Musk & Ramaswamy: Axe in Hand After SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA Time to Stop Them

 

Trump’s running wild Gruesome Twosome

From MARKET WATCH the two billionaire thugs not associated with government now more or less running government for Trump with this headline:

“How Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy teamed up to gut $2 trillion of government spending”

Their DOGE gimmick (not government approved agency) will have to go after Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to hit its targets. Some in Washington don’t believe it stands a chance.

A little over a year ago, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t know each other. Then the two hopped on X Spaces along with venture capitalist David Sacks. Musk told Ramaswamy, who was running for the Republican presidential nomination at the time: “I would like to know more about you.”

Now, Musk and Ramaswamy have teamed up to cut $2 trillion in annual government spending, or more than 30% of the federal budget, within two years.

They’ve been tasked by Trump to run a department focused on “government efficiency,” called DOGE. The advisory body, which will not be an official department of the federal government, promises to radically shake up the federal bureaucracy and massively cut federal spending in the process.

Trump said about DOGE at a press conference: “They’ve been finding things you wouldn’t believe. We’re looking to save maybe $2 trillion and it’ll have no impact. Actually it will make life better, but it will have no impact on people.” (NOTE: Another Trump whopper)!!!

A raft of successful entrepreneurs have descended on Washington from Silicon Valley to help with the new Trump administration’s transition, many connections with billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel who was a liberal redoubt in 2017, then he broke the mold as the only Silicon Valley billionaire to openly back Trump.

Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion article two weeks after Trump’s victory: “The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.” 

DOGE doubts: Some in Washington don’t believe Musk and Ramaswamy’s effort stands much of a chance.

Elaine Kamarck, President Clinton’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government in the 1990 said: “Absolutely no one who knows anything about the federal government can imagine cutting that amount of money in that amount of time.”

The Clinton effort to cut spending and modernize government services saved $112 billion over eight years, and led to significant reductions in the federal workforce, real estate footprint, and government regulations according to an indeendent analysis at the time. 

That was in stark contrast to the so-called Grace Commission under President Reagan, which like DOGE, was led by business executives with little or no government experience. Over a two-year period, the committee of 161 business executives produced a report with thousands of recommendations that were largely ignored by Congress and never implemented. One major difference between the two efforts was that the Clinton approach was not adversarial and relied on the advice of career civil servants as well as the perspective of outside consultants and business leaders. 

Kamarck said: “You need buy-in from the civil servants themselves. They’re the ones who are going to know where the inefficiencies are. Musk and Ramaswamy’s confrontational approach to the civil service could also be counterproductive in the long run, asking whether a career civil servant intricacies if its leaders have been calling them “lazy and good-for-nothing for two years.” 

Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The stated goal is to downsize the federal workforce by eliminating the ability of government employees to work from home writing: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome. If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”

Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the AFGE Employees which represents 800,000 Federal workers said: “That while some federal employees may leave if their remote work privileges are revoked, it will likely be the most talented and in-demand employees who do so. If there’s another employer down the street paying the same salary that will let someone telework a couple of days a week, there will be people who say: Forget about this, I can get a better hybrid deal elsewhere.”

The heads of DOGE may also be overestimating the extent of remote work taking place, as the OMB reports that that 54% of government employees aren’t eligible for remote work at all jobs ranging from civilian military workers, to VA hospital nurses to border-patrol agents. 

For federal employees who are not eligible for a fully remote work arrangement, 79.4% of regular working hours were spent in person, the OMB added.

DOGE is also a symbol of the power and reach of Thiel, and his brand of rightwing nationalism, which at one time marked him as an eccentric in tech circles, but now is becoming a dominant strand of thought in the industry. 

Thiel biographer Max Chafkin wrote his 2021 book: “Thiel is sometimes portrayed as the tech industry’s token conservative, a view that wildly understates his influence: The Contrarian, more than any other Silicon Valley entrepreneur has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.” 

Both Ramaswamy and Musk were connected to Thiel long before they were household names. Musk and Thiel became business associates when their payment companies merged in 2000 to create PayPal. 

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, was one in a long series of young, conservative businessmen that Thiel has backed. Thiel’s venture-capital firm invested early in Ramaswamy’s biotechnology company, Roivant Sciences Ltd. 

When Musk and Ramaswamy first met virtually last year on the X Space discussion, Ramaswamy noted that “our mutual friend, Peter,” was also a seed investor in another Ramaswamy company, ETF provider Strive Asset Management.

Sacks, the other participant in that discussion, has been a long-time associate of Thiel’s, co-writing a book with him in 1995 called “The Diversity Myth,” and serving as chief operating officer of PayPal, the company cofounded by Thiel and Musk. 

FYI: Trump has named Sacks as his White House’s AI and crypto Czar.

Thiel speaks in revolutionary terms, comparing the Democratic Party in a November interview to “The empire in Star Wars whereas he and his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires are a ragtag rebel alliance comprising a diverse and heterogenous group that is fighting to overthrow stifling orthodoxy.”

Whether the American people voted in November for a revolution, or even an unprecedented downsizing of the federal government and the services it provides, is another question.

Kamarck argued that when Americans actually start to look at the services that would need to be cut to radically reduce the size of government, they begin to balk at making those changes.

In 2024, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid accounted for nearly 44% of all government spending.

Interest payments accounted for about 13%, national defense 14%, and veterans benefits 6%. 

This leaves precious little to cut, and even the remainder includes Republican priorities like border patrol and transportation infrastructure spending.

Trump well understands the sanctity of these programs for average Americans. He said Monday that DOGE: “Will never cut Social Security, things like that. It’s just waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Kamarck said: “Everybody hates government in general, but likes it in the particular. If they go after Social Security and Medicare — which they would need to do to make the numbers they’re talking — all hell will break loose, and the first person to be mad at them will be the president himself.”

My 2 Cents: This rundown on Musk and Ramaswamy via their DOGE cuts and such underscores and shows that those two are way, way out touch and in way over their heads on government of, by, and for the people. 

They must be ignored and cast aside since the public will not tolerate what their plans are for cuts to SS, Medicare, and Medicaid and getting rid of the ACA. 

Mark my words, the public will not tolerate their craziness one second.

Then Trump will blame them and cast them aside as he always does when things don’t go his way. That his M.O. and it’s as I’ve said many times before, it’s in his DNA.

Thanks for stopping by,