Symbolism Isn’t Reform: The DOGE Reality Check

Elon Musk said the Department of Government efficiency effort was only somewhat successful and that he would not do it again, according to reporting, reporting from the Guardian. Well, that's nice to know. Would have been nice if he'd figured this out about 11 months ago. The article describes large scale layoffs and buyouts across the federal workforce, plus disputed claims about savings because public accounting was limited. Now, the critique, once you get past the original script, is that the project focused on the easiest kind of cutting, visible headcount disruption. The hardest cost drivers in the federal budget are not office workers. They are structural commitments and politically protected policies. Things that Musk didn't have the nerve to touch. If you really want deficit reduction, you go after the biggest levers. That can mean things like pushing much harder on prescription drug pricing, the purchasing power of the federal government. Federal government doesn't want to do that. They'd upset their friends at Big Pharma and Big Insurance company, scaling reforms that reduce medical cost inflation or revising expensive tax expenditures that function like spending. Things like including the mortgage interest deductions that benefit me personally. But not most people in America, certainly not the bottom third of the country because they can't afford any housing. They don't get those goodies in the form of tax subsidies. Now these, these are the sorts of things that have long been criticized for delivering disproportionate benefits to high income homeowners. And of course, Musk just turned a blind eye. Instead, the efforts became a spectacle of chainsaw symbolism, while the biggest budget items stayed largely untouched. So what's the real message here? Elon Musk now belatedly saying, oops, maybe this whole Doge thing was kind of a mistake. I wouldn't do it over again. You think now we're just figuring that out? I mean, it's. Imagine if Elon Musk had said, you know, tj, you don't know anything about the car industry or electronic vehicles or autonomous vehicles. I'm just going to hire you to be the acting CEO for three months of Tesla. And I drove it into the ground and I just eviscerated the market cap by 90%. And I said, oops, you know, I probably wouldn't be the acting CEO again. What would you think? I think you would think, well, tj, you're a fool for even assuming you could take on a job like that. You're right, I would be. That's why I wouldn't take that job. I try not to take jobs where I have zero credibility, zero understanding of what it is. And yet Musk did that. Unfortunately, this is a problem with our culture. Lionize billionaires. We think, okay, this guy is smart enough to be successful in one niche here. He must have general intelligence to be smart on everything. No, it's never been that way. Henry Ford was really smart at creating an assembly line. He became really rich and he made cars for the masses. Do we then want to listen to his advice on the Jews? I don't think so. He was a well known anti Semite and wasted a lot of his time, money and energy spouting anti Semitic nonsense. Now, I'm not saying Elon Musk is an anti Semite. I say, I'm saying he is equally incompetent at most things, the way most human beings are incompetent at most things. Some people are really, really good at one thing. Some, like Elon Musk, arguably a handful of things he has created. He didn't found Tesla, but he really made it into something significant. SpaceX. He's had a number of successes, but they're all narrowly related to technology. They have nothing to do with government, nothing to do with actually helping people in need. He's been good at one thing and now he's belatedly admitting the whole thing was kind of really a good idea. Now he's still grading himself on a curve. He told the Guardian that he was somewhat successful. I guess you at least have to give him credit because anytime anyone has asked Donald Trump about how successful he was about anything, he says, number one in the world, best ever. People are saying, the greatest in the universe. At least Elon Musk didn't do that. He's also admitting that he wouldn't again now, if you were somewhat successful at something, why wouldn't you do it again? He's citing 75,000 buyouts. There's no, there's no evidence whatsoever this has made the government more efficient. If you've been to the airport recently and your flights were delayed five hours and there was no bad weather, are you feeling like the government's more efficient? I don't think so. The fact that certain air traffic controllers were fired, laid off, hired back again, some of them with paid vacations, does that really make you feel better about the government? I don't think so. So the real lesson here, I think from a human psychology standpoint, and we're all guilty of this, is this authority bias. We think someone's an authority figure in one aspect of life. Okay, you're the richest man in the world. People love money. We are Largely a capitalist world. So if you're the richest man in the world, ergo, you're the smartest guy in the world, you can solve any problem. Therefore, here you're now in charge of the federal government. That's what happened. It's fallacious thinking. It is unsound. By that logic, if you have a brain tumor, if he's the smartest guy in the world, why not just hand him a scalpel and have him perform surgery? So why he didn't go to medical school, so why they didn't major in biology. He's the smartest guy in the world. Let him operate on your child or your. It would be that asinine. That's essentially what this administration did by giving the reins of the government to Elon Musk. Again, the real waste. When you look at how many weapons systems are given billions of dollars every single year, and our own experts at the Defense Department and the Pentagon said, we don't need these. We don't want them. It's all waste. But the congressman saying, well, they're, you know, they're building one tenth of their factory in my district and I want those jobs, therefore we can't. I mean, that's where the real waste in government is. And of course, the biggest waste of all is our health care system, which we're going to be talking about in the next topic here on the show. But the easiest way to eliminate massive government waste, fraud and abuse is to do what most successful capitalistic systems do for their health care. They spend their money efficiently. They spend roughly 50% less than America does on health care, and they free up billions, trillions of dollars more for their economy for productive use. But no, that would offend a number of powerful constituencies to suggest that if you're Elon Musk, it's too complicated. You can't take a chainsaw and show a picture of a health insurance executive, especially in the current climate. And I wouldn't recommend that. But that's why the federal government is as big and as bloated as.