It’s as if the firehose of daily Trump changes to the US Government in the last two weeks has been joined by another firehose, with DOGE now generating revelations of government spending insanity almost hourly.
A Dr Fauci exhibit? Did it include a statue? He probably has one in his home.
The pain is not just being felt on budget line items – and the embedded piece from the 1999 satirical black comedy movie, Office Space, which I’ve seen more as a meme, is entirely appropriate here.
On the MSM-State front it now appears that other MSM sources, in addition to Politico also got an avalanche of overpaid subscriptions from government agencies to juice their bottom line and undoubtedly support Biden Administration narratives across a range of issues.
New York Times
By the way, the Politico grift is no longer $8 million but $34.3 million over several years from Federal agencies other than USAID , but perhaps they didn’t get all of it, like Haiti in the last twenty years.
Even before DOGE there was news last year from the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) that Congress had illegally spent at least $516 billion in 2024 on programs for which there was no authorisation:
CBO identified 1,264 authorizations of appropriations that expired before the beginning of fiscal year 2024 and 251 authorizations that are set to expire before the end of the fiscal year. CBO also found that $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 was associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations.
If even the CBO could find that much waste it’s likely that DOGE’s tech-bros and their AI algorithms will find even greater amounts of shite like it under the surface of the Pentagon, Medicare/Medicaid and so forth.
The next article explains the reason why a small part of the US Federal government felt the initial heat of DOGE’s focus:
Pete Marocco was furious. It was Thursday, Jan. 23, and the Trump administration official had discovered that the U.S. Agency for International Development recently made $153 million in payments for a range of expenses. Marocco, who was effectively running the agency from the State Department, demanded to know why the money was sent, according to five people familiar with the incident.
Just three days earlier, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump had issued an executive order halting new foreign aid spending, and Marocco was already drafting a diplomatic cable, due to go out the next day, that specified even current foreign aid funds had to be frozen for at least three months, pending a review. Was USAID trying to do an end-run?
…
On Monday morning, Jan. 27, Marocco arrived at USAID headquarters with more than a dozen people, most, if not all, representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency.
If you’re wondering about the spin in the rest of that article (“…may have already put lives in danger in places from Ukraine to the Thai-Myanmar border…“) that’s because it’s from Politico. πππ
I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this meme in the months and years to come.
No Minister 