On good intentions and the wood chipper

Plus: a new breed of dad, Ron Paul, and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

On good intentions and the wood chipper

(via)

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” viceroy Elon Musk posted earlier this month. “Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

With all due skepticism of the greatness of the parties in question, it’s the wood chipper I want to discuss.

Have you seen doge.gov? It is, as the top of the page notes, an “official website of the United States government”—an important thing to mention, because you wouldn’t guess it from the aesthetic. Already, the page says, the Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has saved taxpayers $55 billion (as of this writing, though there’s reason to doubt that number), and the website offers some accounting of what the figure includes.

(Incidentally, it is not to be confused with doge-tracker.com, which is not an official website of the United States government but does offer a very exciting live ticker as well as a list of projects the site’s managers believe to be ripe for cuts. Many are drawn from Sen. Rand Paul’s annual Festivus complaint, including provocatively labeled projects like “WILD HORSE & DONKEY VACCINES” and “BEARDED LADIES CABARETT [sic] ON ICE.”)

Now, the official site’s “specific listed contracts” only account for about “20 percent of overall DOGE savings,” and the presentation is not conducive to enjoyable, informative browsing. It is tedious. (Maybe they don’t know how to turn off caps lock?) You get the general idea, and USAID is at the top of the lists for cuts by total savings and percentage of budget alike. But you are unlikely to wade through the details here, let alone make an informed assessment of whether these cuts (to say nothing of the other 80 percent not specified) are prudent, necessary, or legal.

I certainly didn’t get those details or make that assessment, and neither have most people in this country, almost certainly including most people in the Trump administration. It’s just too much, too fast, with too little warning and too much ongoing legal volatility. It is, indeed, the wood chipper.