With reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has established the world's largest hardware innovation companies, Tesla and SpaceX. As for Trump, he once told Golf Digest: "I own the building. I'm a builder; I know how to build. No one can build the same way I can."
But now, Manchester United at Manchester United in Washington, Trump and Musk's duumvirate are not built by construction rather than the other way around: demolition.
With the establishment of the Ministry of Efficiency, Musk claimed for himself that he had extraordinary power: as the White House iron fist, he was rooted in the plague that awakened in the government, stopped grants, frozen payments, opened fire in various departments, and usually shot all Probably many people. On Monday, Doji claimed that he had saved the government more than $50 billion. Meanwhile, a federal judge ruled that Trump and Musk violated the law, usually by going beyond the executive branch’s power and trying to fund institutions that were initially funded by Congress.
In theory, Doge exists to improve efficiency. The need for efficiency is real. The federal government is heavily in debt. Now, its interest payments exceed its spending on defense. Even if the United States has no doubts about debt, it is still a way to make the government work better - to take the same taxes further and do the kindness of a unit. However, judging by the Governor’s early returns, the only objective conclusion to the institution seems to be out of control. What we are currently witnessing in the government (i.e. energy, veteran affairs, education, etc.) is not only a brutal bonfire, but an incompetent rule.
Let's start with the Department of Energy, which has recently faced the brunt of massive layoffs. Among those who are unemployed, dozens of employees are at the National Nuclear Safety Administration (scientists, engineers and safety officials), responsible for protecting and assembling nuclear warheads. About 100 people were reportedly fired at the Pantex plant in Texas, Texas is the country’s most important nuclear assembly and disassembly plant before being recalled to the office. As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the non-partisan Arms Control Association, said: “The people of Mendog are coming in without knowing that these departments are responsible.”
Next, there is Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered acquisitions to thousands of employees before realizing that, they made a mistake. Far from the typical impression that government workers might move paper all day, Virginia provides health and mental care to millions of U.S. veterans. This means that if you offer an acquisition to Virginia, you will get many low-paid doctors, nurses, and psychologists that you accept the offer to leave an already understaffed office, and that's exactly what's going on. A few days after the acquisition offer, thousands of doctors, nurses, psychologists and other essential staff noticed that they were exempted from the offer.
At the Education Department, the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems to want to destroy, terminated a $1 billion contract. But these cuts did not end the ideological plan Musk said was to be eliminated, but weakened the Institute of Educational Sciences, which funded many of the longest and most famous studies in educational research, including some A longitudinal study on student achievement and school efficiency. It is hard to think of a better nonpartisan role in the government than data collection. But Musk and his team destroyed some of the best educational data tools we have. Nat Malkus, a senior researcher at the American College of Enterprise, a conservative think tank, told Washington Post: "There is a lot of expansion in IES. There are a lot of problems to solve. These are the problems you solve with a scalpel and possible axes, but not bulldozers."
The reduction in Doge will develop further. In the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, including those involved in testing food and medical equipment. At the CDC, a growing number of cuts reached the Epidemic Intelligence Agency, which has paid disease detectives around the world and stopped the pandemic before it spreads in other countries. At the National Institutes of Health, the government will cut staff and funding in various ways. If you are a fan of Musk and Trump, you hope these cuts will all be fat without bones. But remember: it's the same government that attempts to refocus the Ministry of Energy on the Ministry of Nuclear Safety, initially using these measures to put the department in trouble Nuclear security In it.
So far, few Doge operations have received more attention than the agency's attack on the United States Agency for International Development, where USAID is responsible for foreign aid and global health spending. Musk appears to be destroying the USDA, taking most employees off, closing its headquarters, and handing over what they have left to the State Department. According to a report, the government said it plans to reduce USAID staff from 10,000 to about 600. As Musk recently posted on X: "We had a weekend and fed USAID into the wood chipper."
There is irony here. There is also tragedy. Ironically, when he was a U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he called foreign aid "critical to our national security." "Anyone who tells you that we can cut foreign aid will put us in a balanced way of lying to you," he said in 2019. However, today, as Secretary of State, Rubio is in a moral oversight position, which he once praised It is the demolition of the aid agency.
Due to the huge artificial cost, the tragedy will be felt on the individual level. Unless the government corrects and replenishes our global health grants immediately, there is no fact that many people around the world suffer and die in order to save a negligible amount for a typical American taxpayer. The United States serves pesticide sprays in Uganda, pregnancy in Zambia, medical clinics in the poorest areas of the world. Most notably, the president’s AIDS relief emergency program saved about 25 million lives and prevented HIV from being born in more than 5 million babies. It is not clear whether Pepfar will survive or wither. This disruptive approach to reform surprised even the most famous critics of the U.S. aid program. William Easterly is an economist William Easterly New Yorker Trump's USDA negation plan is "terrible", "illegal" and "undemocratic".
Musk’s suggestion in his criticism that Dooge will only reverse any measure that is too far away. In theory, this sounds good. Move quickly; chop things; add anything you miss. But in reality, you can't just cut 10,000 programs at once and then reinstall them one-to-one based on whether the number of criticisms passes some fictional threshold. Regardless of your thoughts on the failure of progressive governance, “scrambled discoveries” are not the right alternative. Unfortunately, it is indeed the current approach to the administration.