on the disaster that is doge

An excellent piece by Paul Krugman

snip

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But the real point isn’t Musk’s personal failings. It’s the falsity of the whole claim that the U.S. government wastes vast amounts of taxpayers’ money. Of course there’s waste and fraud there, as there is in any large organization. But the federal government has in fact historically been a well-run organization, with many dedicated workers doing their jobs as best they can despite often being paid less than they could earn in the private sector.

Then Musk marched in, told these workers that they were worthless and pushed many of them out. He was wrong, and now he’s gone. But after the way they’ve been treated, the best federal workers are probably the least likely to return now that even the Trump administration is beginning to realize that it needs them.

America will spend years paying the price for Musk’s fraudulence.

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