I know I wrote what I thought would be my last Elon column. But y’all, I ran across an article on MSNBC that I felt would be a good postscript. One of their people looked at his tenure from beginning to end and showed how rapidly it dissolved into chaos. It’s sad, really. It seems to me that he just tried too hard and promised too much before he looked at the actual government.
His Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) campaign was always billed as temporary, but less than six months into this administration, the man who came in like some sort of MAGA rock star, who was jumping around at Trump rallies, appeared at Cabinet meetings and spoke to adoring crowds at CPAC is now slinking out the side door.
He thought he could make a difference. He thought he could root out “waste, fraud, and abuse”. There was less there than he figured, and all he did was destroy. He didn’t fix anything. No, he wrecked any number of things (looking at you, USAID) that, well, didn’t need or deserve that kind of treatment. He was so random in his choices and his cuts. The people he brought in for DOGe didn’t help. Young, mostly hackers, who wanted to get access to top-level information that they *shouldn’t have*. THAT was a mess of its own. Disaster strikes, top-level mess.
By every conceivable metric, Musk’s stint in government has been an abject failure. On the substance alone, it has been wildly destructive. A lot of lifelong experts in key positions have lost their jobs. Important medical research has been set back, possibly indefinitely. Government agencies are functioning worse than they were before. So it’s clear Musk did real, substantive damage that will be hard to repair, but even by his own standards, his so-called cost-saving, efficiency program failed to achieve what it set out to do.
Exactly. You ought not go messing around with things until you understand how they work. The cuts to NOAA alone are incredibly devastating. We *need* NOAA, and we’re going to get barely a shell of what they used to be. Hurricane warnings? Maybe. Wildfires? Maybe. Weather? Maybe. Tornado Warnings? (That’s a BIG ONE.) Maybe. I could go on, but I won’t. Honestly, it’s too painful. And that’s just one small piece of all he obliterated. ONE. Small. Piece. Ooof.
2 trillion went down to a few billion, and even that is sketchy. DOGe’s website had a lot of broken links and inaccurate information. They revised and revised and revised. They got caught out a LOT for errors of all types. FAIL. That’s what it shows. FAIL. How the mighty have fallen. We won’t even go into the disaster of a run for their candidate to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Elon was very, very quiet and hardly visible after that one.
As Musk leaves the government worse off than he found it, it’s clear his tenure in Washington was a complete failure, substantively and politically. Musk got high on his own supply and convinced himself the American public would fall in love with his antics. But it turns out, they would much rather he just go away.
And so, he is. In with a bang, out with a whimper, through a side door. tRump actually doesn’t want him to leave Washington, but he is, to concentrate on his *companies*, which have about a ton of problems. It’s about time he left. So long, Elon. And to you, the reader, thanks for sticking with me!
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“DOGe’s website had a lot of broken links and inaccurate information.”
The inaccurate information notwithstanding (there’s a lot that floating around the interwebs, after all) but isn’t it just a little ironic that the DOGE website would have ANY technical issues? I mean, granted, even the biggest of big-tech companies will have issues from time to time but that’s a reason for “beta testing”–to test a new product or feature to ensure it works as planned or promoted. But, for all this “tech innovation” that the Muskrat loves to tout and the supposed level of smarts his little band of (likely) incels possess, you’d think creating a website would be considered virtually kindergarten-level stuff. Did no one question how good (much less, efficient) Musk’s little toy boys could be in digging around so much sensitive information when they couldn’t even keep their own website operating, ahem, efficiently?
And see, that was *exactly* what I was, and still am, worried about. There is NO WAY to tell how much information his boy toys have accessed. None. I’m *really* worried about what could be done with all that information. And we all know that they are deeper into the systems of the departments (??? Dunno how to describe them), like Social Security, than is known publicly. I don’t want them having all that information, including mine, for use at a later date! How many people have noticed this, and how substantially more people don’t care. This is *serious*!!!!
We need to root out the little doge shits that have been left inside our government.
Right there with you on that! I’ll drag them out by their collars if I can get in to do so. And we need to check their homes to see what they have stashed there. We need hackers to hack *them*. This DOGE nonsense Pisses. Me. Off….. Department of Government Efficiency, my ass. Department of Terror is better.
by his own metrics musk has been a huge success. he has gotten rid of all the beurocrats that were or could cause problems for him. he canceled his rival’s contracts and had the agencies give contracts to him. his Boys can keep that all going, he doesn’t need to be there personally. I have no idea if he believes there is actually waste fraud and abuse but he is not going to stop milking this. Mikey and company keep talking about savings which there was never going be. any savings is going to be wiped out by musks and others new contracts.
Ouch! I hadn’t seen that aspect, or at least not except a sentence here or there. Contracts, oh, yes!