Department of Government Efficiency
I've been reading about the hoopla in Washington for well over a month now. My favorite story has been about the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
There was a lot of yammering that President Trump had no right to create a new agency, but in fact, he didn't. He took one of Obama's created agencies (you know, one of those agencies a President doesn't have a right to create) and retooled its objectives.
Obama's agency, the USDS, the Office of Management and Budget was created in 2014. According to NPR, it was to correct the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov.
Now here's the thing. Even if half of what Musk has uncovered is true, it should make you rightly angry.
I'm not talking politics here. I'm talking money. And if there's one thing I take seriously, it's money.
For decades, the National Debt has been spiraling. Now, I'm no mathematician, but even I could see that someone was cooking the books. There's no way you could create that much debt even with all the foreign aid and agencies we support.
Padding the payroll is not new. It's been done since time immemorial. The higher you go, the more beak-wetting goes on.
But everything has limits.
That's one reason I've never been fond of leaving the gold standard. I understand why it was done, but I also think it's too easy to hide nefarious acts behind fiat money. Printing money when there's nothing tangible to back it will eventually bite you in the butt.
If Musk does go to count the gold reserves, I hope he takes plenty of metallurgists. I trust no one.
Still, I'm watching this drama play out like everyone else. What I really want to know is where they'll put that money once the siphon is corked.
If Trump can stop these payments maybe we can do a reset, pay off at least some of the National Debt, and get us back on track.
The first step is finding the loose spending and stopping it. The second step is to reallocate that money to real debt and real agencies that will help the American people.
The final step is to prosecute the people who had their hands in our pockets. Just so you know, this last bit will never happen. They're too rich and will keep the courts tied up for years.
Whatever your beliefs, it's important that you know where our money is going and that it's actually going where it was intended.
In other news: I was sorry to hear the final autopsy report on Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and one of their dogs who had been crated because of a recent surgery. Arakawa died first of the Hanta virus. With her gone, Hackman had no way to call for help, if he even understood what had happened. (He had advanced Alzheimer's.)
The reason this struck close to home is because like many seniors, we live far from friends or family. No one checks on us daily. After a couple of weeks of not hearing from us, our neighbors and friends usually do call eventually. If anything had gone wrong, two weeks would've been too long.
What makes me sad is that Hackman had enough money to have someone check on him daily. But no one would've expected his healthy 64 year old wife would be the one to die first.
And that's how it goes. You never know.
I can list a handful of friends who seemed otherwise healthy, yet died before their more frail spouses. It happens a lot more often than you think.
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