Maybe the real fraud was the fraud that DOGE made up along the way
The Legal Eagle YouTube channel’s latest video is a great summary of the fraud that Elon Musk and his DOGE minions have found — and it’s nowhere near as much as they claim.
Among some of the points made in the video:
- Much of the spending that DOGE have tried to cancel was already approved by the Congress — that is, the legislature. In other words, that spending was law. If there are problems with such spending, there’s a process for reviewing and changing it, and DOGE ain’t part of it.
- DOGE made a lot of false claims, such as “Condoms for Gaza.” The truth:
- The math just isn’t mathing. The half-trillion, or trillion, or multiple trillion is savings. Consider:
- This New York Times article, DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million. For those of you who are bad at math, 8 million is one thousand times smaller than 8 billion. After this article came out, DOGE removed the screenshot they used as “proof” of their claim.
- 60% of the federal workforce work at the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, and Trump promised not to touch them (although 1,000 people in Veterans Affairs have already been let go). The remaining 40% account for $108 billion, and even if you managed to fire 1 in every 3 of them, you’d have a $72 billion in savings. That’s paltry compared to what you’d save if you cut what the government pays in subsidies to the very profitable oil industry: $757 billion.
I’m fine with auditing government spending, but by actual auditors, and not Dollar General Lex Luthor.
David Brooks (ugh) on Friday’s moral injury
I would usually have issues with quoting David Brooks — generally because he’s a bit of a fuddy-duddy “Man Karen,” but specifically because he dumped his long-time wife, suspiciously around the time he and his much younger (23 years) writing assistant while they were working on his book, The Road to Character.
So it’s with some distaste that I quote him here, but what he said in his summary of the mobster-style shakedown that Trump give Volodymyr Zelenskyy last Friday, but damn it, the philandering milquetoast has a point…
Brooks:
I was nauseated, just nauseated. All my life, I have had a certain idea of about America, that we’re a flawed country, but we’re fundamentally a force for good in the world, that we defeated Soviet Union, we defeated fascism, we did the Marshall Plan, we did PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) to help people live in Africa. And we make mistakes, Iraq, Vietnam, but they’re usually mistakes out of stupidity, naivete and arrogance.
They’re not because we’re ill-intentioned. What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen.
Donald Trump believes in one thing. He believes that might makes right. And, in that, he agrees with Vladimir Putin that they are birds of a feather. And he and Vladimir Putin together are trying to create a world that’s safe for gangsters, where ruthless people can thrive. And we saw the product of that effort today in the Oval Office.
And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.
Presidential counselor Alina Habba on veterans fired by DOGE: “Perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.”
She said:
You know, we care about veterans tremendously. But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work.
That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means, we are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment or not willing to come to work.
And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work. It’s just not acceptable.
Veterans account for about a third of federal workers, and so far, this administration has fired 6,000 of them.
Lesson 2 from On Tyranny: Defend institutions!
In the previous Notes for the Kakistocracy, I posted the first lesson from historian Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, which was “Do not obey in advance.” Here’s the second: Defend institutions.
“Elbows up!”
Kudos to fellow Canadian and Torontonian Mike Myers — not just for his performance as Elon Musk in Saturday Night Live’s cold open last Saturday, but for his T-shirt at the closing…
…and this gesture, which any good Canadian will recognize:
That’s “elbows up!”, a hockey (and also boxing) expression that means “protect yourself and fight back,” and it’s become a popular catchphrase in light of the Trump tariffs, which are completely unjustified and whose purpose is to weaken Canada to make it easier to take over.