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Going forward, I will be including an audio version of each article read by me, your friendly neighborhood Opinionated Ogre. Please enjoy all of the rich sarcasm.
 Listen now · 10:42 |
Elon Musk would like to report that he has been unable to find the $2 Trillion dollars in waste and fraud he promised. He tried weally WEALLY hard but, gee whiz!, the government is complicated!
Elon Musk has said DOGE is drastically scaling back its savings aims. In a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Musk told Trump the group expected to slash $150 billion from the federal budget over the fiscal year, which runs from the beginning of October 2025 to the end of September 2026.
This is after two months of Musk and his team of children rampaging through the federal government, illegally killing agencies, illegally shutting down programs, illegally seizing private property, and illegally accessing government data.
Remember, these are the lying fucks who put up a website boasting of $55 Billion in “savings” just weeks after kicking off their illegal spree of destruction. Except the website was so full of laughably stupid errors, even the New York End Times didn’t try to defend it. It was also so poorly set up by the world’s greatest tech team, that literally anyone could add information to it. Fucking genius!
Then they “fixed” it and it turned out they were still lying. The solution? Make it really hard to fact-check their claims. Because, you know, “transparency.” We just have to take their word for it.
While all of this was going on, we found out that the DOGE dicks, who were supposed to be working for free out of their love of ‘Murika!, had given themselves REALLY juicy government salaries:
Jeremy Lewin, one of the DOGE employees tasked with dismantling USAID, who has also played a role in DOGE’s incursions into the National Institutes of Health and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is listed as making just over $167,000 annually, WIRED has confirmed. Lewin is assigned to the Office of the Administrator within the General Services Administration.
Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is listed as drawing a salary of $195,200 through GSA, where he is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Administrator. That is the maximum amount that any “General Schedule” federal employee can make annually, including bonuses. “You cannot be offered more under any circumstances,” the GSA compensation and benefits website reads.
But that wasn’t enough. It’s always a grift with these ratfucks and why would that change now? They decided they needed MORE money to line their pockets at taxpayer’s expense:
Notably, the agreement, obtained by WIRED, calls for the DOL [Department of Labor] to reimburse the USDS [United States Digital Service which is what DOGE took over and unofficially renamed] up to $1.3 million for work done by four DOGE affiliates, or “a slightly different number,” over an 18-month period.
…
Paying the USDS an estimated $1.3 million for the total services of four employees, or their equivalent, over that timespan would establish what is potentially an annualized pay of about $217,000. (The federal pay scale for career civil servants tops out at $195,200.)
Unbelievable. Truly, the guiding principle of the Trump regime is DEI - “Didn’t Earn It.” White male mediocrity is rewarded as long as you lick the boots of the regime.
Regardless, their “job” was to cut $2 Trillion in government spending. They reached, AT MOST 7.5%, and let’s be honest, you KNOW they’re fucking lying about even that.
There were three problems from the start. First, none of the little shits in DOGE actually know anything about the government. You cannot identify “waste” if you do not know what the fuck you’re even looking at.
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The DOGE dicks canceled contracts that had already been paid for. How is that saving money? It’s the literal definition of waste. They fired people who were critical for maintaining vital systems and then had to rehire them. How is that efficient?
They just took a burn-it-all-down approach and sat back to see what happened. They did this because it would have taken months, if not years, to actually learn how different agencies operate and what positions COULD be reduced without breaking something vital. But that’s hard work and when you’re a genius move fast and break stuff whiz kid who has never had to clean up after yourself? Well, fuck it! Just smash everything and let someone else deal with it.
Second, they weren’t really there to “save” money in the first place. None of this is about efficiency. It was always about making Elon Musk richer. Kind of weird how contracts to Musk’s competitors were canceled and awarded to Musk’s companies. Very efficient! At making Musk money! Pretty sweet to have access to all of the personal data and tax info of Musk’s rivals, too. I’m sure none of that will be abused by a man who has no moral compass.
And having access to all of that government data is extremely useful and worth hundreds of billions if one were building an AI that needs massive amounts of data. The exact kind the government has but would never in a million years hand over to a private company. Musk and the Trump regime pinky swear this isn’t happening. Do you feel comforted by the promises of pathological liars?
Didn’t think so.
Third, this was never, for a second, about improving the government. It was always about destroying it in pursuit of the theocrats’ and techno-fascists’ vision of utopia. You cannot establish a fascist police state with a fully functioning federal government. You have to destroy it and then replace it with the machinery of oppression.
Project 2025 wants a government that controls every aspect of our lives. What we watch. Who we love. How we dress. How we worship. What our schools teach. Where we live. Who is allowed to be a citizen and who will be part of the permanent servant class.
Musk’s contingent, as I’ve mentioned before, wants their own city-states, independent of the US. There, they can live as god-kings as they chase their fantasy of immortality while committing egregious human rights violations of every kind imaginable. After all, no one tells billionaires what they’re allowed to do in their kingdoms of depravity.
It’s really important to understand that even as Musk brags about all the money he “saved” the country, in reality, he has cost us half a trillion dollars. At least. Just for this year alone:
The Post reports today that the IRS’ internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax, etc.
How much money is that in the overall context of the budget? If you missed this story, and don’t be shocked if you did because the legacy press just glossed over it and moved on, it’s a Big Fucking Deal:
It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the U.S. government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the U.S. military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the U.S. government — more or less light on fire — more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.
Yeah…that’s Musk “efficiency” for you! We were on track to claw back hundreds of billions of dollars from wealthy tax cheats. Now they’re going to steal more than ever before. Hooray. So much savings for America!
But again, the point was never to benefit America and certainly not you and me. This is all to do the bidding of the billionaires that own the Republican Party. They resent having to live under the rule of law in a diverse nation where white men are no longer the dominant political, social, and economic force they once were. So they stole the Supreme Court, stole an election, rigged another one, and now they’re just destroying everything as quickly as possible in hopes we won’t have time to destroy them.
A gentle reminder for the billionaire fascists, though. There’s nothing you can destroy that we cannot rebuild. Every fascist regime falls and when it does, those responsible are frequently held accountable with mob justice. You can flee the country, of course, but are you really going to enjoy spending the rest of your life in Mother Russia, hoping Putin doesn’t have you thrown out of a window?
But please, continue your fascist coup. Keep proving to the country that authoritarian rulers are an existential danger. I’m sure it will all work out for you in the end. Just ask Mussolini, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, etc. how it went for them. Be seeing you. Soon.
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