Tag: government dysfunction

Remember when this administration came into power in January and immediately declared war on government waste, fraud, and abuse? Remember Elon Musk and his inexperienced DOGE sidekicks freezing government programs, firing tens of thousands of workers who turned out to be essential, literally closing the doors of some agencies (in a process that even Fox News called “frenetic and error-riddled”), and, oh yeah, stealing our personal records for unknown purposes, in direct contravention of privacy laws?

Oddly enough (sarcasm), DOGE didn’t find much actual waste, fraud, or abuse. But they sure caused a lot of it—$21.7 bn in waste, fraudulent claims of $115 bn in savings, but a real number more like $2 bn (1/10 of what their shenanginas cost us taxpayers)—and abuse of tens of thousands of hard-working civil servants who suddenly found themselves the targets of partisan witch-hunts, along with the millions of US citizens who depend on those folks. And, as Senator Richard Blumentahl (D-CT) notes, not only would DOGE’s waste have more than funded a number of programs they cut, there’s also corruption involved: “Musk and his companies were able to avoid at least $2.37 billion in potential liability due to federal investigations or other regulatory actions.” (We could have a much longer post about the hundreds of instances of corruption in this administration generally—but I’ll save them for another blog post down the road. This example, though, is directly relevant. Avoiding prosecution is likely a big part of why Musk took the job in the first place.)

But if this administration is really concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, please explain why we’ve experienced—a few among hundreds of examples ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of billions, with a b:

• Scientific studies that can’t be completed because the administration issued stop-work-immediately orders while results were not complete means the money already paid along the way, in many cases, is wasted and the results won’t be published for use by government and private entities: up to $1.4 bn (billion) wasted, as reported by Science magazine. The total cuts in science grants add up to at least $4.5 bn, counting just cuts to National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation
• The birthday parade the president threw himself in July: $45 mm (million) wasted, according to Forbes.
• The September 30 in-person meeting of all his generals, gathered on short notice from their posts around the world to listen to pointless rants by Secretary of Defense Hegseth and the president: $6 mm wasted—and enormous security risks in gathering all these military leaders in a location that was not a secret.
• Arresting, detaining, and deporting millions of non-criminal immigrants is extremely expensive: This official US House document estimates the cost of a full rollout of the administration’s deport-first, ask-later policy at $315 bn—and notes that their numbers are probably on the low side (page 3). And of course, that doesn’t count the impact on our economy as many businesses have to close because their workers are gone, etc.
• For all the talk that they were going after hardened criminals, they are going after ordinary people, many of whom have been in the US for decades and have citizen children. Many came to this country with permission and have been doing their best to follow the constantly changing rules for regular reporting. Consider, for instance, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was illegally deported to El Salvador despite a judicial order blocking that fate, brought back under court order, and then slated for prosecution and possible re-deportation, wasting at least $40,800, probably much more by the time the case concludes.
• They’re also going after immigrants who have different values and different politics from the administration. One of many examples: the detention of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, detained and threatened with deportation for the “crime” of co-authoring an op-ed critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, was an even bigger waste of tax dollars, with the government’s crimes against her costing between $50,000 and $90,000.
• While the current president, when not in office, was quick to decry spending on golf vacations by his predecessors, he not only golfs constantly, spending about $52 mm of our tax money since January ($10 mm just for the junket to his course in Scotland), but when he stays at his own properties (as he’d done 99 times in his second term by mid-July—one of his many violations of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution), his hotels charge the Secret Service agents well above market rates to house his bodyguards during his junkets. In his first term, his golf habit cost us $144 mm to $151 mm, and he made 428 visits to his golf properties. He has served 8 months of a 48-month term, or 1/6. I did the math. If he maintains this pace, he will squander a horrific $312 mm by the end of the term and visit a property he owns 792 times (six months in office by the time of the 99 visits statistic, or 1/8 of his term).

Using the lower numbers where there’s a range, just these few examples total $321,003,090,800. By comparison, the state budget passed in July here in my own state of Massachusetts was $61 bn.

In short, do not believe anyone in the administration who says anything they do is about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. They are committing waste, fraud, and abuse—massively. Isn’t it time we held them to account?