An Explosion of Lies

The Musk Administration chokes on the truth

Source: Monty Python

On Monday a White House official made an extraordinary declaration. Elon Musk, he said, doesn’t run DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Why, he doesn’t even work there.

This was obviously a lie, since Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Musk does, in fact, run DOGE. The immediate purpose of the lie may have been to protect Musk from the consequences of a case brought by Democratic attorneys general against DOGE and Musk himself.

But the lie about Musk’s role in DOGE barely registered amid the explosion of lies emanating from Musk and Trump these days, ranging from the claim that Social Security is sending checks to tens of millions of dead people to the claim that Ukraine started a war that, as I hope everyone remembers, began with a Russian attempt to seize Kyiv.

Why the frantic lying? I suspect that it’s because Musk, Trump and their Congressional allies are flailing. I don’t think any past administration has ever failed so thoroughly in its first month.

About DOGE: Until last week DOGE’s efforts mainly came across as sinister — an effort to gain control of federal payments systems, along with the personal information of millions of Americans. That effort remains deeply sinister, and we shouldn’t forget about that menace even as we note just how shambolic the Musk team’s efforts have been on other fronts.

But it has been an extraordinary shambles.

Beginning late last week Trump officials, clearly operating on instructions from DOGE, laid off large numbers of “probationary” federal workers — that is, workers who have been hired relatively recently or, in some cases, have experienced a change in job status (often a promotion!) and as a result have fewer job protections than the rest of the federal work force.

As I wrote the other day, this was mainly austerity theater — an attempt to look strong and decisive, to create the appearance that DOGE was saving lots of money even though it wasn’t. And Musk’s people appear to have believed that these layoffs would have few visible consequences, that essential public services wouldn’t be much affected.

They were proved wrong almost immediately, indeed within hours after the layoffs began.

There has been a fair amount of coverage of the layoffs at the National Nuclear Security Agency, which officials somehow failed to realize helps secure our nuclear weapons. When they figured this out, they quickly tried to rehire some of those laid off, but had trouble reaching them because their government email accounts had already been suspended.

There has been less coverage of the firing, then attempted un-firing, of workers who help maintain the western power grid, or the layoffs of USDA employees working on bird flu, whom the administration is similarly trying to get back on the job.

All in all, what we’ve just witnessed is a stunning display of incompetence, dismissal of critical federal workers by people with no idea of what they do and why it matters. Musk and Trump have, of course, apologized and promised to do better in the future.

See, I made a joke.

What they have actually done is try to cover up the mess they made with desperate lies — and the lies themselves provide even more evidence that they have no idea what they’re doing.

DOGE quickly responded to the chaos created by the layoffs it orchestrated by claiming that it has already saved taxpayers $55 billion. But the purported specific savings it listed added up to only $16.6 billion — and half of that number reflected a typo, listing a canceled $8 million contract as $8 billion.

Think about the level of incompetence it takes to get a number crucial to your case wrong by a factor of a thousand.

Wait, it gets worse. On Monday Musk put up a series of posts on X claiming that the Social Security Administration has been wasting vast amounts of money, making payments to “tens of millions of people” who are actually dead. Trump then echoed the claim Tuesday.

This is completely false. Yes, Social Security loses some money to fraud — you can’t spend $1.5 trillion a year without a few dollars going astray. But anyone who has actually looked into the program knows that it’s remarkably clean — much cleaner, for example, than Medicare, which spends tens of billions a year in overpayments to privatized insurance plans.

So where is this coming from? Although the people Musk has been sending into the agencies are supposedly tech-savvy, they don’t know their way around the software the Social Security Administration runs on. Wired has a good summary of what probably happened. They came in with the assumption that there must be massive waste and fraud and quickly jumped on harmless quirks in the way data are reported as proof that 150-year-olds and dead people were receiving benefits. Think of it as the coding equivalent of mistaking $8 million for $8 billion.

You should see the DOGE debacle in tandem with what looks like a looming budget crackup in Congress. Republicans took control of Congress screaming about the evils of budget deficits, but also determined to ram through huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Even a liberal application of voodoo economics, of claims that tax cuts and deregulation will somehow unleash rapid economic growth, isn’t remotely enough to square that circle. So their answer has to involve big spending cuts.

But which spending can they cut? Here’s a summary of federal spending in fiscal 2024:

Source: CBO

OK, I changed the name of one category and cut the rest of the budget slightly differently from the usual breakdown. What I call DOGEland is nondefense discretionary spending — basically the operation of the government, from aviation safety to medical research to emergency relief to law enforcement — which is more or less the only thing DOGE has targeted. It’s a fairly small slice of the budget, so it could only be a significant source of savings if DOGE could find massive waste, fraud and abuse. Since it is actually coming up with nothing, that won’t help.

What I’m calling “the expendables” are means-tested programs, especially Medicaid, food stamps and earned-income tax credits, that help lower-income Americans. Republicans are afraid to touch Social Security or Medicare, so the resolution just passed by the House Budget Committee instead imposes savage cuts on programs that help Americans in need.

Republicans may imagine that such people don’t matter. But there are a lot of them. For example, around 70 million Americans receive Medicaid, including a lot of Trump voters in swing districts.

So at this point it’s very hard to see how the G.O.P., with its razor-thin House majority, can pass a budget, or for that matter raise the debt ceiling and avoid U.S. default.

Combine that with the disaster that Trump’s foreign policy has already become. The best guess is that his crazy talk about Ukraine starting the war is a response to President Zelensky’s rejection of his proposal that Ukraine turn over much its wealth to the United States, getting nothing in return.

For those who have forgotten, this is what Ukraine starting the war three years ago looked like:

Source: Washington Post

As I see it, the explosion of lies is a sign that the Musk/Trump Administration is cracking up after just one month in office.

So what should Democrats do? Nothing. Trump and Musk have created this situation, even as they try to undermine our democracy. They should be forced to own the disaster they made, and not a single Democrat should vote to help them out.

MUSICAL CODA

Every once in a while something new comes along that is just beautiful