plenty of disruption of spending even the average republican might agree with, and extra costs that don't net out. As you say, we need to look the welfare state for real cuts, which again needs to be done surgically or there will be huge opposition (which will prevent anything from succeeding), especially on social security. What we really need to cut through is the regulatory red tape that strangles business, that would unleash much more growth than any cost savings or tariffs to protect business.
It's all such a wasted opportunity. He started with a certain amount of credibility and instead of getting a few small wins to demonstrate competence and build momentum, he immediately began burning it.
Do you remember "$1 billion for a survey that could've been done on Survey Monkey?"
https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/27/federal-government-musk-billion-survey-thousands-tax-payer-bret-baier/
Even Daily Caller wanted to believe this, but they updated the article to lay out how it's bullshit.
Imagine someone took over WalMart and to save money issued a stop-work order to a random 10% of employees. Well, a bunch of truck drivers pull over their big rigs and their refrigerated contents spoil. Things pile up on the loading dock. Things aren't being restocked and sales aren't happening. The damage done to the company is very real and very fast and even starting it all back up it will take a while to recover.
A lot of the cuts are stupid, or stuff where maybe we shouldn't have spent the money but we've already spent most of it and now the smart money is to just finish the job.
> “We are cutting the waste and fraud in real time. So every day like that passes, our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. So far we are succeeding,” Musk added.
I respect that he's trying to be funny. But he also seems to be serious about his "critique".
However he's just doing what the rest of the leftoid hissy fitters do, taking half arsed clearly partisan takes from left wing media and running with them as if they are "facts". Because if Washington Post says it, it is definitely true but if Elon says it, it's definitely not.
For instance, his 500 billion less tax figure comes from a wapo article that quotes supposed estimates from "IRS insiders" who wish to remain anonymous. So we have a figure completely pulled out of thin air by people who won't go on the record, and likely despise trump, published by people who definitely despise trump, used to whack trump.
And he runs with that figure like it's come from a study or it's a real number somehow rather than a completely biased opinion reported by a reporter with a completely biased opinion. He's generous enough to halve the completely made up number though so I guess that's balance or something.
Maybe it's just super deep satire, he's satirizing musk by satirizing himself by satirizing how media currently references itself and a bunch of anonymous insider opinion to make itself look cleverer than it is. And then he references them to make him seem cleverer than he is in order to satirize musk who thinks he's cleverer than he is.
Meta humour is a bit hard for a meat sack like me who generally believes the government is not my friend which also makes me evil as well as stupid. That from a left that seemed to sleep through the whole GFC / COVID bullshit where the government endlessly shat in all of us while the rich and powerful kept getting their bonuses and kept going to nice restaurants without masks.
Oh and the guy they had in charge for the last 5 years was clearly a retard and some random cabal of people behind him that nobody voted for, must have been running the show because he was clearly too demented to do it himself.
But sure, having Elon and Doge is like unelected fascism or something and we should burn Tesla's.
It becomes yet another boring partisan take hiding behind the odd good joke here and there.