Empty DOGE’s Bag
See MEDICAID and SNAP smoke? PROTEST!
The DOGE budget savings/cuts have proven so far to be an absolute joke. There is nothing there but smoke and mirrors and braggadocio. Billionaire Braggadocio, aka BS. Musk has devolved to saving $4 million a day. He no longer claims $50 billion saved. That was adding gross errors, as was shown. He in fact can claim no savings. He can claim illegal actions.
Firings will not stand in court. That is DOGE’s largest $ amount of cuts. Employee-protecting due process was not followed and employee civil rights were severely abused. County Civil Court is where each federal employee should file suit for damages. You owe me!’
Cancellation of contracts will not stand in court. A warranted Contracting Officer’s studied discretion is a requirement to terminate for convenience of the Government. Being ordered to do a whack job is not studied contracting officer discretion.
NYT reported that another $4 billion in “savings” on DOGE’s website just had to be scratched off the list. Further, Musk had previously deleted 5 of the 7 biggest savings that were posted when they launched the site. But DOGE still claims credit for saving $53 million by cancelling a Coast Guard contract that was actually completed 20 years ago. The ineptitude is beyond belief.
MUSH has lost all credibility. He has turned to Musk.
Trump and Musk need really big $ numbers to show their savings. They have none. Zero. Nada.
They lust for $880 billion in MEDICAID over 10 years to slash (by edict). Notice not mentioned in the SOTU Speech was the word MEDICAID? This money goes mostly to Red states, and almost all rural hospitals will have to close when that MEDICAID income stream is lost. The subject is too hot for even Trump to handle. A shyster, he will move on it like a bitch, on the sly.
As if that were not bad enough, House Republicans want to cut $230B from food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), over 10 years. That program was in fact enacted to help rural farmers sell surplus. “[L]awmakers cannot cut $230 billion—or anything close to that amount — from SNAP without slashing benefits, restricting eligibility, or some combination of both,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds. Those changes would amount to slashing “more than 20% from a program that helps more than 40 million people, including 1 in 5 children, afford groceries.” (About 90% of the households receiving SNAP benefits have “children, older adults, or people with disabilities.”)
Republicans in the House already voted to:
take away healthcare benefits from grandma in a nursing home.
snatch food stamps away from a hungry, disabled child or elderly person
remove drug addicts from lifesaving treatment
cut Pell grants
cut school lunches and
cancel Head Start.
House Republicans now have to write the specific budget, and send it to the Senate. That is where they run into the faces of their constituents.
To what end? These Republican defunding plans are designed to give the richest people in the country even more tax cuts. Only those making over $350,000/year will see any tax cuts. (It isn’t a tax cut for you and me.)
Listen to Nancy Pelosi on the House floor during the debate that went until 4:30am:
“Here you go again. The last time the Republicans had a majority in the House and Senate, and President Trump was in the White House, they passed a terrible bill. It was a tax cut for the rich that gave eighty-three percent of the benefits to the wealthiest people, the top one percent in our country, and added $2 trillion to the national debt. This year, they are doubling down on that: $4 trillion to the national debt. And they call that fiscal sanity.
And they're doing it by steering taxpayer dollars from Medicaid to give additional tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations. People think of Medicaid sometimes as a poor children's program, and that would be sufficient justification for it at all. But it is a middle-income benefit — people with seniors who need long-term health care need Medicaid. Just listen to your constituents. Hear what they have to say about what it means to their fiscal well-being. Listen to your constituents, the numbers are staggering. By voting for this cruel bill, you are betraying hardworking Americans by raising costs for all those already struggling to make ends meet. Indeed, a vote for this budget is a vote against Medicaid, ripping away health care from children, people with disabilities, and seniors. And it is a vote against SNAP…taking food out of the mouths of babies. And you do that with glee.”
This GOP’s agenda is an immoral abomination that no American, regardless of party, should support.
Protest. If there is anything worth taking to the streets for peaceful protest, it is this. This is a redistribution of wealth on steroids. Stealing from the poor and the struggling to give the stolen money to the upper class. This does not remind me of Robin Hood. It reminds me of swindlers, the fake roofing companies that exploit those impacted by hurricanes. They get paid in advance then vanish.
The stripping of SNAP funds and MEDICAID subsidies are a death sentence for rural America. Republicans do not care one iota. They need a tax cut. Babies being fed is not material to them. These Republicans are sick, mentally unbalanced. They are narcissistic and psychopathic neo-fascists.
Narcissists only care about themselves. One cannot talk them into empathetic sensibilities. Narcissists and psychopaths are devoid of empathy. The poor can starve. They do not care. You cannot force these sickos to care. The mental disorder is psychopathy.
We face psychopathic neo-fascism in this country.
Where do I get off the train? Illegal activities and disobeying the courts are the lines in the sand that, once crossed, are the trip wire to start Paul Revere’s ride to muster our legions. At that line-crossing point, civil obedience will neither serve, nor protect our children’s birthrights. We must then take care of that on our own with mass protests in the streets.
LU$T. The psychopaths have a lust for big $ dollars, and they visualize those dollars in their billfold. The scent of the kill is now too close at hand to these dogs. They are now a wolf pack in a frenzy, and will not be deterred from eating—even their own young.
