Stop Corruption and Waste in the Federal Government

Stop Corruption and Waste in the Federal Government?

Shut down DOGE and End Presidential Immunity 

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

It doesn’t take much digging to see how graft, grifting, corruption and lucrative conflicts dominate what passes for Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And yes, Musk does run DOGE as the President himself declared in his recent address to Congress. For example, Musk’s closings and reprioritizing governmental agencies under his DOGE rubric often have hidden meanings. As he pushes to shut down and de-staff NASA’s traditional function over placement of strategic satellites, he suggests they just focus on their Mars mission, guess which private company is slated to take over those “normal NASA functions”? Hmm? Could it be Musk’s SpaceX? Musk is also pushing competitors, like Verizon, to leave the placement of new communications satellites… so Musk can have them.

Specifically, Musk makes millions of dollars a day from federal contracts. “As billionaire businessman Elon Musk has been leading an unprecedented effort to slash government spending, his own companies have, over the last several years, received an increasing amount of funding through government contracts, according to federal spending data… Over the last decade, Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla were awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts, according to spending data -- with SpaceX winning more than $17 billion worth of contracts since 2015… Federal contracts to SpaceX doubled at the beginning of the Biden administration, going from $1.1 billion in the 2020 fiscal year to $2.2 billion in the 2021 fiscal year. The contracts continued to grow under Biden, reaching $3.7 billion during the 2024 fiscal year.” ABC News, February 10th. And the grift just keeps on coming.

Maybe you think it’s perfectly normal for the President of the United States, standing in front of the White House, to market cars… in this case Musk’s Teslas. Or that that same President, who once declared crypto currencies to be a scam, is now hyper-accelerating the value of his own family’s recent foray into crypto (and significantly enhancing Musk’s crypto holdings) by announcing his plans to create a federal crypto reserve, thus “legitimizing the scam”… one which recently allowed North Korea to hack its way to a $1.5 billion online cryptocurrency heist. Maybe you prefer gold sneakers, Trump bibles, expensive gold watches, TruthSocial stock, nice red hats, or even that wonderful $5 million dollar gold card, a path to US citizenship.

Even using Jesus as a launching platform for unscrupulous religious solicitations of for “donations.” On February 7th, President Donald Trump issued an executive order reinstating his version of the White House Faith Office and once again placing Florida pastor and longtime supporter Paula White-Cain in charge of the initiative. White has an office in the White House and has used her appointment to promise all kinds of God-bestowed life enhancing benefits and tangible religious artifacts to those who donate $1000 or more to her ministry. Holy grift, Batman!

Republicans have all kinds of excuses to cut taxes for the rich, none of them valid when actually used. Like “a rising tide floats all boats” or “incent the job creators” which neither produces more good jobs or adds critical investment for the betterment of the nation. Most of the cuts sponsored by DOGE are not reductions to save money but are more focused on Trump’s culture war and his promised massive tax cut mostly benefitting billionaires.

Look at the focus only on cutting Social Security benefits to keep the system solvent, when the very basis for funding Social Security has been obsolete for decades. See my March 28th A Monarchy Does Not Desire or Require Logic and the Rule of Law blog if you want the details. Cutting IRS staffing is estimated to reduce tax collections by 10% or more, and the “savings” from DOGE’s other cuts – even before the lawsuits under civil service laws are taken into consideration – is not remotely what is touted. The above NY Times charts (from March 31st) suggest the federal budget is NOT coming down, and most of federal budgets are mandatory expenses (like paying interest on our deficit or supporting Social Security).

An analysis in the NY Times’ The Morning news feed for March 31st, by German Lopez and Ashley Wu is most informative: “Discussions about federal spending are difficult because the numbers are so large that they can be difficult to grasp. How many ordinary folks can truly comprehend how much $1 billion — that’s a thousand millions — is? And still, it’s a rounding error (just 0.01 percent of spending) compared with the nearly $7 trillion federal budget.

“This is the context for the federal spending cuts led by President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, the administration announced its latest dismissals: 10,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services. That sounds like a lot of people, but it’s small for a government that employs three million civilian workers.

“How much has DOGE pared back so far? Federal spending is actually higher this year than it was at this point in 2024, according to the Hamilton Project… For years, many economists downplayed concerns about the debt. Interest rates were low, and debt payments — the cost of borrowing all that money — were consequently low, too. Inflation was also low, which suggested that government spending hadn’t overheated the economy… But interest rates and inflation have increased. Today, the federal government spends more to pay off its debt each year than it spends on Medicare or the military. Economists now warn that the federal debt is piling up too quickly.

“At the same time, politicians are scared of cutting popular programs. Trump has ruled out cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military. Along with interest payments, that’s about 70 percent of what the government spends. There’s an old saying among wonks: The United States government is just an insurance company with a standing army.” Repairing the damage caused by DOGE’s meat-axe approach to cutting federal expenses will probably exceed any “savings” by billions of dollars. Contrast this to a reasoned cost-cutting approach during the Clinton administration, in full cooperation with federal agencies, that slashed a real $400 billion (roughly $750 billion in today’s dollars) from the federal budget. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs and other elements of economic mismanagement will increase costs to consumers by trillions!

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the Trump/Musk federal budget cuts inflict pain and suffering on the American people to benefit mostly billionaires, for anyone willing to look at the actual results, it becomes obvious that this Musk-gone-mad approach is just a disguised culture war with no real overall spending cuts.