Madden Mischief

If you had to compare President Trump and Melania to classic movie stars, I would strongly suggest Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind. 

Imagine Melania running up to Trump as he’s leaving Mar-a-Lago and shouting that his tariffs are causing havoc in the stock market.  His answer:

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Now back to something called reality. 

Did you watch FOX News recently peek behind the crude curtain at our government’s caveman style record keeping?

As sometimes a Democrat, but mostly Republican when it comes to common sense, I couldn’t help paying rapt attention to Elon Musk’s DOGE team as they revealed on television the prehistoric ineptitude inherent in the piles of government records stored on paper. 

And where did they find them?  Of all places, inside a cave in Pennsylvania!

If you were among the millions who viewed this special program on FOX News Channel hosted by Bret Baier, you probably would have reacted like me, a Republican appalled. 

Meanwhile, the jury’s still out on a more “tariffying” subject, Trump’s hurling us down an even deeper hole as his tariffs are causing the stock market to cave.  And what does he say?  “It’s a great time to get rich!”

But for now, let’s focus on our government’s ancient record keeping. 

Were you as shocked as me to hear Musk talk about the inefficiency that had our overweight government heading toward another disastrous cliff, insolvency?

Among the many revelations on this spine-chilling special report, the one that both impressed and depressed me the most was how our government was entombing retirement records.  They were being stored down a mine shaft deeply underground prehistorically on reams of some ancient substance foreign to the modern business word today known as paper.

I’m joking, of course, but the findings by Elon Musk’s adroit team of skilled investigators on his ever-probing Department of Government Efficiency so far are consequentially almost breathtaking.

I’m amazed to think how our tax dollars were paying for storing records on paper underground.  This is just one of a grizzly, gigantically wide assortment of gross inefficiencies causing absurd overspending in callous disregard of our government’s already astronomical debt.

I applaud Musk’s mission to reduce government spending by 15% in his drive to reduce the federal budget from $2 trillion to $1 trillion without losing any critical services.  

This would steer us away from the ultimate embarrassment and destructiveness to our democracy that would occur if our government ever reached that horrid Lucifer level, insolvency. 

And according to Musk, such a mission would only be possible under a President as wise and vigilant as Trump.

Now back to what I found as the most absurd example of our government’s expenditure foolishness after Musk’s team found it blindly wasting a billion dollars a month, and doing it so casually and thoughtlessly, which is mindboggling.

The Paper Mine

Yes, there is that mine in Pennsylvania that DOGE discovered housing every piece of paperwork associated with the process of retirement from the government.  It started in the 1950’s and hasn’t changed to this day.

“Picture this,” says DOGE team member, Joe Gebbia, co-founder of AIRBNB, “this giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets, stacked 10 high containing 400 million pieces of paper.

This will now all be changed in the next few days to a digital process that will take just days instead of months to operate, resulting in enormous savings in time and labor costs with vastly improved efficiency from digitizing the whole federal retirement process.

It’s an injustice to the civil service to subject them to such an antiquated process, said Gebbia. 

And from what I saw in this eye-opening special report, and why I’m blogging this now, is because it’s just a mere drop in a vast voluminous bucket full of everything, but what our government needs most—efficiency. 

Thanks, President Trump, for picking Musk to lead the way with DOGE to a more streamlined government.

Isn’t it about time our government starts to run more efficiently, needing fewer of our tax dollars to do an even better job of governing? 

Yes!

Tom Madden governs one of America’s top public relations firms, TransMedia Group, which he started 40+ years ago when he left NBC where he was vice president, assistant the president, then his buddy, the TV programming wiz, Fred Silverman. When he’s not doing PR, he’s writing books such as his latest, Planetary Lifeguard, Blowing the Whistle on Climate Change.  Or he’s firing off his MaddenMischief blog adding his ever thoughtful two cents to help Make America Great Again!