Dem
47
GOP
53
DOGE is ostensibly supposed to be about government efficiency. After all, it's right there in the name: Department of Government Efficiency. At best, the people running that particular sh**show have decided that "efficiency" really just means "fire a lot of people." At worst, this is all just a smoke show meant to obscure the real agenda. Evidence in support of the latter view continues to pile up.
Yesterday was yet another meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference. (Seriously, they seem to have one of these things every week.) Since the meeting was in Maryland, and thus close to Washington, DC, Elon Musk decided this was an excellent time for a little political theater. So, he made a last-second, barely publicized appearance, in order to brag about his cost-cutting efforts, in conversation with NewsMax anchor Rob Schmitt.
It was... um, really weird. If you would like to watch for yourself, you can do so here. Musk bounded onto the stage while the adoring crowd roared its approval. Then, Argentine president Javier Milei—who is also crazypants, mind you—came out and presented Musk with a chainsaw decorated with gold accents. The general idea here is that it's a trophy (gold) being given in honor of cutting costs (chainsaw). Musk waved the chainsaw around for a short while, and then commenced the interview, which was only semi-coherent. Put it this way: Within 10 minutes of his sitting down on the interview couch, the word "Ketamine" was trending on eX-Twitter (Musk admits to using the drug, and is widely suspected of being an abuser/addict). If you would like to see an example of his barely being able to answer a question, this clip is the one that got widest circulation on social media yesterday.
There are, we would say, two takeaways from this curious event. The first is that, justifiably or not, Musk is becoming something of a modern-day Robin Hood to the MAGA faithful. That is going to make it much harder for Donald Trump to cut him loose, should their relationship become frayed. The second is that if Musk was just trying to cut spending and/or make the government more efficient, there would be no need for all of this face time. Clearly, there is more to it than just that.
We recognize, of course, that the "more to it" could be "we're doing stuff, and want you to know about it, so you'll keep voting Republican." That's pretty standard political stuff. And giving every taxpayer a big rebate check, while claiming it is "their share" of the DOGE savings, would clearly be designed to help on that front. But we continue to suspect there's much more to it than just vote-getting.
At this point, let us turn to two rather egregious errors—or lies—that Musk has put forth in just the last week. The first, which we've already written about a bit, involves Social Security. The South African has now made the claim, several times, that some vast number of people over the age of 100, often far over the age of 100, are receiving Social Security checks. He's given different figures at different times, but most commonly he's claimed that there are 10 million people over the age of 120 who are still receiving Social Security payments. This is not only nonsensical, it's impossible. In fact, by law, Social Security payments automatically cease when a person reaches 115. Since only 30 Americans have ever made it to that age, it's a pretty good chance that any given 115-year-old recipient is not legit.
How, exactly, did Musk come to this faulty conclusion? Because he and his team work in secret, it's hard to be entirely certain. However, there appear to be two dynamics at play. The first is that the Social Security Administration databases were executed in the now-pretty-ancient COBOL programming language. And, for reasons that are pretty inside baseball, COBOL databases tend to treat blank date fields as if they were filled in with the date May 20, 1875. If you'd like to know more, this article has the details.
The second dynamic is that what might be called the "Social Security Era" (1937- ) and the "Not Everyone Has a Birth Certificate Era" (4 billion years B.C. - ca. 1950s) overlap, so there are many people who are in the system who do not have a verified birthdate. Ipso facto, the system thinks they were born on May 20, 1875, and so are about to celebrate their 150th birthday. These people are not receiving—and many of them never received—Social Security payments. They are in the system because the same system that tracks payments also tracks Social Security numbers. In truth, the number of people 100+ who are getting Social Security payments right now is about 40,000, while the number of people 110+ is about 250.
Now let's talk about the second error/lie of the past week. On Monday, someone (presumably Musk) fired up the official DOGE eX-Twitter account and posted this:
The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).
In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work.
