Two Unelected Billionaires Target the Needy

While each awaits his yearly $3.5 million tax cut for the wealthy, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy build their plan of how to afflict those in need of government services and “other sources of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Their annual goal is to slash $2 trillion in government spending but their initial targets amount to a modest $516 billion. Scroll down for more of that later in this piece.

As a pointed interlude, the top 5% have extracted over $50 trillion from the 90% from 1975 through September 2020. They bought the lobbyists to influence Congress to write the tax laws to create cavernous loopholes to give over $15 trillion in tax cuts to the 5% in just this century and even more when all the downstream damage is done. We’re talking interest rate expenses over the long term that these beneficiaries have no intention of paying off. That’s the duty of “the little people.”

Elon and Vivek co-authored a Wall Street Journal Opinion in their first paragraph stating the following:

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’tlaws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointedcivil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune fromfiring thanks to civil-service protections.

Not surprisingly, that paragraph is dead wrong from start to finish which discouraged further reading.

Checks and Balances

George Washington created the first 4 federal agencies by appointing his cabinet. Thomas Jefferson was his Secretary of State, Alexander Hamilton served as Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox was engaged as Secretary of War, and Edmund Randolph became Attorney General.

Briefly stated, Article 1 authorizes Congress – as the first among equals of the three branches – to create and design agencies and prescribe how officers are appointed and removed from office. Congress defines agencies’ powers, duties, and functions and may, through subsequent legislation, directly counteract agency actions regarding delegated duties. Congress also funds agencies through the appropriations procedures.

Article II gives the President the power to administer Congressional laws and agencies’ executive duties (although s/he has veto power which the Congress may override). Clause 1 states that “he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Office…”

Article II, Section 2 Clause 2 says that “He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate…(to) nominate but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.”

Article II, Section 3 Clause 3 gives the Supreme Court authority to limit Congress’s ability to influence or control agency officers once they are appointed.

Article II Section 3 requires the President to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” This means that Congress has the power to make the laws. The Constitution bars the creation of a broadly empowered “unitary executive.” The supreme court (sic), following the Federalist Society’s view, has favored this broad interpretation of the Constitution.

The founders' primary goal was to eliminate the possibility of a tyrannical government, not an efficient one. This does not mean that efficiency is of no concern. It means that efficiencies take second place behind the superior goal of protecting citizens’ rights.

Trump and his allies want “efficiency” so he can install his lackeys without the required advice and consent of the Senate. They insist that he can usurp the federal legislative powers. The supreme court (sic) has shown that he’s already gotten his their rubber stamp for an extraordinarily wide berth to do whatever, whenever, and he had the media question nothing during the campaign. Now they speak up. Too late.

If Trump succeeds, Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen will take a back seat to Trump’s ability to say “Off with their heads” and have it done that day. THAT is the efficiency he got when he had a cabinet filled with “Acting Secretaries” and its efficiency will multiply with a cabinet never questioned, never confirmed, and whose only duty is abject obeisance.

DOGE Appetiser: Let’s Fire the Experts (& Hire AI?)

Shown on the Partnership for Public Service website is a profile of the 2023 federal workforce that describes a federal workforce of over 2 million professionals with educational and training credentials required by their work. Most work in Veterans Affairs. Other federal agencies include justice, national security, public health, economic development, environmental protection, and education, among others.

Agency work is intended to be nonpartisan. Workers are hired and retained on a merit system. They have appropriate backgrounds, postgraduate degrees, and ongoing in-service continuing education.

The first principle for recruitment and advancement is shown on the website of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

Recruitment should be from qualified individuals from appropriate sources in an endeavor to achieve a work force from all segments of society, and selection and advancement should be determined solely on the basis of relative ability, knowledge, and skills, after fair and open competition which assures that all receive equal opportunity.

Loyalty to the President is neither a qualification nor a desirable trait for employment.

Musk and Ramaswamy also complain that federal buildings housing these agencies are largely vacant. DOGE’s post on X says:

Federal government agencies are using, on average, just 12% of the space in their DC headquarters. The Department of Agriculture, with space for more than 7,400 people, averaged 456 workers each day (6% occupancy).

Why are American taxpayer dollars being spent to maintain empty buildings?

As the saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

But while these two are more focused on cutting the number of agency employees, they also think sending agency employees out of D.C. is a good idea. Why?

Then they demand that agency personnel be in the office five days a week. They assume that the end of remote work will be so noxious that enough people will voluntarily quit with little fuss. Musk and Ramaswamy promise they’ll help secure private sector work. Of course, Project 2025 proposes loyalty oaths to stay on the job, which may be enough to outweigh the noxiousness of required 5 days per week attendance.

In their Wall Street Journal opinion piece they say their purpose is threefold:

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.

These three items are worrisome.

1. The replacements will be corporate hacks, not people focused on regulation that serves the public interest. What will Elon and Vivek charge per hour for their hovering over this project? How long do we support them to the standard they expect to enjoy?

2. Why do we need non-government advisors, and at what cost? Visualize DOGE’s profit structure. The far right always wants to privatize all governmental activity, then charge excessive fees for the C Suite and pay the workers as little as possible. Maybe they’ll list DOGE on the stock market. Then again, AI would be so much cheaper, wouldn’t it?

3. Regulatory rescissions and administrative reductions. Two birds killed with one stone - defanging necessary regulation and swapping nonpartisan experts with corporate hacks.

All of these are circular, bolstering each one another to justify this venture of extracting even more from the “underclasses.”

Then there are the two final factors in Elon’s and Vivek’s calculations: pay scale and union protections.

