Some like to follow along in the text at 1.25 speed.
I recently heard from my cousin Danny.1 He is among my favorite relatives, though our politics differ. He shared an article with me over social media regarding DOGE and the Veterans Administration. I provide here, my comments on that article.
Oh! The poor wretches!
I was surprised at how light an impact DOGE has had to date. I was sure, at the beginning, they were going to cut a swath across government a mile wide. They haven’t. To date they have only shrunk federal spending by $150 billion dollars. PEANUTS. And yes, heartless me, I am disappointed. The federal leviathan is out of control.
Before DOGE started its lame slicing of the budget, I made a prediction. As soon as cuts started, the media would go on a hunt for the most pathetic stories they could find to say “See? Look at the poor wretches DOGE is destroying. Trump hates America. Elon hates people!…blah blah, blah.”
And the lame ass media did not disappoint. One of the first targets for scrutiny was USAID. That’s basically an intelligence arm of the federal government. They do the occasional sweet thing to make people believe the “AID” part of their name is legit…but it’s not. The activity got slashed on a Thursday. As predicted, The following Sunday 60 Minutes already had their wretches lined up.
Christina Dry and Adam Dubard told us how people worried about where their next paycheck would come from, and then the DOGE monster showed up and it’s “all gone, overnight.” It was such a dramatic moment that Scott Pelley repeated the line for dramatic effect. Except these two well paid federal employees were going to get 8 months severance PLUS benefits! I shed not a tear.
And so it has gone since the beginning. With each cut recommended by DOGE and ordered by the department in question, somebody somewhere would come up with a sad story. The implication, of course, is that since it is a sad story an offense had been committed, an abuse.
This is the upshot of the article Danny sent. It was published by a group called Vets Vote. It decries the injustice of cuts at the VA. This same VA had fewer people and spent less money in 2015 than it did in 2024. And service and efficiency were infinitely better in 2015. VV is a Left wing political organization tarted up to be a Veterans’ advocacy group. They are even soliciting more sad stories they can print. It’s at the top of the article.
As for cuts across the board…sorry, troops. Most of the people involved in ALL of the firings were hired by the Biden administration. The mission of the federal government has not grown since 2019, or even 2015. But to truss up employment numbers, Obama’s third term went on a hiring spree. Since we have for decades, spent more money than we take in, it can be accurately said that all these positions were paid for with borrowed, freshly printed money. They all represented more debt, on top of the existing insanity. And the government was not accomplishing more than it used to. They do less or don’t do their jobs as well. Lives of the citizens were not enhanced by their presence. Several people were now doing redundant work. So when the adults showed up, we knew the gravy train would have to slow down. The offense, if you want to call it that, was done by whoever ran the Biden administration. DOGE is just fixing that…a little.
Further, it is not the job of the federal government to employ people for the sake of employing people. It is understood that the government should not waste our tax dollars, no matter how good doing so might feel; no matter how incumbents may benefit politically. And while we’re hiring for no reason, we have millions of sq. ft of federal office space standing empty.2 Make THAT make sense.
Cut YOUR stuff? Cut MY stuff too!
I benefit from three programs that are federally funded. I have a Navy pension, I will start drawing Social Security when I’m 703, and I get treated by the VA. I try to rely on my insurance to the greatest extent possible to avoid wasting tax dollars.
I vehemently contend that every department in the federal government can endure MAJOR cuts and it won’t do any damage to citizens (other than the layoffs that SHOULD take place). And if such is the case, it is only proper I take a hit too. Once we eliminate useless departments, like the Department of Education,4 and shrink over bloated entities like the EPA5, we start trimming the fat in real departments.
I favor the Mack Penny plan or something like it.6 Cut 1 % per year from every department for perhaps 6 or 7 years. There was a time when doing so would balance the budget in 6 years. I don’t know if that is true now after all the damage the spending monkeys did since Covid. But you’d make a hell of a dent. The entire federal beast could sail through the first four years just eliminating redundancies. AND YES, THAT WOULD REQUIRE LAYOFFS!
Example: Social Security and DoD could lay off an army of bookkeepers by NOT taxing retirement and SS payments. At the same time, you reduce all those payments to a level that reflects the elimination of the effective tax rate. That way you don’t have all those extra people, after others have already handed you something, calculating what you have to give right back. It’s a gimmick. A pointless exercise.
But let’s pretend for just a moment there were entities in the federal government that ran at 100% efficiency. Let’s pretend HUD was such a department and a 1% cut would mean a 1% reduction in payments to recipients. Well, that’s based on what a landlord is allowed to charge a tenant on Housing Assistance.7 The government, if it had two brain cells to rub together, would insist Section 8 landlords accept 1% less to rent space on the taxpayers’ dime. And of course, if you know ANYTHING about economics, you know the industries these landlords rely on would react accordingly.
But absolutely NO federal government department runs anywhere near 100% efficiency. So there is HUGE space for improvement and savings to the taxpayer. The tax payer doesn’t OWE anyone a job.
Bottom line: Sad stories are not the building blocks of sound governance. We never should have put many tens of thousands of people in a position such that when the gravy train had to roll to a stop, they’d be out on their asses. But now that it has stopped, only the intellectually dishonest would blame the guy who said this was all bullshit to begin with, as surely it was.
Cheers.
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Danny was a cousin by marriage and that marriage didn’t last. I still consider all Jackie’s cousins as family. There all good peeps.
Many of these facilities are new acquisitions, often new construction. They are entirely unjustified and a complete waste of billions of dollars. Beneficiaries of the largess include Congress members, their staffs, their families and assorted cronies who own politicians inside the beltway.
The idea was to max out. But they’ll change that before I get there - so I will likely have passed on tens of thousands of dollars for nothing.
It never contributed to the education of a single individual. It exists as a hiring factory and to support the teachers union leadership in their ever expanding quest for union dues. No child has benefited from the DOEd’s existence.
The EPA can be a quarter of its present size and me moved under another department; likely Interior.
See details here.
Such assistance used to be called Section 8. But people got their panties in a bunch because getting tossed from the military used to called getting a “Section 8” discharge. That’s what Max Klinger was gaming for 11 seasons.
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