- Guest: MoJo’s Michael Mechanic
- Also: Trump stealing hundreds of millions for White House renovations, billions in no-bid DHS contracts…
As we have been documenting for years on The BradCast, Republicans do not give a rat’s ass about the national debt or deficit spending, much less federal government “waste, fraud and abuse.” They never did, and they certainly don’t in the Trump Era. So, it’s particularly galling to watch corporate media allow Republicans pretend that they do without challenge. [Audio to today’s full show follows this summary.]
Anyone who allows a Republican to get away with those claims at this point is either not paying attention, is incredibly lazy, or is just plain dishonest. (I’d put my money on that last option.)
The National Debt today is a hair’s breadth below $40 trillion, for the first time in history. (We may be past that milestone by the time you read this.) I don’t much care about that number. It doesn’t mean all that much, for reasons not worth explaining here right now. But Republicans love to pretend that they care about it. And they are still allowed to pretend, largely without challenge, that Elon Musk‘s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), facilitated by Donald Trump after returning to office for his second term last year, had anything to do with saving money for taxpayers, lowering the debt or deficit, or trimming waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government.
It didn’t accomplish any of those things. A report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) last week confirmed as much, for those disinformed enough to need such confirmation. While DOGE claimed it saved $110 billion across federal contracts, grants and leases — a pittance of the federal budget, if true, much less of the $2 trillion that Musk once claimed DOGE could save — even that was a lie. The GAO found that the Trump/Musk DOGE was unable to provide information to verify 96% of it’s claimed savings!
But, as our guest reports today, “a) We knew that from the start, and b) the GAO entirely misses the point.” In fact, he writes “DOGE saved us nothing,” but “Musk’s little project has cost America dearly. In countless ways.”
Before we even get there today, a few more points from this week alone to prove the Trump Administration could not care less about waste, fraud and abuse.
- Washington Post reports that Trump’s White House renovations are actually going to cost at least $900 million, most of which is set to come from taxpayers. And, because he couldn’t get his own party to approve the expenditure in Congress, he has simply stolen $500 million from Congressionally appropriated funding to the U.S. Secret Service and White House Military Office. The funds were transferred into an account for maintenance of the Executive Residence that does not allow Congressional oversight, and usually has no more than a couple million in it for regular WH maintenance, such as gardening, plumbing and carpentry.
- Today, Trump’s hand-picked Board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to potentially defy a court order by shutting down the Center for two years for supposed renovations. We’ll see if the courts allow it. But it’s obviously meant to prevent the public from noticing that national treasures house at the institution, such as the National Symphony Orchestra, have been unable to fill more than 10% of its seats in response to Trump seizing control of it. That, despite a banner year in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s term.
- And there was the NYTimes scoop today that DHS paid nearly $500 million last December on a single no-bid contract purchase of 10 airplanes to be used for deportation flights, which have been parked, largely unused, at an airport in Louisiana ever since. (Though FBI Director Kash Patel has been using one of the three luxury business jets included in the purchase to visit his girlfriend around the country.) Even though a better price might have been had for taxpayers, the no-bid contract, with a company headed by a donor of disgraced former DHS chief Kristi Noem, was allowed under an exemption that may be used when delay in contracting would result in “serious injury” to the Government. So far, in 2026 alone, two-thirds of DHS’ $34 billion in new expenditures have been on no-bid “urgent” contracts, often with donors to Trump or other Cabinet officials. By way of contrast, in the final year of the Biden Administration, just 1% of contracts were considered “urgent”.
While Democrats in Congress have attempted to seek information and accountability for all of that waste, fraud and abuse by the Administration, Republicans, apparently, do not give a damn.
All of which brings us back to our guest today, MICHAEL MECHANIC, Senior Editor at Mother Jones and author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live — and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.
The GAO report on the Trump/Musk DOGE scam misses the mark, he argues in his piece at MOJO today, headlined “Elon Musk’s DOGE Promised Savings, But It’s Cost Us a Fortune”. While, yes, it cost us a ton of money, the GAO doesn’t account for the unspeakable costs to our heath, humanity, privacy, education, food safety, consumer protections, and our former position as the world leader in science. And that’s just a start.
Mechanic breaks down the losses to America in each of those categories and more on today’s show. Many of his examples are infuriating, such as the estimated $600 billion in lost revenue to the government after DOGE fired a quarter of the IRS staff. Added to the $260 billion in tax cuts, mostly to the wealthy, in the Republican tax bill last year, that amounts to nearly the same amount they took out of health care to the poor in that same bill.
The Trump/Musk/DOGE cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to 95% of its staff, means that tens of billions clawed back for American consumers by the Bureau from corporate fraud has fallen to zero.
“I don’t think ‘savings’ actually had anything to do with it,” Mechanic charges, as he details all of these cuts. “They wanted to gut the ability of the government to regulate anybody. That was the goal here. Including Musk’s own companies. He basically kneecapped federal agencies that were investigating his companies. Those investigations went right away.”
“Talking about ‘savings’ from DOGE is like talking about savings from not paying your mortgage. You’re ignoring the part where the bank comes and takes your home. That’s what we are dealing with here.”
In his excellent MoJo piece today, Mechanic warns in conclusion: “Breaking things is disastrously easy. Building them is hard. Elon Musk pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall. Piecing him back together, if even possible, will take decades, concerted effort, and enormous sums of money—money that will now be in short supply thanks to Trump and his enablers.”
There is much more, as usual, in our conversation on this. I hope you’ll tune in.
FINALLY… with not-unrelated news, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, as jellyfish are now taking down nuclear plants in Europe, thanks to global warming; Trump has killed the government’s annual reporting on dangerously rising temperatures in the Arctic; and, just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, he has cut federal government tracking of flesh-eating bacteria in the Gulf that has so far killed seven in the U.S. this year, as it is now moving north up the eastern seaboard in climate changed warming waters…
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[Cross-posted from The BRAD BLOG…]
