President Musk, citing the illusory "overwhelming mandate"* given to Der Furor in the election, has been taking a chainsaw to the federal government, his unsupervised and unqualified flunkies slashing positions at will without any apparent thought to the impact of those cuts. As an example, the administration last week was frantically trying to re-hire some 200 persons fired from the Department of Energy ... after learning that their positions were responsible for the security of our nuclear weapons stockpile. Ruthless cuts to the Federal Aviation Agency are likely to undermine air travel safety and may have contributed to the recent rash of deadly aircraft accidents. Other cuts and tariff impositions will likely slam farmers (mainly in red states of the midwest) who depend on federal loans and exports (largely via the now-defunct USAID) for their livelihood, and gut support to schools in low-income and rural areas that depend on government grants to compensate for low local tax revenue to support education.
These are examples of what I like to call "DOGE's Law of Mission Accomplishment: anything is possible when you don't know what you're doing."
There are, however, a lot of positions across the government that can now safely be cut: the jobs of those who handle the calls from our allies. There won't be very many of those calls to answer in the future, now that JD Vance, in an astounding display of crude, bullying behavior and diplomatic ineptitude that did credit to his boss, demeaned and insulted our closest allies at last week's Munich Security Conference.
After needlessly alienating both Canada and Mexico, the administration has shown that it's approach to the world is not "America First," but "America Only," and that it is uninterested in mutual benefit - only crass, one-sided advantage that ignores the legitimate concerns of our closest allies.
Of course, a counterargument can be made that those call receivers could be kept busy answering calls from the autocrats and despots whose approval Der Furor craves ... but since such callers are probably on Der Furor's speed-dial already, he won't need any administrative or technical assistance or, for that matter, advice from Cabinet departments already neutered, an obedient Congress, and courts he is already primed to ignore.
The popular acronym nowadays is FAFO - [Mess] Around and Find Out ... and Americans who voted for an agenda they didn't fully understand are slowly finding out.
Have a good day, and do what you can to preserve what little competent and effective government we have left. You'd better be planning to vote in the 2026 midterms ... assuming annoying things like free and fair elections are still here.
More thoughts coming.
Bilbo
* It needs to be repeated - often - that there was NO "overwhelming mandate" for Der Furor. In fact, he won a bare majority of the popular vote: 77,303,573 (49.8%), as opposed to the 75,019,257 (48.3%) won by Kamala Harris. This is hardly an "overwhelming mandate," although Der Furor and his supporters like to claim it is.
2 comments:
The Musk/DOGE team are turning out to be even more incompetent than I expected, which is in keeping with how surprisingly inarticulate Musk was in his Oval Office appearance. Computer proficiency is only that, and it's not a substitute for common sense OR knowledge gained through relevant training and long experience.
The only thing overwhelming about tRUMP is his lies.
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