Today the New York Times had an article titled: “DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week.“
The biggest cut on the old (wrong) list was an $8 Billion cut to ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Even a casual common sense check would have led any reasonable person to realize that this doesn’t make sense. The entire ICE budget for a year is only $8.5 billion!
But Elon is not a man with a reasonable amount of common sense. Or perhaps we just don’t see the genius in this decision? Perhaps Elon was slyly trying to send a message to President Trump that the President should stop his crackdown on immigration? After all, Elon was also in the United States illegally for a while! It’s clearly a genius move to come to terms with his past.
Okay, so … so what if the DOGE website said that they had cut $8 billion from ICE when they really cut $8 million, a savings of well over 2 cents to every man, woman and child in the United States. So what if they confused “ceiling values” (the maximum they could spend on a project) with what was actually spent on a different project? So what if that meant that a $655 million savings was actually only a savings of $18 million, along with a loss of some good programs at USAID? What was the point of these absurd mistakes?
There are really only 2 possible explanations. First, that Elon is an utter buffoon who has the math skills of a mediocre 6th grader and is so clearly incompetent that he would be immediately fired from any job with even passably competent management.
Or, that Elon is a genius who knew that these errors would get headlines, and then that most people wouldn’t notice the quiet correction and would think that DOGE is actually saving the taxpayers non-trivial amounts of money.
And come on, which one is more likely? Do you really think this guy looks like an utter buffoon?
(Photo from Gage Skidmore and used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.)
Here at Elon Is A Genius, you know which one we’re choosing!
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