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department of government efficiency
Trump’s ‘Shock-and-Awe’ Approach to Governing Is as Deluded as W’s Iraq War
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
Sep 09, 2025
Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, agencies, and programs.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns; eliminate foreign aid programs and the entities that deliver them; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programs that provide healthcare and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear and panic in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many of whom have an ideological bent and are eager to get a gun and badge to carry out their agenda. And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programs or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programs that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust. The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programs, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programs cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will only multiply, and some elected officials will be hesitant to reestablish or provide funding for programs that this administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, we may now see the resurgence of childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated. In eliminating programs that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who were also often direct beneficiaries of these efforts will be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to an erosion of trust in the US as a reliable trading partner. The resulting loss of US standing in many regions of the world has already led to governments to increasingly look to China. Losses are evident too in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
While US President Donald Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach President George W. Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9-11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside of the administration. Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East.”
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove Saddam Hussein, install a government that met US criteria, and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East.” When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy. It was an effort to convince us that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence. But there was no “logic,” and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos.” The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “Republics” that destabilized the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild. At this point, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they’ve done. In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base are still under his sway and continue to believe that the mess they see isn’t real or will easily be fixed in short order.
But as was the case in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
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Over 70 Top Civil Servants Have Resigned in Protest Since Trump Took Office: Report
"This level of resignations in protest is without known precedent," said government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Sep 03, 2025
US President Donald Trump's second term has taken a massive toll on the American civil service, according to a new report by a government watchdog.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on Wednesday released a report documenting dozens of instances in which government officials "have publicly resigned in protest after being asked to do something they believed to be illegal or in violation of their oath of office."
CREW noted that the resignations have so far impacted eight executive agencies and five independent agencies, and added that some of those who have resigned have served across as many as six presidential administrations.
"At least 19 of those who have resigned in protest have a decade or longer tenure at their agencies, with some nearing 40 years," explained CREW. "Every administration sees resignations, but this level of resignations in protest is without known precedent."
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been hit particularly hard by resignations and has already blown through four different commissioners in less than a year. This includes two acting IRS commissioners, Doug O'Donnell and Melanie Krause, who both resigned rather than comply with demands to hand over data on undocumented immigrants to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The report also examined the wave of resignations that has occurred at the US Department of Justice, beginning with Danielle Sassoon, the former interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York who stepped down after being asked to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon was followed out the door by six other attorneys who worked on the case, including its lead prosecutor.
Taken together, CREW has tallied 72 different government officials who have resigned in protest in just the first eight months of Trump's second term.
"The second Trump administration is sending a clear message to get in line or get out," commented CREW. "This approach to dissenters who refuse to obey orders that are illegal, unconstitutional, or unethical has chilling authoritarian characteristics, and stands to reshape the federal government in dangerous ways."
The most recent wave of resignations occurred last week when several top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stepped down over the firing of former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccination policies in the US.
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Is the Pentagon Spending Taxpayer Money on Alien Tech?
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Congress must hold the DOD accountability for how it uses its funds.
Aug 31, 2025
The US federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.
As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense (DOD).
Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which provides:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.
As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. US President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
President John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said. If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.
Those concerns persist today. On August 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congresspeople were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy… I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue…”
A Behemoth Without Oversight
The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.
The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DOD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.
A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”
The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DOD—the only major agency without a clean audit—has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”
The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:
In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.
Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.
The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste, or Something Worse?
The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DOD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire US GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DOD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.
There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40-50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DOD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular: “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”
Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary, and thug in the world that we are open for business.”
Speculation Run Rampant
In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”
In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a US government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a US intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government.
The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO-UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DOD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007-2012.
According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the US government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the US and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Donald Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.
In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the US possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the US possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.
Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:
This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.
Secrecy Undermines Democracy
With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DOD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DOD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the US Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?
The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.
To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DOD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.
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