The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has had another busy several weeks identifying and eliminating egregious fraud and abuse in our federal government.
We all know by now how many preposterous contracts DOGE has discovered, including funding for drag shows, atheist proselytizing, muppets, Feds’ personal oil paintings, and leftist state propaganda, both here at home and around the world. It certainly makes one less motivated to pay one’s taxes. Fortunately, DOGE is on the job to save us money.
DOGE usually does an update every Friday on the wasteful contracts it has uncovered during the previous five days. On Sept. 19, DOGE announced, “Over the last 5 days, agencies terminated and descoped 87 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $2.1B and savings of $673M, including a $509k State Dept. professional support contract for an ‘Iran press assistant position in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs’, a $509k State Dept. professional support contract for a ‘press advisory specialist in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs’, and a $911k NASA climate & sustainability contract for ‘integrating Earth observations toward advancing equitable resilience to geo-hazards in a changing climate’.”
Incidentally, the Iranian regime says that “death to America” is one of its main slogans and a policy, so I’m not sure exactly what the press assistant would’ve been doing besides collecting a taxpayer-funded paycheck. Obviously not much, which is why DOGE eliminated the position.
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The week before, on Sept. 12, DOGE stated:
Over the last 5 days, agencies terminated or de-scoped 56 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $2.5B and savings of $774M, including a $31.5M HHS R&D contract in the social sciences and humanities for “value based learning”, a $911k USDA consulting study contract for “convenience and variety of foods and beverages in the Thrifty Food Plan market baskets”, and an $11.9M Dept. of State contract for “professional services/consultant”.
Who knows what the heck “value based learning” is supposed to mean? It sounds like Orwellian jargon to hide a much more sinister woke indoctrination program.
A program that does present an interesting prospect is from the U.S. Treasury and U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). DOGE explained on Sept. 10, “Federal employees can now earn up to $10,000 for spotting waste in procurement. GSA and Treasury will verify all savings before awards are given, ensuring accountability. This rollout makes waste removal in contracts a permanent fixture. We are all DOGE.” It seems a shame we have to spend yet more money to identify potential savings, but the agencies obviously believe they will end up saving much, much more than they spend on rewards.
The first week in September, DOGE ended 74 contracts that had a ceiling value of $920M with savings of $398M.
DOGE this week has apparently been providing support to the adoption of Meta‘s artificial intelligence Llama across government agencies, which is somewhat concerning, given the track record of Meta artificial intelligence displaying a strong woke, anti-American bias. Time will tell. In any case, the contract assessments are extremely useful and will hopefully continue full steam ahead.
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