General Schedule’s table shows the pay scales that seek to replicate private sector compensation packages.

As for union protections, we know these two boys’ intent. They’ll use loopholes to allow Trump to 1) impose “reductions in force” which don’t include specific people, and 2) use “large scale firings to relocate federal agencies out of D.C.” Again, why? Do we need travel expenses included as a charge for replacements’ time?

The Fire Sale on the Unlucky 18

The immediate targets for this misnamed NGO Department of Government Efficiency are 18 of the 22 programs whose 2024 $516 billion funding has expired.

Wage theft is a second way working class and middle class families have been shorted. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that wage theft costs american workers 50 billion per year. Employers do so by paying less than minimum wage, refusing to pay workers overtime, disallowing workers to take meal and rest breaks, requiring off-the-clock work, or taking workers' tips. Thousands of victimized workers seeking to receive those lost wages fail. Others wait years to receive what is owed them.

Given the continuous tax cuts and wage theft, one would think the upward redistribution would at some point be so egregious as to indicate that the better course is to legislate clawbacks to begin paying off the colossal national debt they’ve run up.

As members of the phenomenally entitled class, Elon’s and Vivek’s first targets within those 22 programs are 18 which help people and public service organizations needing public funding.

CBS broadcast this list of 500 billion spending where they will cut the following programs whose 2024 funding has expired. Although Planned Parenthood is not specifically named in this list, it will, of course, be cut off.

Those shown in CBS’s list, in order of funding levels, are the following:

• Veterans' health care, $119 billion. This is simply inexcusable. We recruit our all-volunteer military with all kinds of promises and cut adrift those wounded without the wherewithal to meet their needs in a timely fashion.

• Opioid treatment and drug development, $48 billion. OxyContin has claimed some 650,000 victims because the drug was fraudulently labeled as less addictive than other narcotics. Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy Trustee fought the $6 billion settlement under which the Sackler family retained their combined $5.2 billion fortunes and relieved them from further third-party claims. At this point, all parties’ interests lie in limbo since the supreme court (sic) overturned the original agreement.

• State Department and foreign affairs programs, $38 billion. Remember Benghazi after the Republicans cut the budget for embassy military protection? In the end, Trey Gowdy and the GOP members decided after 3 separate Hillary inquisitions that they could not prove her responsible for those deaths.

• Housing assistance, $37 billion. What housing crisis? Ignore the homeless. So what if people on minimum wage can’t afford their rent? It’s their choice, right?

• Justice Department, domestic violence, $35 billion. Shades of J.D. Vance saying women should stay with abusive husbands for the sake of the children. More “your body, my choice,” cage fighting style.

• Education Department, K-12 funding, $29 billion. Continue to dumb down America’s children. Keep them undereducated so they’re easy to control throughout their lives.

• NASA, $25 billion. How many think Elon’s gonna cut his portion of the government gravy train? Elon Musk's Big Business and Conflicts of Interest is reported to be $20 billion.

• Health care and student loan programs, $23 billion. Health care is a privilege and you can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We don’t supply the bootstraps.

• International security programs, $14 billion. Hillary’s fault. Again.

• Head Start, $12 billion. Start dumbing them down early so they won’t know any better later.

• National defense programs, $11 billion. Military branches, research and development, military training, weapons systems acquisition, intelligence, cybersecurity, support for military families, military exercise programs, and military health programs. Our billionaires are likely to keep most of this budget entry unless Trump opens the red carpet for Putin to probe our soft underbelly. On second thought, this free-range money mountain must present a huge temptation to the likes of our billionaire bros.

• Workforce development, $10 billion. Training programs for existing and potential workers with skills to enable employers to maintain the ability to compete internationally. The billionaires’ thinkbots twirl imagining they can drive out these competitors as prime targets for takeovers or, failing that, undercutting them so they die on the vine.

• PACT Act - Vets’ exposure to toxic substances, $9 billion. Inexcusable. Vietnam Vets worked for two decades for coverage to treat Agent Orange exposure. They continue to work for better coverage to this day. Today’s corollaries include injuries from burn pits which are addressed by this act.

• Child care funding, $9 billion. A women’s issue so at the top of the heap for cutting. From the alpha male perspective, make ‘em stay home, care for the kids, be the unpaid janitor/cook, and on demand sex provider.

• Higher education funding, $8 billion. Think “U.S. brain drain.”

• FAA, $7 billion. Worry not. They'll never cut funding for your Gulfstream G600. Or if they did, think of it as a fig leaf, or, as Wall Street puts it, “window dressing.”

• Immigration and Nationality Act, $7 billion. As reported, on October 2, 2024, the americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/mass-deportation says, “In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations [those living here and those just entering]—an estimated total of is at least $315 billion. We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate.”

• Energy policy, $7 billion. “Drill, baby, drill.”

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $6 billion. Privatize it and raise the price as high as the traffic will bear. Any oncoming hurricanes? Pay what we charge or hope your neighbor warns you. Let’s discuss regular payment by subscription. To quote Jon Lovitz, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

• State housing grants, $6 billion. Dammit, the poor are ALWAYS with us, AREN’T they? Cut the whole $6 billion and let these SOBs live on the streets where we can sneer at them and insist the police take the rest of their belongings.

• Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, $4 billion. See above.

• Other spending, including water infrastructure and health care, $53 billion. The ultra rich whine about having to pay for these things. “It’s all a hoax.”

There you have it. This is how Elon and Vivek are spending their days on their new wish lists. This is where our truly entitled demographics have started their next step in acquiring all the nation’s wealth and power to enslave and rule the rest of us.