Waste, Fraud and Abuse!

Is it just me, or does the Department of Government Efficiency sound like a transparent scam to anyone else?

It begins with the fundamental premise that there is, MUST BE, rampant waste, fraud and abuse permeating, marinating our federal government. On the one hand, Mr. Musk tells us, WE ALL KNOW how corrupt and wasteful our government is, but on the other hand, all those federal workers whose job it is to follow the rules set out by law are wasting our money trying to do their jobs to prevent fraud and abuse.

Dept Agriculture

This is a department based on the implicit assumption we KNOW there is something rotten in Washington, you know, that swamp thing. 

But do we really? 

My social security check gets deposited into my bank account every month, which I think is pretty efficient and downright nifty. Not that long ago a factory making a drug called metformin in India got closed down, because American FDA inspectors working to inspect that factory in India discovered contamination in a batch rolling off the line in that country. Golly gee, that's keen. Imagine: some U.S. feds, humping all the way out to India to inspect a factory there because they make stuff we consume here. I would think that's not fraudulent, or abusive (at least not to the U.S. customers) or wasteful--the waste would be if a lot of U.S. customers got sick and had to use our resources here to get treated.

Reminds me of a woman I met who came to my office in her blue wool power suit, carrying her maroon leather attache case, the very image of a career woman, a fed, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official.  Asking about what she did for the government, she told me she was about to hop a flight from Washington, D.C. to go out to Iowa to tell a farmer there he had to kill 300 cows because testing of one of his sick cows showed it had Mad Cow Disease and there was no way of knowing how many of the other 299 cows have it because there is no simple diagnostic test, and the only way you'd know if the other cows on his farm had it was to wait for them to show symptoms, which could take years, could so all the cows have to be killed and that would hurt him substantially even after insurance. 

Mad Cow

I said, "Oh, you must be just be every hard working farmer's worst nightmare, going out from the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., telling him that news, looking every bit the heartless bureaucrat."

She smiled, and for a moment I saw something else beneath that blonde bun and wire rimmed glasses and blue eyes. "Well, actually, I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin," she said. "So when I go out there, they find out pretty quick, I know my way around a farm, and I know the pain."

"You know the pain?"

"One night, my brother was coming home in his truck and it overturned and he was killed. So they woke me up at midnight, me and my sisters, and they told us he was dead. We got up 3 hours later to milk the cows."

"They couldn't give  you a little time to sleep in and recover?" I expostulated. "I mean, they'd just told you your brother had died."

"Well," she said with a hard smile. "The cows didn't know that."

So, that's what I think of when I think of a federal employee.

That farmer in Iowa who has Mad Cows, a prion disease, undetectable, could have sold those cows, from which 30,000 hamburgers carrying that prion could be produced, and sold to unwitting citizens, and nobody would know about it until 20 or 25 years later when 30,000 people are found drooling in their beds, rapidly demented with the human version of the disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. But that bullet got dodged because of the federal lady, in her blue suit flying out from the Department of Agriculture, in Washington, D.C.

Mad Cow Disease, In People

Waste, fraud and abuse?

Give me more of that.