A Receipt For Your Humanity: Actual Waste and Abuse

Finally. Last week, the "worst ultra-billionaire on earth," higher than any of his SpaceX rockets ever got, lurched to the end of his rampage through humane governance, leaving in his feckless, malignant wake unparalleled devastation - agencies ravaged, services gutted, a multitude of jobs and the expertise behind them lost, 300,000 people around the world, two-thirds children - 103 an hour - consigned to early death. "We’ll miss you,” said no one ever. Fuck that guy.

Musk's reign of terror as a moronically named "Special Government Employee" - did he get stickers? - heading a made-up "Department of Breaking Shit You Don’t Understand" officially, suitably wrapped up in a surreal farewell scene at a gaudily tricked-out Oval Office where, still grovelling, he declared the once-somber, now-trashy landmark site "finally has the majesty it deserves." Sporting a black eye, black "Dogefather" tshirt and wildly hallucinatory air, he thanked his dark overlord for "the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending" while his dementia-ridden boss praised him as "a friend and adviser," with coincidentally deep pockets, whose "service to America is without comparison in modern history," which you can take alotta different ways. "This isn't the end of DOGE, it's more the beginning," said Musk. "It's a way of life," also of needless, barbaric, untimely death.

Trump nodded along sagely before babbling, "Elon gave an incredible service," which isn't a thing. "He’s done a lot of things," he added helpfully. "He's a very good person." He's also perhaps the most despised person on the planet, except maybe for Bibi, which is why Trump evidently cut him loose well before mid-terms. "We have to get a lot of votes," he blurted at one point. "We can't be cutting - we need a lot of support." Of course now so does Musk's floundering business empire, probably because in his private and public efforts he applied the same toxic move-fast-and-break-things attributes - ignorance, arrogance, entitlement, carelessness, a sociopathic lack of empathy his addled mind deems "weakness" - with the same disastrous effects. It's thus unsurprising his short brutal tenure at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has met with "deservedly vicious reviews."

"Elon Musk'sLegacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death," declared The New York Times. "Go, Elon, and Never Darken Our Doors Again," intoned the appalled American Prospect, which noted, "It's hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm (in) such a short period of time." They went on, "Musk is one of the most malevolent people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics. His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set." The Daily Show's Leslie Jones offered a more succinct and profane, but similarly themed take on the catastrophic debris left behind by the pernicious likes of Musk et al: "I can't believe America may be ended by these fucking loser incels."

Many skeptics warn Musk's much-touted departure is in fact a "fake retreat," with his "mess of half-realized plans" and over-stated, badly executed "achievements" simply taken up by an army of about 50 young, unvetted DOGE tech bros and flunkies who like their boss don't know how things work, aren't interested in learning and don't care how many people they hurt. Embedded by executive order in agencies across the government and digging in "like an autonomous termite machine," they're just as intent on mining data, cutting services, greenlighting corporate abuses and otherwise wreaking havoc. "Musk's departure obscures but does not actually change the continuity of DOGE's staff and mission to destroy everything that protects the public from the depredations of the most rapacious oligarchs," said one oversight expert "DOGE is still hungry. We've still got to feed the fucking dog."

Of course Musk failed to achieve anything close to his blithe goal of cutting $2 trillion from an allegedly bloated budget. in what experts call "arson of a public asset," estimates of his actual savings by cutting from all the wrong places range from $100 billion to $2 billion, one-thirty-fifth of 1% of the federal budget, "otherwise known as budget dust." Either way, his cuts to vital, profitable agencies like the IRS and National Parks will simultaneously cost taxpayers about $135 billion in lost revenue and rehiring/ re-training costs. A(nother) rich white guy with zero accountability, Musk played the victim, whining about "the banal evil of bureaucracy" and becoming "a bogeyman"; he declined to mention the obscene $170 billion more he's raked in after attacking offices investigating his dodgy businesses, scoring $38 billion in government contracts, and pressing countries to buy Starlink.

Meanwhile, he did incalculable damage. At home, he destroyed thousands of jobs, billions in contracts, mountains of institutional knowledge, especially in science, health care, childhood cancer research. He hobbled Social Security, the National Weather Service, disease mitigation, veterans' services, homelessness programs, the U.S. Institute of Peace, now plagued with rats and roaches. He did the Seig Heil, CPAC Chainsaw, fake savings tracker, White House Tesla mini-mall, cheesehead trying to buy a judge, what-five-things-did-you-do-this-week claptrap. He did lots of drugs - ecstasy, mushrooms, LSD, cocaine, Ambien, Adderall, so much ketamine he's now reportedly incontinent. He famously brought his 5-yrear-old son to the Oval office, where X wiped oblivious boogers on the Resolute Desk, an apt, gross, sublime metaphor for what his heedless father has left us all with.

He also killed many, many people, aka "pioneered new methods of increasing death tolls in emerging markets." Of his multiple crimes and acts of malfeasance, Musk's mindless shuttering of USAid, and the carnage it swiftly caused, is by far the worst. Even the backstory is repulsive: His infamous February post, defining a vile legacy, bragging, "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper." He could have “gone to some great parties," smirked the white supremacist ghoul, but instead he shredded a global agency that has fed and cared for millions of poor, sick, starving, marginalized people, especially children, around the world, particularly in Africa, thus abruptly cutting off almost 85% of live-saving funding because he breezily denounced it as "a radical-left political psy-op” - MAGA-ese for keeping alive thousands of at-risk babies starving, caught in war-torn countries, born with HIV.

Just one example: Simply halting PEPFAR, a landmark, George W. Bush-era program that has saved over 26 million lives by giving mothers a "miracle" anti-HIV drug that costs less than 12 cents a day, has already killed an estimated 54,500 adults and 5,800 children; about 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, and many more will follow. Fact-aversive MAGA denies this: Marco Rubio just told Congress, "No children are dying on my watch...No one has died because of USAid" - a claim called "ludicrous" by many critics. They include Nicholas Kristof, who wrote of one victim of hundreds of thousands. Evan Anzoo was an orphan born with H.I.V. in South Sudan who America kept alive with antiretroviral HIV drugs for five years; soon after a too-rich, blitzed-out, witless white supremacist blocked access to his medication, Evan died of an opportunistic infection.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald said of Tom and Daisy, "They were careless people...They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness...and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Now erratic Space Nazi Musk, "a poisonous human being" and "an evil piece of garbage," is purportedly, partly moving on while food rots in warehouses in hungry countries around the world and once-manageable diseases rage out of control. "In government," says one bitter advocate, "it’s much easier to tear things down than it is to build things up." Still, at DOGE, "tasked with getting rid of unnecessary bullshit within the government," things are looking up. "We’ve been searching everywhere to find bloated, unnecessary, overrated, overpaid, unwanted, heinous waste to get rid of," reportsThe Shovel: "Turns out he was running the place." And truly, fuck that guy.

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