Closing the tabs …
The Trump administration’s DOGE agenda is gaining traction at the Department of Veterans Affairs. And not a moment too soon.
Last week, VA Secretary Doug Collins wrote in The Hill that the agency had eliminated almost 600 programs and will terminate over 80,000 employees. These efforts redirected $1.8 billion to serving veterans instead of government bureaucrats.
Ed: That’s what draining the swamp means. It will save money, too, but it also means taking the money that is spent and making sure it benefits the communities intended rather than Beltway bureaucrats.
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“…Pentagon Spox John Ullyot said ‘Climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part’ of DOD’s mission,” Britzky posted.
After seeing the post, Hegseth weighed in.
“John is, of course, correct,” the defense secretary wrote. “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”
Ed: Exactly. As the late great Rush Limbaugh repeatedly emphasized, nations have militaries for two legitimate purposes: to kill people and break things. Those tasks should only be undertaken when absolutely necessary for national security, but the military must be ready at all times to focus on those two tasks when deployed. Any other priorities are a fatal distraction.
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“After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID,” Rubio said in a post on X from his personal account, not his official secretary of state one.
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” he claimed without providing details on the canceled contracts.
Ed: The estimated amount of program spending at USAID was roughly $50 billion. Eliminated 83% of the programs would amount to something in range of $40-42 billion saved. Congress could restore those programs directly, but don’t expect Congress to publicly back most of these weird choices. The slush fund was intended to avoid responsibility, not to embrace it.
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They came in aggressively, a former official who witnessed Elon Musk’s team take over the Social Security Administration said, demanding access to sensitive taxpayer data and refusing briefings on how the agency ensures the accuracy of its benefit systems. They recklessly exposed data in unsecured areas outside Social Security offices, the official said, potentially disclosing personally identifiable information on almost every American to people not authorized to see it.
And representatives sent by the U.S. DOGE Service refused to explain why they needed taxpayer information that is protected by law, the former official said. Despite their status as political appointees, the secretive members of the cost-cutting group overseen by Musk ignored the normal chain of command, instead communicating directly with DOGE.
Ed: The sourcing for these claims are the bureaucrats that will likely get displaced when DOGE determines where the money is going. The Washington Post might consider them reliable narrators, but that doesn’t obligate the rest of us to do so.
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Nearly 40,000 users reported problems with the platform around 10 a.m. ET, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users who spot glitches and report them to the service. Around 28,000 people were experiencing issues as of 11:30 a.m. ET, and about 22,000 people were having trouble with the site as of 2:00 p.m. ET.
When X resumed loading for some users Monday afternoon, Musk said the company had suffered a “massive cyberattack.” Musk did not provide any evidence, and CNBC could not independently verify that a cyberattack took place.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
Ed: Some people really dislike debate and dissent. The fact that these entities are willing to throw this many resources into an attack on Twitter/X (and apparently Rumble) shows who the fascists truly are. Elon Musk is their target, not their patron. Also, that’s why I have so few tweets in tonight’s Final Word — Twitter/X still couldn’t generate embed codes this afternoon. I had to look for news reports instead.
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School choice in all 50 states would fix our reading and math crisis. https://t.co/npB5dQSJYV
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) March 10, 2025
Ed: Duane wrote about this earlier. If Randi Weingarten is unhappy about the direction of the Department of Education, I take that as an encouraging sign. The worthwhile tasks are being redirected to HHS, as the next tweet notes, or would have if I could have gotten the embed code.
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Look, man, we’re screwed. I mean, we don’t know. Democrats don’t know what to do. This is this is a nightmare. You know, somebody like Donald Trump, we thought we’d at least have Hakeem Jeffries in the speaker’s chair to hold him back. If we didn’t have Kamala in there to do the right thing.
Listen, the Democratic Party is going through a massive set of internal crises. You have a party that got trapped two ways. One, defending a broken status quo that nobody likes because they thought that Donald Trump was going to make it worse. But when you’re defending the status quo, you’re going to lose. And then offending most people in the country, calling everybody sexist and racist and transphobic and every other name, and then saying, please follow us. That’s not a good strategy, folks.
Defending a broken status quo and offending most of the country, turns out, is not as popular as my party thought it was going to be. And so it’s going to take a while for people to get it figured out.
Ed: They’re so turned around and up their own rear ends that they are now organizing to stop a clean continuing resolution — after forcing Republicans to accept one three months ago. They have no ideas outside of the weird progressive agenda, and now they’re running on the automatic gainsay of whatever Republicans offer, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python’s Argument Clinic. And voters are even more tired of that than they are of their weird progressive agenda.
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Why the GOP Must Avoid a Government Shutdown: Will the Party Unite Around Passing a CR? @EdMorrissey @ChrisStigall pic.twitter.com/Smwswczp0B
— Salem News Channel (@WatchSalemNews) March 10, 2025
Ed: RHIP. I get the final word in today’s Final Word, and that’s … final. Except for our commenters, of course!
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