The Department of Govt. Efficiency
Elon's plan to rob the government blind
The incoming Trump administration announced a presidential advisory commission to be headed by billionaires Elon Musk (the current wealthiest man in the world) and Vivek Ramaswamy (former candidate, current Trump ball handler). The commission will be called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, as Musk planned it because he’s an incel teenage boy at heart and those initials match that of his favorite internet meme which he later turned into a cryptocurrency that was pushed during COVID restrictions. Musk even wants “thought leaders,” and others to work for the department for no salary whatsoever.
Musk and Ramaswamy, who are both the product of great advantages brought on by their respective fathers’ successful careers, Ramaswamy’s father was a patent lawyer for General Electric while Musk’s father owned an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa, have already begun to speak of ways in which they will cut federal government spending. Ramaswamy has suggested picking odds and evens, if your social security number ends in an odd number and you are a federal employee, you’re fired. He stated that this would right off that bat eliminate half of the federal workforce, and thus cut all those salaries from the budget. The billionaire (who must be a genius because of the commas in his bank account) didn’t even bother to look up the system which is used to decide social security numbers or how this would actually effect the federal work force. The men have also suggested cutting social security, medical care, and veterans health care.
Social security and medicare are programs that a large portion of the public relies on to stay healthy and stay alive in their retirement years. Hardworking Americans get up and go to work day after day for sometimes upward of 50 years and when a lot of them retire, social security is their biggest lifeline in paying rent, utilities, and other basic needs to live a somewhat respectable life. These people aren’t out to be millionaires or rich or bleed the government dry through resources which we have the ability to fund multiple times over with the defense budget alone, these are hard working people who want to have peace of mind at the end of the night after working so hard for a large portion of their lives.
The wealthiest Americans, people such as Musk and Ramaswamy, and nearly ever other cabinet pick Trump has made thus far, stop paying into social security and medicare after their first $168,6000 in income. You work for thirty, forty, fifty years and you have been paying into this program the entire time, you expect those benefits to be there when you retire. Along comes to men who by the fortune of their fathers’ hard work, began life on third base, the wealthiest men in America, and they decide that all your hard work shall be for naught while they enjoy new tax breaks for them and their corporations.
Musk announced that the commission would target a cut of $2 trillion from the U.S. federal budget with measures like this. Ramaswamy noted that “DOGE'“ may eliminate entire federal agencies. Republican’s and their new billionaire friends are seeking to cut spending and solve a problem that they themselves created by cutting large swaths of the federal government. These are men who have already been rewarded handsomely by said government in the form of government contracts and grants to their companies, a large portion of which made Musk in to the powerful oligarch he is today.
While there are wasteful programs throughout the country and places that you can trim the fat of the budget while seeking to eliminate small portions of the national debt at a time, this is not the way to do it. Department of Defense employees and government contractors are unelected career officials who make up the federal government and keep it working on schedule. We have seen the panic that is caused in the media when we get close to a government shut down, that is because these employees keep everything about our day to day lives running on schedule. Regulation, media, food distribution, shipping routes and plans, banking, everything you can imagine, and we are talking about cutting those with odd numbers at the end of their social security number?
Government efficiency is a good thing and a standard that we should always be seeking. It should not be an executive commission named after a meme in which the men running it seek to fire the working class at will while they efficiently align government spending toward theirs and their friends’ bank accounts.
The national debt has grown out of control. It has been since the war in Iraq launched and we stayed in Afghanistan for another 20 years. Republicans (and democrats alike) continued to support the military industrial complex. Large bonuses, unheard-of amounts for contractors, piles of cash to negotiate with foreign war lords, sending missiles to other countries. These have all been the way of American life for so long that we have gotten ourselves into an enormous debt in the name of keeping the world safe, but it’s really been about keeping pockets lined.
We should have a commission looking at the amount of aid that was given to Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Gaza relentlessly, we should be looking at the efficiency of funding wars across the world and the American people’s return on investment, and we should be looking at the reality of what it means when someone has $1 billion and how that can be applied to public efficiency and the national debt.
These men and their fellow billionaires and CEO’s being appointed to cabinet and secretary positions for the incoming Trump administration are not seeking ways in which they can lower the national debt and make life better for the American people. They are seeking to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, strip people of their livelihoods, and strip veterans of their healthcare.
Which brings me to my last point…
Cut veterans health care if you want to, guys.
I don’t think that Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy realized the mistake that they made when they suggested cutting veterans healthcare. If you think that what happened to the United Healthcare CEO was bad? Cut veterans healthcare.
You trained an entire generation and more to fight your wars overseas. You broke them down into nothing and then recreated them into machines taught to kill an enemy. You forgot about those young men and women when they got back home and left the service and one of the only things that you provided them with was some semblance of health care. It is something that we rely on more than you could imagine.
22 veterans in the United States commit suicide every talking day. Every. Single. Day.
That is with our current healthcare system where people like myself are receiving the mental health care and medication that they need to not only function on a daily basis, but to survive and to live and to be there for our families. If Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy decide to take that away from us, not only will that number of suicides most likely double for a significant period of time, they will have a large number of angry and violent men out for retribution.
Fuck around and find out.
-Underground