The GOP plan to destroy government. HCR offers more commentary.
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Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post observed today that “the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ [is making] the federal government almost comically inefficient.” She wrote that Internal Revenue Service employees line up at shared computers on Mondays to submit their “five things I did last week” emails to DOGE while taxpayer service calls go unanswered. Federal surveyors at the Bureau of Land Management are no longer allowed to buy replacement equipment, so when a shovel breaks they can’t simply replace it; they have to locate a manager authorized to file an official procurement form and order one. Many have had to ignore their actual jobs in order to scrub words from official documents.
After interviewing frustrated civil servants for weeks, Rampell said, she has learned that “routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity,” while DOGE bogs workers down with “meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.”
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” one Pentagon staffer told Rampell. “Crazy town.”
Administration officials are discovering that their idea of slashing through government might not have adequately considered how actual people might react to that destruction. As constituents erupt with anger, Republican lawmakers are refusing to hold town hall meetings. Yesterday, Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) responded to boos and heckling by saying: “It’s so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government…. [Y]our hysteria is just really over the top.” When protesters dressed as chickens to goad Representative James Comer (R-KY) into holding a town hall, he issued a statement: “Congressman Comer does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
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