C (50:33)
That's a great question because Doge's whole thing was we are the private sector, we are the tech bros. We are the titans of industry who know how to do everything more efficiently. Efficiently. Well, a, that's nonsense because a lot of those industries are totally inefficient and bloated. If you look at Elon Musk personally, he has got a deal with Tesla that guarantees him hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. It makes him more wealthy than most countries on earth. It certainly makes him more wealthy than the federal government. Elon Musk, out of his personal wealth, could pay the entire federal workforce and all of their benefits for an entire year and still be left with $100 billion. I mean, that's completely ridiculous. So first of all, the premise that someone like Elon Musk could come in and genuinely find efficiencies is a nonsense. But the second thing is the people Musk hired were not government experts. They were tech bros fresh out of college. Some of them were still teenagers. They didn't know how constitutional government worked. They probably had no idea of the requirements that if something is legally funded by Congress, only Congress can defund it. They didn't understand the hiring and firing processes, but they did understand how to hack the government. So they basically came in and they literally hacked the financial and the information pipelines of government and they broke down all the barriers that are there to protect privacy and to protect private information. And they Basically bulldozed their way into very secretive computer systems that hold the government systems together. And they went in and they started getting lists of all the people they could potentially fire, not because they were doing jobs that weren't important, but because they were new employees. And new employees have less legal protection. So instead of having to wait months before firing and instead of having to fire for due course, if you find a new employee, they're on probation. So you can just say, hey, your job's done. And so they found all these new employees, including tens of thousands of military veterans who were transitioning to civilian life and civilian employment, but thus were judged to be newbies. And they sent them these letters saying, you, services are no longer required. But they didn't really do it properly. I mean, you know, there's a hot. It's not really any way to do it properly, but they did it particularly improperly. So they sent out these basically bulk mail letters to hundreds of people in each department saying, you're being fired because of poor performance. Well, that's illegal. You can't make up a claim of poor performance if there is no reason for making that claim. But they were firing hundreds of people on these nebulous claims. And they were quite literally, in Some instances having U.S. marshals frog march them out of the building, make them hand in their government id. They were frozen out of their government email accounts and at the end of the workday they were literally thrown out of the building that they worked in. Well, again, you don't deal with any human being that way. I mean, you know, I could teach an elementary school kid that that's not a respectful way to treat another human being. You certainly don't treat US government employees that way who are trying to preserve public health, trying to preserve the public environment, trying to get good, reliable data on the job market. You know, all that stuff that we don't think about on a daily basis, but that's pretty vital to the functioning of civil society. If you just randomly kick people out to make up a quota, which is what they were doing, you don't make government more efficient. Quite the reverse. You make government simply grind to a halt. And things that used to get done don't get done. Phone calls that used to be answered are left unanswered. Emails that used to be dealt with are left undealt with workplace safety issues are no longer investigated. Corruption is no longer investigated because the DOJ fired most of its anti corruption team. None of that stuff saves the taxpayer money. Quite the reverse. It cost the taxpayer money because it creates a whole bunch of bottlenecks that didn't used to be there. So let's get rid of this complete pretense that this was about saving the taxpayer dollars. This was not. This was. And this is an ideological project designed to shred not all parts of government, but certain parts. So if you're Donald Trump and you're Russell Vogt and you're Vance and you're Stephen Miller, you're going to defund anything to do with the environment, anything to do with social justice, anything to do with public health, anything to do with diversity, anything to do with overseas aid, including programs that keep children from starving to death in poorer countries, you're going to scrap all of that. What you're not going to scrap is the security apparatus. We saw this in Minneapolis this week, the shooting of an unarmed protester by ice. Well, ICE is operating now with a budget which has the scale of an army. It's got a budget bigger than the armies of almost every country on earth. Well, if you empower the security apparatuses like that, you are going to fundamentally change the structure of civil society. So let nobody think that when we fire or drive out of the public sector 300,000 workers, we're doing it for a cost saving. We're not. We are taking money away from things to do with economic justice or racial justice or environmental protection or public health, and we are giving that money to an expanded national security state. And that is what Trumpism represents in 2025 and into 2026.
