As you surely must realize, neither President Elon Musk nor his orange sock puppet is the least bit concerned about government efficiency or waste. If they were, President Musk would not have received billions in government contracts since assuming his post on the throne atop the hill. What DOGE does is exactly what the Fox White House has pledged to do all along: go after people and organizations that the MAGA cult does not like, in an effort to settle some kind of vendetta for imagined injuries and offenses.

Nor is either of them the least bit competent in compiling their hit list. At one point they gleefully proclaimed DOGE had discovered that Social Security payments were going out to people who would be 150 years old if they were alive. It did no such thing, of course. What this reveals is a cringeworthy ignorance of a computer programming idiosyncracy — involving, I gather, the computer language COBOL, which has been around since the Stone Age.

When the birth year of an individual entered into the database is unknown, the system substitutes 1875 as a placeholder, apparently on the theory that it was so long ago it will preclude any confusion. But the programmers severely underestimated how idiotic some idiots can be. Even I, a decided non-geek, have been aware of this quirk for a long time. And yet a supposed technical genius like President Elon was not. And it goes without saying that his tangerine-tinted footstool is not, either.

On his Truth Social propaganda page, the cardboard chief executive posted this:

DOGE: Looks like the Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department Of Defense to study “large scale social deception”. GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!

As you might gather, the Reuters they were referring to is the news agency. But that’s not the organization that the DOD contracted with. It was Thomson Reuters, a totally unrelated cyber security firm. Do these people even know how to Google???

DOGE also found that a program in Pennsylvania was helping kids to “transition”, so just like that, the cord was cut. Mustn’t do anything to help people switch genders, you know. Except that’s not what the program did. It helped students with disabilities make the transition to adulthood. DOGE just saw the word “transition”, and bingo, that was enough to bring the axe down.

And DOGE got wind that the U.S. was spending 50 million dollars to supply Hamas with condoms, so of course President Musk put a stop to that pronto. And his cantaloupe-visaged teabagger proudly announced the move, and even speculated that Hamas had been using the condoms somehow to make bombs. Except it wasn’t Hamas of Gaza that was receiving the condoms; it was Hamas, a province in Mozambique.

These are the stable geniuses playing around with your Social Security number.

Nothing exemplifies the Bizarro Planet nature of conservative budget-slashing mania better than MAGAworld’s unhinged, bigoted, calculatedly cruel obsession with DEI. Like most other things these people are obsessed with, they have no hint of a clue what DEI really is or what it does. They just know that the libs like it, and by god that’s all they need. And nothing illustrates this better than Greg Abbott, govern-err of the Republic Of Teksizz, rolling in his wheel chair up a ramp in the state capitol installed because of DEI initiatives, to sign a bill outlawing DEI. Thanks, Greg, you provided an excellent segue into our central point here.

In addition to cosmic ineptitude, sheer ignorance, and intentional cruelty directed toward the most vulnerable members of society, a major problem with the budget-slashing obsession is that it’s almost totally one-sided. It deliberately chops off one end of the seesaw, focusing only on the costs of a particular program, and never on its benefits. Thus, arts programs have always been a favorite tar baby of right-wingers. It’s very easy to figure out how much money is being spent on the arts; but it’s practically impossible to accurately gauge the returns, especially in monetary terms. How many teens have been spared from suicide or a life in the doldrums or destructive behavior because they were given the opportunity to play a musical instrument, learn to dance, or perform in a theatrical production? And how many people’s lives have they in turn impacted? What is the dollar value of all those lives?

Some programs, however, are considerably easier to assess. As of this writing, the budget slashers have their crosshairs on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which, by the time you read this, may already be history. The NOAA includes the National Weather Service, which is a very crucial department indeed. And one study found that for every dollar spent on the NWS, it returns $73.98 in value. There’s nothing even remotely efficient about eliminating a service like that. On the contrary, it’s the epitome of inefficiency.

