If you have any doubts about whether the Trump/Musk comedy team is honest and knows what it is doing, let’s disabuse you of those doubts. They aren’t and they don’t. Read the following article written by Carl Gibson in AlterNet:
But aside from the Coast Goard contract completed in 2005, the billionaire’s group has also committed several other glaring errors, casting doubt on the veracity of its claims of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse.
“These are not savings,” government spending tracker Lisa Shea Mundt told the Times.
“The money’s been spent. Period. Point blank.
”
Out of all the budget cuts DOGE (which is not yet an official federal agency authorized by Congress) has taken credit for, Musk has said five particular cuts saved taxpayers $10 billion.
One contract for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that DOGE claimed was for $8 billionwas actually just for $8 million.
DOGE also erroneously counted a $655 million contract three times.
And the group also claimed to have cancelled a $232 million contract at the Social Security Administration, when in reality just one individual project was cancelled to the tune of $560 thousand.
Out of the $10 billion in purported cuts Musk claimed for these five line items, the actual savings was just $19 million,which is 99.8% smaller than the initial number DOGE proffered.
That’s a similar error to the Coast Guard contract, which was 99.7% less than what Musk claimed.
“It’s obvious that they don’t understand,” said Eric Franklin, who runs a firm that consults with the U.S. government on contracting procedures.
A $14 million contract with Franklin’s firm was actually on DOGE’s wall of receipts, even though it had been completed in 2021.
In just the first few minutes of the speech, Trump proclaimed that he won the 2024 election with “a mandate like has not been seen in many decades.”
New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel pointed out that Trump won the popular voteby just a 1.48% margin, while Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama each had margins of victory of 4.45% and 7.27%, respectively.
This led Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) to stand up and shout that he has “no mandate to cut Medicaid.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) then ordered the House sergeant-at-arms to remove the longtime lawmaker from the chamber. Aaron Fritschner, who is the deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) posted the viral photoof Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) shouting during Biden’s State of the Union address with the text: “They weren’t removed.”
Trump also used a significant portion of his speech to falsely assert there was widespread fraud in the Social Security Administration (SSA), arguing that people well over 100 years old were receiving benefits. On Bluesky, Washington Post columnist Philip Bumpcalled that claim “total horses—“ and posted a link showing that
Trump was misreading data from the SSA. The agency has a database of every American who has been issued a Social Security number, but many of them don’t have a date of death listed, as they passed away before electronic records were put in place.Kansas University law professor Corey Rayburn Yung described the president’s remarksabout Social Security as “a lengthy diatribe that is all false.”
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 