Remember Elon Musk running around in his DOGE garb with sunglasses and a chainsaw? The Republicans are hoping that you don’t.

The ostensible point of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was rooting out trillions of dollars of government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk gathered together a group of “super-high-IQ” MAGA boys who worked 80 hours a week ransacking all the various government agencies and departments in this effort.

Musk promised to cut at least $2 trillion from the US budget with his DOGE gang. Musk came up largely empty-handed in this effort. He did manage to save around $20 billion a year by eliminating USAID, a program that provided health care and nutrition to millions of people in Africa. While this ended the Bush II AIDS program, PREPAR, which has saved tens of millions of lives, it did not do much to help US taxpayers. The $5 billion cost of the program was roughly 0.08 percent of federal spending.

It is impossible to believe that there is a large amount of fraud in government without also believing that Elon Musk is a total incompetent.

Mostly, what Musk ended up doing was creating chaos in programs that he seemed to not understand. He took credit for canceling contracts that were already completed, fired people who were subsequently rehired, and did things like end a screwworm monitoring program. This last move has led to a screwworm outbreak threatening the country’s cattle stock.

But the key point here is that Musk has a free hand and a chainsaw to pursue government waste, fraud, and abuse wherever he saw it. Everyone needs to keep that in mind when they hear Republican politicians yelling about how they will save us billions or hundreds of billions from various programs, not by cutting meat, but by rooting out fraud.

This means that when Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn claimed a few months back that 12 million people were fraudulently added to the exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, she was claiming that Elon Musk and his super-high IQ boys were too incompetent to find 12 million fraudulent........

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