Colorful billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk sparked quite a reaction at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington last week when he leaped around the stage waving a chainsaw.
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. CHAINSAAAW!” he exclaimed. "Uwaaauwaargh!"
That’s Elon. Always ready to light up an adoring crowd.
As the CPAC audience settled down, Newsmax talking head Rob Schmitt asked Musk what it feels like to "absolutely shred … the government — the swamp — whatever you want to call it."
It’s cool, Musk said (according to a transcript published by The Verge). It’s awesome. "We’re … trying to get good things done, but also, like, you know, have a good time doing it and, uh, you know, and have, like, a sense of humor."
The "good things" Musk and his minions at DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, are doing consist of cutting government payrolls, canceling contracts and apparently aiming to "delete" (Musk’s word) whole federal agencies.
The most visible fruits of their efforts have been large reductions in force, or RIF in government-speak: layoffs, furloughs and terminations of thousands of Americans who work in the public sector.
What’s less apparent so far is the effect these RIFs will have on potentially millions of Americans who count on services from the targeted government offices and agencies. For example, the Internal Revenue Service began laying off some 7,000 employees Thursday, according to the AP. While tax cheats across the nation will no doubt take comfort, tax filers who need customer service in the upcoming tax season are possibly in for some major frustration.
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DOGE’s purported goal is to rid the government of waste, fraud and abuse. And who wouldn’t want to do that? It’s been a standard political mantra of both parties for a long time. The worry is that it’s a cover for other ulterior motives.
The problem I have with the Trump administration’s RIFs is the manner in which they have been carried out, which is too fast, too indiscriminate and utterly lacking accountability or oversight, not to mention the question of legal authority.
DOGE is acting so fast and sowing so much chaos that it’s difficult to grasp the nature and scope of its operations. It’s also difficult to find out who besides Musk is calling the shots.
Musk and Trump claim to have found thousands of cases of rampant waste and fraud, yet DOGE has been suspiciously light on details about its accomplishments or effectiveness.
DOGE has claimed to have cut $55 billion in government spending already, but an analysis by Yahoo Finance finds the figure is closer to $8.5 billion.
And some of the claims Trump and Musk have made about DOGE’s work don’t hold up to scrutiny. They claimed repeatedly last week that DOGE found Social Security beneficiaries who were hundreds of years old. The claim is based on a misunderstanding, perhaps willful, of how COBOL, the programming language used by the Social Security Administration, deals with files lacking birth dates. SSA’s new acting commissioner explained Wednesday that dead centenarians were "not necessarily receiving benefits," according to AP.
Yes, I still cite the AP, which remains one of the most reliable news organizations on the planet, even though Trump bars the agency from presidential events for refusing to use “Gulf of America,” his new made-up name for the Gulf of Mexico. So much for freedom of the press.
Another embarrassing development boiled up last week when DOGE actions resulted in more than 300 staffers fired at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as part of Department of Energy layoffs.
Apparently somebody later realized that retaining those hundreds of experts, with the required security clearances, would be more than a little useful — critical, actually — to managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile, CNN reported.
Fortunately, some members of Congress petitioned Energy Secretary Chris Wright to rehire the workers, and most were reinstated once they could be found, despite having had their telephones cut off.
It’s almost as if haste makes waste.
Anyhow, the chaos sown by DOGE has done little if any damage to the president’s approval ratings so far. According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll last week, 45 percent of Americans say they support what the president has done during his first month in office, while 53 percent say they disapprove.
On the question of whether the president has exceeded his authority since taking office, 57 percent said he had. Yet Trump has so conditioned us to be shocked, or at least surprised, by his excesses (pardoning all of the Jan. 6 offenders, including those who confessed to beating police, is a prize-winning excess in my view) that it may take more than the usual affronts to turn the electorate against him.
Still, only 35% of respondents in the Washington Post-Ipsos poll deemed Trump "honest and trustworthy." And they’re even less sure about Musk. Only one in four (26%) approve of him shutting down government programs.
At this point, Musk and Trump are rolling out a fast and furious agenda, and most Americans can only look on in awe.
Good luck with that, Mr. President, but be careful. At some point the dust will settle, and American voters will be able to check your work. And they might just hold you accountable.
Clarence Page: Voter’s remorse? Not much, but give it time was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency and is shared with permission. Clarence Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist, and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