Musk-DOGE Follies. Maybe there was a folly that was a bit much for someone with a modicum of sense inside the Trump Administration.
The optics of the richest man in the world starving kids while food from American farmers rotted in warehouses.
There were a few that told Musk about a really bonkers line item cut. So Musk, a PR guru of no repute, announced that the funding to ship the peanut paste (and distribute it) was reinstated. Except he reinstated funding for the wrong company. The dumbest people on God’s green earth are DOGE.
There is no line item veto, by the way, and that is specifically the action Musk is taking ex post facto.
In fact, Harvard Medical School professor Sasha Gusev said: “The beauty of DOGE is that it is self-correcting. For example, someone pointed out to Musk that he was letting food we had already paid for go to waste, Musk called that person an ‘imbecilic propagandist’, and then several hours later reinstated the wrong contract.”
Fraud on a large scale. Among the largest DOGE claims that have been posted and then disappeared:
A $1.9 billion savings that the group said it had achieved by canceling an Internal Revenue Service contract for tech help. Before Sunday night, this had been the biggest single savings on the site. But NYT reported that the contract was actually canceled in November, while Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president. This is not a DOGE savings. It is a material misrepresentation, also know as a fraud.
A $149 million savings attributed to canceling a contract to provide three administrative assistants at the Department of Health and Human Services. The entry on the site last week contained numerous errors, including a link to a different contract, with a different company, that did not involve administrative assistants or $149 million. On Sunday, after NYT mentioned this entry, it disappeared. More accurately. The fraud disappeared
A $133 million savings that DOGE said had come from canceling a U.S. Agency for International Development contract for work in Libya. The contractor, Chemonics International, posted last year on LinkedIn that its work on that contract had already ended. DOGE’s claim seems fraudulent.
Even after the changes to the DOGE’s website, errors remained. As of Monday morning, the list still included claims that DOGE achieved $106 million in savings by canceling a pair of contracts that the Coast Guard signed for administrative help. That was wrong. Federal procurement data shows that these contracts were actually completed in 2005 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
Musk is doing a data trick. “Bury the reader in the weight of the paper.” He will work to present so many line items that no one can cut through it. Go to the biggest line items first. I did. The biggies were buried way down the lust, and none passed muster. Skip the nickels, I always tell people. If you count nickels, you won’t get to $20. Do you want to save $20, or $200 million?
Problem is Musk has to get to $2 trillion. And he is not finding any fraud, waste, or abuse. He has lots of line items of things he does not like. Every line item was an approved expenditure, and I don’t care for Musk’s taste. I find his taste in this regard repulsive, immaterial, and immature.
Musk’s first line item was a purchase of condoms he calls Federal government waste. He thought that was the best one to be the first line item for immature reasons. Musk is that juvenile. HIV containment is not a waste. Such a condom purchase would have helped Musk immensely in his personal life.
Our Federal workers are public service experts and they take their stewardship of the public trust most seriously. They hold that trust sacred, just as you would. Musk is not finding waste, fraud, and abuse. He is finding—and funding—egregious hyperbole and blatant lies. He slanders and libels our public stewards. That Musk abuse will end when certified cost and pricing data is required of him. Musk must put his signature on a document that holds him accountable to a perjury standard. Right now, Musk is free to lie.
The joke is on the Republican legislature. However, the truth is they in fact do not care whether DOGE’s data are good or not. They just want to hear the final big $ number. They will yell that number to muffle your protests.
Nonetheless, they should care about the data accuracy. Taking any legislative action based on known material misrepresentations makes them part and parcel of a fraudulent activity. Yes. Fraud. IMO. (I am not a lawyer. Call Adam Schiff.)
I have demanded testimony from Musk under oath to Congress, and a certified cost and pricing data submittal on the prospective savings. I have no authority to do that, but it sounds good! I want Musk’s signature on the cost and pricing data certification. That is a reasonable request.
Many a bid that I submitted went into the Government with certified cost and pricing data. That certification invokes the Truth in Negotiations Act (TINA). You can go to jail for trying to fudge knowingly one like me item through that wicket. Democrats in Congress must demand from Republicans sound accounting with certifications, to back up a $4.5 trillion tax cut.
The Road Ahead. We have only one plausible course of action. That is us on the streets in protest. All of us.
The Government will shoot us there. Have no doubt about that. They have before. Blood is always shed to change drastically social behavior and major political changes.
Kent State right before the shooting started on May 4, 1970. Unarmed students were fired upon by national guardsmen.
Trump will not be able to stand his own ego’s association with unseemly street protests all across this country. His demented mind’s strongman image will suffer too greatly. Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act and order military guns to be fired on citizens. I see us storming the White House. Many will die.
With a life well spent and close to its end, it would be a small price for me to pay for such a worthy cause. So many have made this journey for this very same cause. Not “bone spurs” of course. He’s in it for the grift.
Trump already asked our military to shoot our citizens on the streets, “Can we shoot them (Black Lives Matter protestors) in the legs?”), but the military refused. Now he plans to arrest protestors. That will not make any difference. It will escalate.
You know how far with this that Trump will go. The next fork in the road, no one knows what will unfold. Grab a flashlight, we are in the dark.
Well said. I like how your mind rolls! And I agree we must take it to the streets; preferably in front of state houses where we can maximize media coverage. After all, "a picture is worth a thousand words."