We Know How to Fix Federal Government - Will Democrat Bureaucrats Let Us Do It?

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It was a simple fix.

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Yet an IRS engineer reportedly estimated that it would take at least 103 days to move the button. 

Thankfully, Elon Musk’s team posted last month on X:

“This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes.”

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If DOGE has revealed anything in its first 100 days, it is the depth of government dysfunction, largely because Democrats have been in charge for decades.

While Musk’s detractors are concentrating on Musk's shortcoming – to date, it has cut an estimated $160 billion in government spending, instead of the promised $2 trillion – the urgent need for reform is clear.

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To take a favorite word of progressives, the issues we face with government inefficiency are systemic. Fraud and abuse are real problems, but, as the IRS button example shows, the deeper issues involve what passes for standard operating procedure. We have built a monster that is strangling us with process.

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Fred Kaplan provides a telling example in his New York Review of Books piece on Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff’s new book, “Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War.”

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Example 1

As a U.S. Air Force captain, Shah was flying missions over Iraq in 2006, Kaplan writes, when he noticed his F16’s display screen did not “indicate his location in relation to coordinates on the ground.” Back in his barracks, Shah loaded a pocket PC he had for playing video games “with digital maps and strapped it to his knee while he flew. The software in that $300 gadget let him see where he was – basic information that the gadgetry on his $30 million plane could not provide.”

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A decade later, Shah was tapped to lead a small Pentagon start-up, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), that sought to apply Silicon Valley innovations like the pocket PC to the military. An early challenge was coordinating the refueling of planes in midair.

Kaplan wrote that this is a “very complicated task … Yet to plan these operations, they were moving magnetic pucks around on a whiteboard, just as their forebears had done during World War II.”

He continued: “Northrop Grumman had won a contract to overhaul this system; by the time Shah saw the whiteboard, the company had spent $745 million – twice the original estimate – over ten years with nothing to show for it, and the Air Force was now asking Congress for more. ”

Kaplan reports that Shah connected with “a small Silicon Valley firm” that developed “a working product … in four months, at a cost of $1.5 million.”

Needless to say, “they faced intense resistance from the Air Force officer managing the Northrop Grumman program (jobs were evaporating) and from staffers on the House subcommittee overseeing the defense budget (kick backs were endangered)”

Happily, an advocate in the Pentagon brass helped them “break through the blockage.”

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No one knows how many $745 million problems can be solved with a $1.5 million solution, but it seems safe to assume that the answer is plenty.

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As much as DOGE has drawn attention for firing federal workers and closing a few government programs, its most significant contribution has been exposing the jaw-dropping patterns of waste and inefficiency that bloat the size and cost of government.

Democrats want BIG government.

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Example 2

On March 21, DOGE reported that “the IRS has the transaction volume of a mid-sized bank, running similar infrastructure. Those banks typically have an Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budget of ~$20M/yr.

The IRS has a ~$3.5B O&M budget (which doesn’t include an additional $3.7B modernization budget).”

Keep that in mind when you read the next scare-mongering headline about job cuts at the IRS.

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Error is inevitable in human action. DOGE has certainly made mistakes. But a bigger blunder made by self-serving people, and the Corporate Media is pretending every government worker and government contract is essential.

That is the implicit argument of Musk’s detractors.

Even if that ridiculous claim were correct, our current federal spending trajectory is unsustainable. Something has to give.

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Still, there is reason for hope. Instead of just celebrating those who found a way to move a homepage button in 71 minutes, let’s identify and eliminate the layers of bureaucracy that would have turned it into a 103-day ordeal.

If software engineers can solve Pentagon problems on the cheap, let’s compile and void a list of stupidly expensive contracts – before increasing its annual defense budget north of $1 trillion. 

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This effort must be bipartisan, for the good of the nation

As the Trump administration has proposed funding cuts to scientific research, his opponents have argued this will kneecap one of America’s greatest strengths: our unrivaled ingenuity and know-how.

Why don’t we all agree to use the dynamism of private enterprise to create a federal government as smart and effective as our nation desperately needs?

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Example 3

US Treasury Finally Scrutinizing the Making of Payments

The Democrats howling, moaning, groaning is not so much about their misdeeds being discovered.

It is about the reliable Democrat votes of millions of those people sucking of the federal-money tit finding out the tit is dry!

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Democrats are also upset about the likely discovery of even more misdeeds, which puts an end to/slows down their political and fovoritism games and gravy trains. 

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The sudden chaos you see all over the US is partially due to millions of Democrats and organizations/NGOs no longer getting blank checks from the federal government, as they did under super-lax Secretary Yellen

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It is easy to imagine a recipient of government largesse suddenly not getting the usual periodic US Treasury payment.
A frantic call to a Congressperson to complain, but that person blames all on Trump and Musk’s DOGE, which has cut off your payments. That person may even advise to take the issue to the streets and destroy some Teslas, etc. It all hangs together. Hence the sudden national chaos!
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The US Treasury has a new Secretary, who rationally requires any payment request to have:

1) The bureaucrat name and signature (not autopen) on the payment request  

2) A line item of the law that authorizes the payment (if no money is left, no payment is made), and

3) A routing number indicating the name, address, etc., of the recipient (if the recipient appears shady, no payment is made).

4) Confirmation, with name and title of the recipient, the payment was received.

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As a result of this sea change in end-to-end accountability, many Democrat bureaucrats are no longer bothering to send “payment requests” to the US Treasury.

This undoubtedly has reduce unnecessary and illegal deficit spending.

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Highly intelligent DOGE folks were flabbergasted to discover 1) the lack of tying payments to approved budgets had been going on for decades. 2) the lack of using routing numbers.

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Example 4

DOGE found the federal government was buying tens of thousands of high-priced subscription services from the Corporate Media, which acted as a subsidy.

In turn, the Media provide near 100% favorable treatment for Biden Democrats, 100% unfavorable treatment for Trump Republicans.

Almost all those subscriptions were cancelled.

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The DOGE Group

Much more fraud, waste and abuse has been found, exposed, and recommended to be terminated by a group of very intelligent, mostly young people, headed by Elon Musk, who has taken a step back to concentrate on his businesses.

DOGE found about $160 billion of fraud, waste and abuse in just 100 days.

The money was taken back, and reduced the US national debt

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