MAKE AMERICA GAG AGAIN

There is bloat in Washington!

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to eliminate bloat in the federal work force! As a start, by God, they will require that everyone report to the office a full five days a week. They believe thousands of civil service employees are so lazy and will be so annoyed that they will quit en masse! This could potentially lead to a government shutdown, economic turmoil, social disruption, etc. How this will save more money than it will cost is unclear.  Their goal is to slash $2 trillion from the $8.5 trillion federal budget. Revenues are about $6.5 trillion. So, one can see where they're going: cut 2 trillion and balance the budget!

Labor is the largest cost in most enterprises, private or public but controlling payroll is a tricky business. Musk’s Method: when he bought Twitter, now X, he savagely gashed — on day one — top to bottom. Later he hired back some of the same people. First-fuck-it then-fix-it.

The “ 'Department' of Government Efficiency” will be created to carry out the cuts. The “department” tag is a misnomer sure to confuse. Named from a crypto coin, DOGE is not actually going to be a department but rather an all-volunteer “planning commission”. The names of other members, if any, are not yet known. When Elon and Vivek have figured out how to abolish the admittedly cumbersome civil service protections afforded 2.3 million federal workers and when thousands are walking the streets, the costs of relief efforts to assist them will of course grow exponentially. Let ‘em eat cake!    

Lots of taxpayer money is wasted annually. No one really knows how much: it depends on how “waste” is defined. For a starter, take the fiscal 2024 defense department budget of over $850 billion. Personnel is not really the problem because the headcount has actually declined. The Defense Department's 2022 Demographics Profile of the Military Community states the number of service members dropped 2.7% from the previous year.

It’s all those toys that cost the trillions! By one estimate (there are many out there and they all differ) one Musk Space X rocket costs $5-10 billion to develop and $100 million per launch. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has stated that the cost of a Starship launch could eventually be as low as $10 million. A bit more than a Jeep or even a tank. How can we cut the superfluity of such high-priced toys? What will the people who play with them do? Maybe lay them off in the first round of cuts? How much can Musk’s federal contracts -- exceeding $100 billion a year be slashed? How will we populate Mars if they cut Space X because it’s too expensive? No worries. That toy will survive.

Then there’s Vivek Ramaswamy. Rather Smarmy. He is a pasteboard presence, a unidimensional cartoon, a barking dog, out-trumping Trump. He is the (now billionaire) founder and CEO of Roivant Sciences, a healthcare company that uses technology to develop drugs and build healthcare technology companies. A dummy he is not: before going rabid, he attended Yale Law School with a fellowship award from George Soros which he declines to mention. A lawyer, an entrepreneur and an ingrate.

Musk is a whip smart weirdo who builds a nice car and a rocket that went up and came down. He is a major suck on the government udder with $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year — with 17 federal agencies. He is always described as “ … the world’s richest man.”