Applying the DOGE Directive to the Trump Administration

One of the initiatives that the President’s DOGE envoy, Elon Musk, has put forth recently, re­quires federal employees to justify their existence by listing their ac­complishments on a weekly basis. Let’s apply that policy to the Trump administration. What follows is a short list from verifiable public sources that covers weeks of hard work by the President and his staff.

• Trump promised and failed to bring down the price of gro­ceries. However, he found the time to unnecessarily make the world safe for plastic straws.
• Then he came up with the idea of unnecessarily changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
• He unnecessarily anointed himself chairman of the Ken­nedy Center for the Perform­ing Arts.
• He rolled back some of the most “woke” policies of the Obama and Biden adminis­trations by eliminating key protections in the Affordable Care Act, empowering health insurance companies to once again deny coverage to folks with pre-existing conditions.
• He restored the freedom to impose lifetime caps on treat­ment to health insurers.
• Realizing that the American people have had about enough of this collectivist “we, the people” crap, Trump saw to it that ACA outreach programs that help Americans enroll in affordable health plans were defunded.
• He rescinded Executive Order 14087 so that pharmaceuti­cal companies are no longer burdened with having to offer medications at lower prices for Medicare and Medicaid recipients.
• The on-again, off-again tar­iff policies have generated a fair amount of excitement. This has been like watching a combination tennis match and championship prize fight. Keep them off guard with those “rope-a-dope” moves, right Mr. President? Meanwhile, economists have warned that we may be head­ing into a recession.
• The President’s magnum opus will forever be his impressive stand for the rule of law by pardoning all those January 6th insurrectionists. So much for “backing the blue”.
• The shuttering of USAID and America’s soft power around the world, led to the US show­ing up days late and dollars short to help out with disas­ter relief for Myanmar earth­quake victims. Thank God China was there to step into the gap and help with rescue crews, medical equipment and things like water and food. It looks like our greatness is slipping.

In the midst of all the ongoing competence on display in Wash­ington these days, news broke on March 24th of a National Security meeting that was held on the non-se­cure Signal app. The story’s well known at this point: An impressive group of highest-ranking Trump ad­ministration officials was involved in an overwatch to a bombing raid in Yemen. However, journalist Jef­fery Goldberg from the Atlantic was inadvertently included in the text thread despite the fact that he lacked the necessary security clear­ance. Additionally, Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow while on the call. The seriousness of this kind of in­telligence breach might leave one asking, who the designated driver for this group was?

It should be noted that the admin­istration’s response to this debacle has been less than swift, transpar­ent, and decisive. When questioned about it, Pete Hegseth sputtered, got angry and besmirched the profes­sionalism of the offending journal­ist. White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, unable to come up with an original response of her own, followed Hegseth’s lead. When questioned about it in a Sen­ate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 25th, Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, looking like a cou­ple of kids who got caught making out in a stairwell at school, both claimed to not remember specific details about what was discussed in the meeting. When asked about the breach, President Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about the incident. But he let us know that he isn’t a fan of the Atlantic, a pub­lication with a circulation of over 1,000,000, which he predicted is “a magazine that is going out of busi­ness.”

This all might be funny if the American people had been casting a movie that needed a group of char­acters who were called upon to dis­play the fundamental incompetence of the Keystone Cops. What is on display here isn’t well thought out conservative political policy. It’s straight up idiocy.

As the late night comedians say, “The material writes itself.”