It's understandable that Democrats are fuming about Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse, inasmuch as the people committing the waste, fraud and abuse are their constituents. What I can't understand is why they're saying so out loud.
The Democrats claim there's no "waste, fraud and abuse," and if there is, it's minuscule -- infinitesimal -- and if there's an occasional overpayment, we have inspectors general coming down with a claw hammer on the miscreants -- or at least they were, until Trump fired them! (Technically, he fired 17 out of 70 inspectors, and I'm sure every last one of them was absolutely vital.)
Basically, they're staking their claim on the idea that the government is a streamlined, well-oiled machine. The only step that would "actually" combat waste, fraud and abuse, Democrats say, is to "invest in a skilled workforce." ("Invest" meaning, raise the salaries of federal government employees and, no, this has nothing to do with the fact that government unions give 99% of their political donations to us.)
The left's full-throated defense of federal waste reminded me of my "Excellence in Government" file.
It's been busting at the seams lately, with the addition of the trillion dollars stolen from COVID relief funds. For perspective, that's more than we've given to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, more than it cost Jeff Bezos to send the Real Housewives into orbit, and is nearly as much as California's Reparations Committee decided was owed to the state's black residents.
To be fair, the moment the $2.2 trillion "relief" program was announced, cybersecurity experts lit up the White House switchboard, warning that the CARES Act was like a 7-11 on the route of a BLM march. So it's not as if anyone could have anticipated the coming heist. Only anyone who happened to peruse the dark web and notice that it was exploding with criminal groups in China, Nigeria, Romania and Russia, plotting to get their hands on U.S. taxpayer money.
Naturally, therefore, our highly trained federal workforce dutifully sent out a trillion dollars to federal prisoners ($267 million), dead people ($139 million -- though curiously, Joe Biden didn't get a cent) and people who appeared to be living in multiple states ($29 billion), among other manifest frauds. Sometimes the checks were sent directly to federal prisons, a mistake anyone could make.
Somalis in Minnesota stole $250 million in COVID relief funds, briefly distracting them from credit card skimming, child prostitution, machete attacks, child rape and joining jihad abroad.
Pretending to be providing meals for low-income children, the Somalis collected hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, which they spent on luxury cars, multiple homes, expensive jewelry and other purchases that are not remotely meals for low-income children. (They didn't scam the Payment Protection Plan because so few Somalis in Minnesota had jobs even before the pandemic that it wouldn't have been believable.)
Another item in my "Government Excellence" file concerns the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare committed by a different batch of Our Greatest Strength. So astute were government watchdogs that, from 2007 to 2009, Medicare made more home health care payments to a single county in Florida than to the rest of the country combined.
You can't get anything past our highly trained federal workforce. (Would a CEO who failed to catch a half-billion-dollar theft from a single county be considered an indispensable employee?)
It's hard to find a common denominator in this larceny, but in an unrelated note, the defendants were Michel De Jesus Huarte, Ramon Fonseca, Vicente Gonzalez, Alyd Dazza, Monika Blacio, Ricco Dazza, Orlin Tamayo Quinonez, Juan Carralero, Madelin Machado, Gladys Zambrana, Javier Zambrana, Enrique Perez, Alejandro Hernandez Quiros, Vanessa Estrada, Vicenta Tellechea, Modesto Hidalgo, Carlos Castaneda and so on.
El Salvador can't build us prisons fast enough.
Despite the fact that no one's Medicare has been touched by Musk, and no one in the Trump administration has suggested cutting Medicare, Democrats act as if DOGE is a thinly disguised plot to destroy the program. But they sure don't mind when Our Greatest Strength drains Medicare with laughably obvious scams. I guess feigning concern for Medicare is more politically advantageous than defending the Democrat-voting criminals who are emptying it.
For my final "Excellence in Government" story, I give you two South Carolina housewives, Charlene Corley and her twin sister, Darlene Wooten, who casually defrauded the Pentagon out of $20 million over 10 years by scamming a military payment system overseen by 12,000 highly skilled government employees at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
The twins, a schoolteacher and state budget employee, registered their new company, C&D Distributors, as a military contractor and began sending ordinary hardware to the Defense Department, under a program to fast-track minor supplies to the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. When a mistaken decimal point on a shipping invoice netted them an unwarranted $5,000, the sisters realized that no matter what number they entered, it would be paid, no questions asked.
Whereupon they began charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship small items worth a few dollars or less -- $998,798 for two 19-cent washers, $492,097 for an $11 threaded plug, and $499,569 for 10 cotter pins worth $1.99 each.
Even decades after the scandal of the Pentagon paying contractors $600 for ashtrays, $640 for toilet seats and $400 for hammers -- all billed to the taxpayers -- the military wantonly paid more than 100 of the sisters' preposterous shipping charges.
Their scheme went on from 1997 to 2006 and might have continued to this day (we're always at war someplace) but for a mistaken double entry. When the feds were finally closing in -- several beachfront homes, 10 luxury cars, plastic surgery, jewelry and millions of dollars later -- Wooten committed suicide, leaving a $4.5 million check made out to the Defense Department.
We can only hope that the Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, Russian, Hispanic and Somali criminal gangs ripping off U.S. government programs will be as guilt-ridden.