Posted on 02/16/2025 8:52:02 AM PST by John Semmens
A pair of former President Obama's speechwriters--Jon Lovett and Jon Favreau--appeared on an episode of "Pod Save America" to express regret that "we weren't able to achieve the kinds of efficiencies Trump's DOGE team seems to be making. We knew that efficiency is an admirable goal, but President Obama's directive said that it must be accomplished without laying off people or cutting the budget. He felt that hard-working government employees shouldn't have to sacrifice their jobs and that any money saved should be reinvested in programs to redistribute money more equitably and in planet-saving businesses."
"Now those planet-saving businesses we subsidized are going bankrupt," Lovett lamented. "The wind turbines chopped up tens of thousands of birds and the solar farms fried tens of thousands more. The energy generated was more expensive than we envisioned, less reliable than coal-generated electricity, and insufficient to meet the economy's need for energy. The loans the government gave out can't be repaid and the toxic materials left over from decaying turbines and solar panels are damaging the environment."
"Yeah," Favreau said. "It seems that the President's assumption that the pace of spending would be a good measure of the success of our approach was flawed. Leaving out certain fields in the Treasury's database sped up the disbursement process, which was good. However, it also made the system vulnerable to the widespread fraud--hundreds of billions of dollars per year it appears--that Trump's DOGE auditors are now finding. Our intentions were good. We had an ethnic, racial, and gender balanced team, but unlike Musk's team, we weren't all geniuses."
"Maybe that was the key missing ingredient," Lovett interjected. "Maybe being super smart enables a person to understand more things more quickly and devise more successful solutions to problems, but that would put solving problems ahead of equity considerations. Regrettable as it is, I think sacrificing efficiency to achieve equity is a price we should willingly pay. It's more humane."
That sounds like the requirements of a non-serious effort. That fit’s the Zero to a tee.
The same incompetent and disastrous results happens all across the government if you try doing any “sacrificing efficiency to achieve equity” on the staffing of the ladders of the fire trucks.
Regrets I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
“...hard-working government employees shouldn’t have to sacrifice their jobs...”
No, they shouldn’t, but the government employs 4 to 5 people to do what one “hard-working” employee can do...Thinning the employees down to just the “hard-working” employees SHOULD be done...
“We knew that efficiency is an admirable goal, but President Obama’s directive said that it must be accomplished without laying off people or cutting the budget.”
they actually said that? That sentence means the goal was not efficiency, and Obama had no intention of even trying to improve it.
I can actually say I am glad for one thing Obama did, he created the USDS, which is now Doge.
>>>Regrets I’ve had a few
Clapping madly!
I had a comedian friend back in the punk rock days who said that was the definitive version.
The Kenyan had no intention of making the government efficient he wanted and achieved to opposite.
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