Where’s The Beef?
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
D0GE identified $100 billion in fraud, waste and inefficiency
“Less losing” was good for starters.
But yes. More, faster.
3 Responses to “Where’s The Beef?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
July 22nd, 2025 at 10:21 am
When all you eat is pork, it takes time to find alternative grift, ahem, sustenance.
July 22nd, 2025 at 12:11 pm
I knew that the answer in part is cancelled contracts but I didn’t want to do the work. Here’s an example that showed up.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner announces the Department already saved $260 MILLION by cutting wasteful contracts and spending
https://xcancel.com/libsoftiktok/status/1947694665597391229#m
YMMV, of course.
July 22nd, 2025 at 6:32 pm
It strikes me that Musk was using his search algorithms to strike out individual lines in the budget, which is good, but what strikes me in many areas is that it is not individual line items, but rather entire initiatives, that need to be removed.
For example, I’ve seen estimates that the cost of “corporate welfare”–targeted tax breaks, direct subsidies, depreciation schedules, and the like–goes into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and also that the costs of tax compliance have a similar magnitude. Add that up, and we’re talking about at least half a trillion dollars that can be sliced from the cost of government.
And to get that, all you have to do is ask “tell me why, exactly, highly paid professionals buying electric cars ought to be subsidized by the middle class and poor?”, and things like that. It’s really indefensible.
One place where I am hopeful is that the huge reductions in spending can be achieved is in our welfare programs as the supply of low skilled migrant labor is cut–forcing businesses to consider hiring the U.S. born poor. Hopefully the moral state of our poor classes is not such as to make this impossible, but clawing back even a portion of the ~trillion bucks spent on welfare and such would be huge.