Without question, it makes a person look stupid if they fire someone and then immediately try to re-hire them. Oops— turns out the person in charge had no idea what that employee actually did! Maybe they weren’t so useless after all!
And so it sure does look stupid when Elon tried to fire air traffic controllers. Yup, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says that Elon’s DOGE team tried to fire air traffic controllers. Elon called that a lie, which must also mean that Elon has no idea what his staff is doing?
Then President Trump helpfully told them both to “hire geniuses from M.I.T.” but it seems like maybe you’d want to hire geniuses from Air Traffic Control School instead?
This is far from the only example of Elon trying and/or succeeding in firing critical workers. This headline speaks for itself: “Embarrassed Elon Musk hastily rehires fired nuclear employees after dreadful DOGE error“
This headline is perfect too. Maybe this entire post should just be fun headlines that explain everything? “Energy department forced to rehire fired employees after major DOGE mistake caused security concerns“
But those are both about nuclear scientists; maybe the people who oversee America’s nuclear stockpile aren’t an example of wasteful spending? Who would have thought?
There are plenty more examples, as the Associated Press notes:
The CDC is the latest federal agency trying to coax back workers soon after they were dismissed as part of President Donald Trump’s and billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting purge. Similar reversals have been made among employees responsible for medical device oversight, food safety, bird flu response, nuclear weapons and national parks.
This makes Elon look like an absolute buffoon. Firing someone and then begging them to come back, and doing that thousands of times? It’s moronic.
But here’s the genius in the buffoonery. Everyone’s now talking about the important services that the Federal Government provides to American citizens. Of course we want safe medical devices, and bird flu monitoring, and nuclear weapons oversights, and oh yeah air traffic controllers. Are you, as a taxpaying resident of the United States, willing to chip in a few dollars a year for each of these services? Of course you are.
And now you know more about where your taxes are going! It’s genius. Just like when Elon tells you that Social Security payments are going to 150-year-old people and anyone with any knowledge of the situation will tell you that’s not true and that Elon is either lying or an idiot. Or both! But now you know that Social Security has pretty good systems in place to minimize fraud!
Elon is brilliantly using Cunningham’s Law, which “is the observation that the best way to get a good or right answer is not to ask a question; it’s to post a wrong answer.”
Sometimes those wrong answers are absurd claims that Elon makes. And when people jump in to correct his obviously ludicrous and simple-minded claims, we learn a little more about all of the parts of the government that are helping average Americans. It’s nothing short of genius.
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