That tweet, whoever it was from, is the work of a veteran manipulator. It was clearly designed to produce responses like this one, posted to eX-Twitter by a MAGA Maniac about an hour later:
DOGE revealed that $4.7 trillion in U.S. Treasury funds is unaccounted for and cannot be traced.
In simple terms, this means taxpayer money has disappeared without a trace.
Many ordinary folks are stunned and furious about this—and they have every right to be. People should be outraged.
The right-wing mediasphere was also all over the news (Joe Rogan did an hour about it, for example), while everyone else has basically (and justly, we would say) ignored it.
Notice the (by-design) evolution from the first tweet to the second one. The original says that tracing the money without that flag is "almost impossible." "Almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There is, of course, a massive difference between "almost impossible" and "impossible." Further, it is laughable that, for want of a three-letter code, the money cannot be traced. Transfers of wealth, particularly in the modern era, leave a trail behind. On top of that, whether in the modern era or not, one of the purposes of accounting is to make sure that trail exists in duplicate or triplicate, and cannot easily be wiped away. And yet, despite all of this relatively basic logic (and that's before we even mention how absurd it is that two-thirds of the entire federal budget could disappear into the ether), the DOGE claim had morphed into the money being "unaccounted for" and having "disappeared without a trace."
In the past, we have made clear that we think the legend of Elon Musk is overblown, and that he's not the once-in-a-generation genius that some would have you believe. But he's not stupid, either, and we find it hard to accept that he really thinks there are ten million supercentenarians getting Social Security checks, or that the Treasury really doesn't know where that $4.7 trillion went.
What, then, is the motivation for such tall tales? Well, again, it could be to pump up the work of DOGE, and to convince voters that the Trump administration is doing things. However, as quite a few folks have observed, the budget bill being worked on by House Republicans right now is projected to include tax cuts, mostly for wealthy people, of $4.5 trillion. That's rather similar to $4.7 trillion, as if Musk & Co. are trying to set up the argument that "Hey! The tax cuts are a wash, since we recovered an amount of lost money even greater than that." Yes, it's a bit conspiratorial, but it's not THAT conspiratorial. Certainly, nothing that's happened in the last week, particularly not the whoppers coming from Musk and DOGE, has done anything to dissuade us from the notion that DOGE is mostly just a smokescreen meant to distract voters from the hammer that the GOP is about to take to the budget, the deficit, the national debt, and the social safety net.
There is one other thing to note on the DOGE front. In response to one of the anti-DOGE lawsuits, Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House's Office of Administration, filed a statement in which he declared, under penalty of perjury, that Musk has nothing to do with DOGE:
The U.S. DOGE Service is a component of the Executive Office of the President. The U.S. DOGE service Temporary Organization is within the U.S. DOGE Service. Both are separate from the White House Office. Mr. Musk is an employee in the White House Office. He is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization. Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.
Presumably, Fisher is planning on a pardon, should he be charged with perjuring himself. Nobody can take seriously the assertion he makes here. Further, Trump already forgot the lie that his underlings are trying to perpetrate, and on Wednesday told attendees at an event that "I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, and put a man named Elon Musk in charge."
What is the point of this obvious sophistry? There's really only one answer, and that is that the administration knows it is breaking the law six ways to Sunday, and is trying to create a moving target, to make life harder for plaintiffs and judges. The White House has also been playing games with the question of whether DOGE is an "agency" or a "department," for exactly the same reason. This suggests rather strongly that Trump, Musk & Co. know the party cannot continue forever, and that they have to maximize the impact of DOGE while they can.
We were going to have a full Crazypants Report today, but we decided that this DOGE deep dive (DDD?) was somewhat pressing, and we don't think that we (or the readership) can handle a bunch more additional whackadoodlery on top of this. We'll definitely have one on Tuesday, though, as we've already got 18 potential entries, and we're not even into the weekend, when the administration generally tries to sneak the craziest pants stuff through. (Z)