Rocket Science

Here’s a sentence that would’ve been baffling ten years ago: DOGE, Elon and Vivek’s government-dismantling initiative, is named after a cryptocurrency based on a picture of a quizzical Shiba Inu.

DOGE, as you may know, is the whimsical acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency. Echoes of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award, which ferreted out stupid spending, or the Reagan-era Grace Commission.

There are always three stages to these things.

Stage 1: Shocking waste revealed! $4.2 million to study why dogs like hamburger! $1.4 million to encourage finger painting in underserved communities! $1.4 million to discourage finger painting in overserved communities! $500,001 to study people who are annoyed by odd numbers! Lego 4 All, which pays $46 million in block grants to grant blocks! Ridiculous!

Stage 2: Defenders of the spenders point to an obscure study that sounded ridiculous but had great benefits.

“Look at this nonsense — spending $2.6 million to make lobsters do push-ups. What’s the point? That money could’ve gone to building six feet of border wall with a lava moat!”

Response: “As it turns out, that study was focused on the production of a particular protein unique to lobster forearms and resulted in a drug that can cure Ebola in monkeys.”

“Okay, well, I’ll give you that, but there’s this one — $946,000 for studying the lung capacity of Amazon blow-dart warriors?”

“Right. The Ebola cure can be administered to monkeys only by nasal spray, so we use blow-dart operators to tranquilize them so they can get the spray. The program, thus far, has prevented over 160 outbreaks of Ebola.”

No, there’s not a bit of fat or wasteful spending. It’s all tended by careful stewards of the public weal.

Stage 3: Being reminded that most federal government spending isn’t little stuff. It’s “entitlements,” a horrible word that should be replaced by “obligations” or perhaps “broad-spectrum constituent pacification.”

While some on the right complain about waste and unnecessary spending, some on the left believe that 73 percent of the budget goes to the military, which spends $700 on golden hammers and gives them to Israel to drop on preschools. Remember the bumper sticker? “What if the schools were well-funded, and the Air Force had to have a bake sale to buy a bomber?” Awesome idea! I would absolutely buy a cake every week if we got a cool stealth bomber once a month or so. We spend enough on education. Money cannot fix the problems. Money can help, but somehow, for some odd arcane reason, spending on school administration has ballooned since the Department of Education was created.

Actually, it makes perfect sense. If you create the Department of Striking People Sharply on the Ear with a Wooden Dowel, you create dowel-procurement departments, regulators to determine the length and weight of the dowel, instructors who teach dowel-deployment as well as another level of instructors who certify the others as well as codify the rules for dowel-striking and developing disciplinary procedures for breaking those rules. (You’ll also need government-paid advocates to defend the accused.) Every municipality will have a dowel liaison to ensure the quotas are met and the dowels inspected.

Whether anyone is actually struck with a dowel is the least of their concerns. When news breaks that no one has, in fact, been rapped on the ear by a dowel, spending will increase, and a new agency head will be appointed, even though he has never picked up a dowel. He did get a Ph.D. with the dissertation Swing and a Miss: The Intersectional Hermeneutics of Intention and Completion, and he will appoint someone who focuses the department on making sure the dowels are responsibly sourced from renewable sources.

All of this adds up and produces little.

Anyway, good luck to the DOGEsters. They’ll likely find all sorts of things that ought to be loaded on a rocket and fired into the sun, and while you might say Elon’s just the man to do it, he’s not. That would be a waste of a perfectly good booster, and we need them to get to Mars, so we can start from scratch, create a free and prosperous new society, and reach the exact same situation in 250 years.