The GOP slashers, in fact, have a consistent habit of targeting things that produce results of greater monetary value than the funds they consume. National Parks. The IRS. CFPB. SNAP. (Most likely, this roster also includes”Illegal” immigrants.) It isn’t hard to see how President Elon and his apricot-hued boot swab have managed to piss away so much cash on Tesla, Twitter, and casinos.

And then there’s the one they’re REALLY obsessed over, USAID — which they’ve called a “Democrat (sic) slush fund”, a “CIA shill”, and even — I kid you not — a “criminal organization”, among many other things. USAID used less than ONE percent of the federal budget — while providing 42 percent of humanitarian aid. To people who really, really needed it.

Well, so what. We can’t take care of the rest of the world, can we? After all, Amurrca First and stuff. What’s in it for us?

Plenty, actually. Marco Rubio proclaimed:

Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?

Which very crisply illustrates why people like Marco Rubio should not be allowed within 100 miles of a government office, much less in the capacity of anything so prestigious as Secretary Of State. It’s bad enough that he has the attitude not only of “America First”, but “America only, and screw the rest of the world”. What is perhaps even worse is that he is unable to see that helping the rest of the world also helps America and Americans.

In a piece for U.S. News and World Reports, Professor Natasha Lindstaedt, Director of Education at the University Of Essex, England, concisely answers these questions with regard to USAID. She explains how it absolutely does make America stronger, safer and more prosperous. In short, it makes America greater, which supposedly is the goal of the MAGA cult. Quoting Professor LIndstaedt:

USAID also supported democracy, civil society, economic development and land mine clearance in war zones, and efforts to fight organized crime, terrorism and conflict. The gutting of USAID will have a profound impact on human security….

As we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic that began in China, diseases have no borders. And while preventing the spread of deadly diseases to U.S. soil is one concern, allowing infectious diseases to ravage populations far away also poses a threat to U.S. security interests….

The U.S. also provides economic development assistance to strengthen local economies across Latin America, for example, to provide alternatives to illegal drug cultivation, narcotics trafficking and human trafficking, all of which are threats to American and global security….

USAID has engaged in preventive security, staving off threats such as organized crime, terrorism, violent extremism and conflict before they manifest. Slashing U.S. assistance will also prevent Washington from strengthening relationships with countries in the developing world that are critical to our competition with China…

The work of USAID in supporting poverty alleviation creates new markets for U.S. investment and trade. By building local economies, countries around the world become more economically interdependent with the U.S., which increases U.S. economic power and influence.

You’d think that someone in Rubio’s position, or President Elon’s position, or even his sherbet-shaded knob polisher’s position would be able to figure out all of this for himself. At least you’d hope so. But alas.

When you help others, you help yourself. When you hurt others, you hurt yourself. All of us are going to be harmed by the broligarchy’s deranged compulsion to damage people they don’t like. Well, all of us except the billionaires, who’ve now managed to create a position of absolute immunity for themselves. Nice work if you can get it.

Quite a few people are already reaping the harvest from their support for this regime.

If you’re not familiar with the expression “face-eating leopards”, you might want to look it up. Chances are you’ll be hearing it quite a bit in the days ahead.

Some people, however, still buy into the hilarious whopper that President X and his pumpkin-puss butt sniffer are actually saving them money. Because, you know, sharks and batteries and windmills and Hannibal Lecter and people eating pets and stuff. You might see a list going around of all the supposedly wasteful and frivolous expenditures that they’ve supposedly found (without doing any audits) and supposedly eliminated (at the snap of their fingers).

Most of these, if they are real, would actually be quite positive and constructive — and beneficial for America in the long run. Others are highly dubious. But in any case, if you look at such a list and your response is outrage, congratulations. The billionaire bros have you eating right out of their hand. Don’t you dare question whether such a list is accurate. Don’t you dare investigate why the U.S. would invest in a program, and what its benefits might be.

And above all, don’t you dare wonder how much all the “savings” are going to cost you.