The Thinking ‘Kat: DOGEing the Facts
Under the supposed guise of improving efficiency by reducing government waste, Donald Trump commissioned an entirely new government department. The Department of Government Efficiency sounds like the sort of prowling dystopian agency you might expect to read of in 1984, but the truth rests more with incompetence than deliberate malice. Well, I guess the jury is out on that one, since it could conceivably be a combination of both.
I have digressed. First of all, there is something ironic about creating an entirely new government department in order to tackle the alleged excesses of government. Perhaps even more ironic is that the man heading this department, Elon Musk, has a track record for inefficiency. Musk has wasted huge sums of money on his SpaceX project, overseeing countless, costly failures, and similar maladies have afflicted his Tesla business, with production problems and hardware faults being common. He has run Twitter into the ground, operating under the belief that you can fire people en masse, and this will somehow boost ‘efficiency’ (which in Musk’s mind, merely equates to ‘profit’).
Already there are consequences to this unfounded belief that cutting jobs will boost efficiency. After scores of workers were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration, the US government scrambled to rehire them, realising their importance, but only after their initial mistake. To make matters worse, due to the closure of security clearances and other administrative blunders, there have been problems tracking down these workers! How many others, in positions of importance, are losing their jobs because of a misguided concept about efficiency from two rather incompetent businessmen?
Let’s be realistic here, this is not about efficiency, and it never was. It’s about tying Musk to the machines of power, and granting him a lot of access to a lot of stuff he should not have access to.
