Everyone in this country who pays even the slightest attention to the government knows that there is waste and inefficiency in any government bureaucracy. The way to clean up any bureaucracy is not to penalize the people benefiting or the agents in the field doing the actual work; you start at the top and streamline the management to make the agency more efficient.

Taking a wrecking ball to the USAID agency has resulted in $600 million in food that was scheduled to ship out wasting away in warehouses. People in developing countries who depend on medical supplies to help their children have been totally cut off from help. Does that sound like an efficient process?

The cost of USAID to this country is less than 1% of the total budget and the return on investment is probably greater than 10 times when you consider the benefits of soft democracy principles that keep China and the terrorist groups from making inroads to these populations. Gutting the FBI and the Justice Department so that they are only staffed by people loyal to Trump creates a totally unsafe and dangerous environment for the general population.

FBI agents who worked on cases involving Trump were assigned to those cases; nobody volunteered. Compromising the independence of the FBI diminishes its ability to search out terrorism, both domestic and international, and prevents it from investigating Trump’s billionaire friends when they try to take advantage of the citizens of this country. If you really think these rich people are thinking of anything but their best interests, you have your head in the sand.

Trump got a lot of votes because he lied to the American people about his ability to bring down the price of groceries (one of his favorite words). I haven’t seen any attempt to bring down the cost of food, the price of gas or fuel oil, or to do anything at all to make the housing market fairer.

Another of his favorite words is tariffs. Despite what he says, a tariff is a tax on just about everything that we buy, from electronics to food to automobiles. And then when the other countries retaliate with tariffs on us, companies based in this country, especially small businesses, will be put under pressure and probably have to lay people off; the American consumer gets hit twice.

So what is the point of all this if we are not really saving any money? There is one huge reason that Trump and Musk do not want you to know. Initially, they are trying to close agencies that have low visibility so people will think that it is no big deal. Soon they will take an ax to Medicaid and many people are going to lose their insurance.

Trump tells us they have found billions in corruption and waste, but they won’t give us any transparency as to just what they’ve found. The reason is they need to find trillions to pay for a fresh round of the 2017 tax cuts that paid billions to Trump, his billionaire friends and their corporations.

If they are successful in gutting all these different agencies that they are going after, they will be able to brag to the American people that they are cutting taxes but not adding to the deficit. This is what Trump and Musk are really doing for the American people. Governance by fear and intimidation is, unfortunately, what the people voted for.