Smashing the rice bowls how elites are lashing out at Trump and Musks reforms

Philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote, “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”As President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency get on with their business of trimming waste, fraud, abuse and graft from the federal budget — a business that is vitally important, given the government’s parlous financial outlook — they need to keep this in mind.Less than two weeks in, DOGE teams poring over federal spending records are discovering all sorts of problems. “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress,” Musk reported Sunday.Money from the US Agency for International Development and other agencies is going for organizations shipping illegal migrants to the United States or paying their expenses upon arrival — which then oppose, on “humanitarian” grounds, any effort to stem the flow. Musk and hedge-funder Bill Ackman wrote that the government funded non-governmental organizations to get around laws that are supposed to keep taxpayer dollars out of party politics and dangerous scientific research.USAID officials even tried to physically stop DOGE technicians from accessing the computers that contained information on payments, leading Musk to comment, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”Meanwhile Trump suspended payments to NGOs and nonprofits until a formal re-evaluation of the nature, purposes and legality of the spending is complete at each grant-making agency.It’s a safe bet that once they’re re-evaluated, far fewer grants will be made.That means an awful lot of NGO staffers and executives in Washington, DC, and vicinity will soon be out of a job — and if Trump slashes the federal bureaucracy, too, many more will be thrown into the DC employment marketplace in a year’s time.If ...