Neil Patel and Eric Siu examine the backlash against DOGE, the new government efficiency office. Siu points to specific spending examples: $20 million for an Iraqi Sesame Street program and $100k for a DEI book in Somalia. They argue politicians condemn DOGE without evaluating whether these expenses are actually wasteful.
All right, let's talk about why people are melting down on Doge, which you have in the sheet.
You saw what's happening on X. You, you, you see everything that's being revealed. There's $20 million spent on Iraqi Sesame Street.
I thought it was $4 million on Sesame Street.
No, $20 million. And then it was $100 grand for like, like a DEI book for Somalia or something like that. And then there's a lot of, a lot of like waste that's being uncovered right now.
And, and to clarify, when Eric says waste, It's not money going towards the United States of America. He's not saying that some of the money that they're spending for some of these countries is needed or not needed.
Yes, correct. And so, look, I think what I really mean by all this is that the American taxpayers are— the American taxpayers deserve to know where their money is going. And forever, basically, it's been opaque to us. In our lifetime, we've actually never known until now. We're starting to see all these things. And by the way, If you think about this, if someone was stealing from your bank account, okay, and you would want to know who it is, right? And so—
Know who it is or have them thrown in jail or both?
But you first, you want to know who it is, right? Yeah. So, okay, maybe you start to see on camera who's stealing it. Okay, so now you know who it is, and now you have the ability to take them to trial and put them in jail potentially and get your money back too, right? You would want to know about this, right? But what's happening right now is you actually have the, the people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they're like in uproar about this. They're melting down over Doge because they're like, Oh my God, Elon, you know, he's a billionaire. He's destroying our democracy. He's doing all these things. There's like an entire uproar about it. But the analogy I just gave you is like, guys, if someone is taking from our, like, bank account, we should know what's going on and they should be brought to justice, right? But that's not what's happening.
You see how much money they said they supposedly sent to al-Qaeda? I don't know if this is true or not.
No, no.
They're saying they send billions a year to al-Qaeda. It's every week they're sending money.
You know, they sent $260 million to George Soros.
I saw that too. I don't know what's true or not because I can't see the files. Yeah, but, you know, and they may have reasons on why they're doing some of this kind of stuff. Um, but we all know Al-Qaeda hasn't treated, uh, women kindly at all, uh, without getting into it.
I think if the American taxpayers agree to spend on these things, then great. It's just like how America voted. So 60— what, 60-ish percent of people voted for Trump, and Trump said he was gonna do this Doge thing, and he said Elon was gonna run it. So this thing is all above water. And now there's like this uproar about it. And then I was just telling, like, politics aside, I think if Democrats want to win the next time, they need to keep— they need to come back to the center because they're just going more and more like crazier and crazier. And this is not a political show, but I'm just saying this doesn't help when you melt down on TV and you melt down on X because what is it? It's actually— I think it's 67% of people now look at the Democratic Party as unfavorable. Yeah.
Huge.
Have you seen that?
I have not seen that.
Andrew Yang posted it.
And it also depends who they're surveying and the sample size and all that, right? Which can skew the results. But, um, the most interesting thing that I saw about DOGE was we all get the concept, right? It's Department of Government Efficiency, and their overall job is to cut the fat. And whether that's fat or not, I don't know who decides that, but, you know, whatever fat is in whoever wants to decide. But the most interesting thing that I saw was, um, not necessarily the expenditures, because after you see a few of them that are ridiculous, like, okay, you already know more ridiculous stuff is going to come out. And some of this stuff, there must be a reason. What is the reason? I don't know. But what's interesting for me is you're getting a lot of people arguing over the fact that a team of people Are able to go in and look at the expenses. What I haven't seen one argument online yet is of the expenses and if they're valid or invalid. What I mean by that is you have a politician saying this is crazy, someone's going in there checking it, and at the same time they're releasing all this information: Sesame Street, Al Qaeda, George Soros. Whatever's true or not, I don't know. But I've never once seen a politician say. I agree this spending is wasteful, or this is good spending and we should. I wonder why they're not willing to put their neck on the line for that, but yet they want to argue— and it could be both sides, you know— that, hey, we shouldn't have people digging in. Why don't they want people digging in, yet they won't say anything about the actual expenses?
That usually means there's something wrong, right? Where there's fire, there's smoke. And when you are When you're telling people there's nothing to dig and you're saying they're lying, you're usually the one that's lying. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. And here's the thing, they're actually— to Congress's credit, I mean, there are a couple of senators that are just like, wait, we spent— this guy spent like 5 minutes talking about, wait, we're spending here, we're spending here, we're spending here. He's like, guys, I don't know why we're so upset about this. We should be giving Elon a medal. And I do believe he should be getting a medal. He doesn't need to do this. What? He's already the richest man in the world. He's already got all these companies. He has time to play Diablo too. He's got 12 kids, right? He doesn't need to do this. And yet he's doing it for the American people. And the most ironic thing, the deep irony here, Is that the world's richest man is ironically going to put money back into the average American's pockets.
Or in essence, what he's doing is he's just reducing our deficit each year, trying to help reduce our deficit each year, which hopefully will help things like inflation or not cause taxes to rise as much or whatnot.
Yeah. All right, guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. And we'll see you tomorrow.
