Local opinion: DOGE follows the money, right out the door

The following is the opinion

and analysis of the writer:

You would expect to save a boatload of money if you fired 6,000 employees. You would have spent some time figuring out if any one employee or groups of employees brought in more money than they cost your business. For sure, that would be worth investigating don’t you think? I mean, how long would that really take to determine? Not doing it at all would seem to be a boneheaded business decision. And since we’re now running America as a for-profit business with 300 million-plus shareholders, that kind of vetting is fundamental. It just wouldn’t pass the smell test to summarily fire 6,000 IRS employees without any real effort to determine if they contribute to the bottom line more than they’re paid.

An article by Pro Publica — an investigative media source vetted as very reliable by Ad Fontes Media — which itself has an excellent reputation for independently reviewing published articles and rating them both for reliability and left/right skewing — published a piece that included an interview with a fired IRS probationary employee, David Nershi. Nershi was hired because his chemical and nuclear engineering expertise gave him the background to review contested tax returns that just sat on the shelf not being reviewed at all because of the technical chops needed to figure out what was going on. He too was suddenly let go — “Fired For Performance” though he had only recently received high marks from management reviews. OK, a one-off, shoulda maybe kept that guy. But he represents many IRS-fired employees who were tasked with bringing in tax money owed or tax money that should be owed — but because there were too many returns to process or the issues were too technical or contentious, they just sat on the shelves gathering dust.

Nershi and some of his fellow colleagues were going after the higher-income earners. Why is the IRS selectively targeting those rich Trump supporters? Well, you heard it here first. The IRS employed a complicated strategy to cover up its vendetta against Trump along the exact same lines as the plan used by America’s number one bank robber at the time, Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton gave away the secret sauce — “Because that’s where the money is.”

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Now factor in this truly unnerving revelation in that Pro Publica piece — that a group of fewer than 10 IRS employees worked together to put money back into the US Treasury by making those who owed more than $250,000 in uncollected taxes pay them. That tiny number of IRS employees recouped over $5 billion in 4 years.

They were all fired.

Now DOGE claims that if you add up all their firings of federal and government contract workers it is saving the US taxpayers $55 billion. But that liberal rag The Wall Street Journal investigated Musk’s claim and found that he grossly overstated the total savings. It was only $2.5 billion not $55 billion. Now that is a heck of a lot of “overstating.” How bloated are Trump/Musk’s alleged savings numbers? It’s like saying 10,000 people showed up to a rally when only 450 showed up.

So we’ve got fewer than 10 IRS employees bringing in over $5 Billion to the US Treasury and we’ve got DOGE total government-wide savings of half that amount —after firing more than 10,000 federal and who knows how many contract workers. Yup, that is correct. Ten people brought in 200% more money back to taxpayers than the firing of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. You cannot make this stuff up. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Now, if a business owner showed up on The Apprentice with DOGE’s business plan … can I hear it? You’re fired!

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