I’m not pontificating. But I’ve been “around” since I was born 78 years ago. I remember the Eisenhower presidency. I saw Douglas MacArthur on the Black-and-White TV deliver his farewell speech to Congress. I was an adult when Johnson passed the Medicare bill and Nixon created the EPA in response to the Love Canal disaster. I spent nearly 30 years working as a civil servant “inside the beltway”.
I knew this waste would reveal itself, without knowing the exact numbers and from the very beginning with the South African usurper wielding his chain-saw in his bizarre Kabuki theatre display.
It should be obvious — as it was from the beginning for some of us — that Trump doesn’t know anything useful for governance or the betterment of the nation. He “makes stuff up”. He pursues criminal behavior and decisions with abandon, as though it doesn’t mean anything. By contrast, Obama had been quoted as saying that his administration must be “squeaky-clean” — avoiding all violations of law or limits to authority. To say that Trump is being persecuted flies in the face of administrations going back decades and centuries who had not engaged in such violations.
Both Trump and Musk graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps a coincidence? But Musk demonstrates his ignorance of American history, American Law and the American people with the DOGE outrage.
At the same time, the media has simply normalized DOGE, rather than provide the focus on its illegitimacy. It has no congressional charter. It has no basis in Law. What DOGE attempts unsuccessfully to do, the government has systematically done itself within the Law with each successive administration: it hires consultants by contract like Booz-Allen-Hamilton to assess how to organize and downsize agency staff. The longstanding effort always had in mind adherence to statutes, systematic reform of regulation and legal implementation. This has been going on for decades, within the Law, and with little fanfare in the media.
Particularly, the focus on the career service is a travesty, since it is only 4% of the federal budget. Responsible officials should instead have given themselves to trimming the military and entitlement budgets without destroying programs affecting the immediate lives of so many Americans who cannot live without the guaranteed promises of health care and social security.
There is a perverse psychology afoot here. If the social class of Trump and Musk think they pay disproportionate shares in their federal taxes, they also think the Treasury is “their money” — but it’s not; it is “our money”. Since they no longer have control of “their money”, they are determined to squander “our money”. And they do it at every turn. They do it with the National Guard deployments. They do it when they defy our courts or overburden the justice system with appeals at every turn. They do it by attempting to fire federal employees who are otherwise charged by Law to implement that Law without partisan consideration, and they burden the agencies and increase costs of litigation and about-face rehiring of the same employees. I’m sure readers here can extend that list considerably.
Meanwhile, they refuse to raise taxes, hoping to “drown government in a bathtub” and either break it or let it break itself.
These people are criminals. They are not patriots. While they may intend to wrest the government permanently from the opposition party, they should be charged, arraigned and convicted of whatever laws they have broken during their tenure — if they can be unseated. Every, single, violation.
And if those corrections are never realized, I can only suggest one thing left to do to save Justice and sanity.