Whoops. April 15 is a date which is famous for fancy footwork with figures, being the last day that you can file income taxes, but DOGE has given new meaning to the deadline. DOGE started out with the same fantasy that Trump started out with, namely that Trump was a self-made billionaire and DOGE was a group started by the World’s Richest Man, and he should know about money, right, so the two in concert were terrific? Wrong. Musk made a lot of money by taking over other peoples’ companies but that does not translate into a comprehension of macroeconomics, global trade, government, or anything else that dictates how well the United States government runs on a real world basis. DOGE was never cast on a real world footing, it was fantasy and spectacle from the get go.
DOGE has a website, one which is “in constant flux and riddled with errors,” according to NOTUS, which dropped the bombshell today that a billion dollars in savings has just gone POOF! Fairy dust. Unicorns. Rabbits in hats. Your money and mine in the same category? Looks that way.
On Tuesday alone, DOGE removed around $962 million in previously claimed cuts and altered hundreds of others to boost individual items’ purported “savings” values.
Despite promising weekly updates and sporadically touting new contract cancellations on social media, DOGE did not update a single line of its savings website from the end of March through Monday, according to a NOTUS analysis. Then, just after midnight on Tuesday, DOGE added scores of new cancellations, quietly removed hundreds of others and altered the claimed savings of hundreds more.
NOTUS has identified nearly 650 grants and a few dozen contracts and leases that were scrubbed from the DOGE website over the past several weeks, almost all of them during a two-hour window between midnight and 2 a.m. on Tuesday. That list is not exhaustive; the recipients of many grants are listed as “redacted” or have no appended description, making it difficult to account for every listing that was added or removed.
DOGE has also made a habit of listing cancellations that long predate its establishment at the beginning of the Trump administration in January, helping to further overstate the scope of its cuts. […]
During a cabinet meeting last week, Musk lowered the $1 trillion expectation he had earlier set for reducing government spending this fiscal year. The billionaire instead said he expected to reduce expenditures by a markedly smaller sum of $150 billion.
In the hours leading up to the April 10 cabinet meeting where Musk said DOGE would reduce expenditures by $150 billion, the DOGE website’s total claimed savings jumped from an estimated $140 billion to $150 billion. The number of contracts, grants and leases DOGE said it had terminated, however, remained exactly the same, making it impossible to determine where the new $10 billion came from.
This is accounting, Trump style, and if you recall Trump’s chief financial officer, Allan Weisselberg, went to prison for five months. And it would have been a lot longer but the five months sentence was based on a plea deal. And you know the rest, now all those investigations are dead or stalled in the water because the Cinnamon Sociopath managed to get reelected.
Don’t believe anything you hear with respect to the yuge amounts of money DOGE is supposedly saving. But you can trust the shuttered offices and the innocent people put in the unemployment line, all as part of a big reality TV stunt. The human misery that this mis-administration has created is all too real. We are all extras or bit players in a reality TV show that is hell bent on destroying this country, not taking it back to some halycon bygone age. When all is said and done, the billionaires will have many more billions, the rest of us will be lucky not to find ourselves in Great Depression II, and standing in line somewhere for free coffee and doughnuts for the unemployed.
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Friends, we’re in this mess together. If you can spare some change to keep us trekking through cyberspace, we would appreciate it. This business has not gotten any easier since November 5. All donations are banked and go to pay overhead so that the writers can get paid from ad revenue and subscriptions. Thank you. Ursula
It is pure folly to think that an elected billionaire hires an unelected billionaire to change the system that made them billionaires. The whole thing was a big lie, designed to fool people into thinking that they were getting what they wanted. All they got was fired.