If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are serious about stopping government fraud, they can start by preventing Donald Trump from pocketing taxpayer money by overcharging the Secret Service agents who stay at his properties.
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Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that he wants his puppeteer Elon Musk and MAGA sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency,” the first meme-based US agency.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,” said Trump in a statement that probably made capitalization experts cry.
Inherently, there is nothing wrong with trying to reduce inefficiencies within any organization — whether that’s in government, in business, in NGOs, or anywhere else.
Sure, inspectors general and the experts from the Government Accountability Office are already doing this job, but the federal government is so big that an extra pair of eyes would likely do some good.
At least if the person conducting that additional oversight is serious and if they are motivated by reducing costs and not some other motive.
Sadly, Musk is not a serious person at all, and there is no reason to believe that the main objective of the DOGE boys will actually be cutting costs.
Instead, they are going to use whatever authority they have to aggressively pursue their political agenda.
Therefore, more than likely, corporations will be more powerful at the end of this process, Americans will be less protected, civil servants will lose their jobs, and the entire system will work less well.
Oh, and Musk will probably benefit his own businesses somehow, e.g., by hamstringing the government agencies meant to oversee them.
Could we be wrong? That’s possible.
However, there is a good way to recognize early on whether the two DOGEsters really want to put an end to fraud.
Because, as it so happens, we already know a source of massive fraud: their boss.
Trump began lining his own pockets with taxpayer funds as soon as he walked into the White House.
Last month, House Democrats released a report showing that, contrary to claims from the president-elect and his family, the Secret Service agents tasked with protecting them were overcharged for stays at Trump’s properties.
The document details how, as we wrote at the time, Trump enriched himself “in a manner that is, at best, unethical and, at worst, unlawful and unconstitutional.”
It would seem that anybody trying to identify government waste and instances of how taxpayers are being defrauded would start right there. After all, Musk stated that the creation of the new department “will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
But will the Trumps quake in their boots because they are worried that one of their grifts will come to an end? That seems unlikely.
And that’s precisely the problem with this effort.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
