According to the most recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll, a majority of Americans (49% to 34%) disapprove of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — and for good reason. Editor Conor Reilley’s “cautious praise” for these chaotic and destructive cost-cutting measures, published in The Monitor on Mar. 5, was rife with misinformation and made me question where he gets his facts.
As most people are aware, Elon Musk was not elected, nor was he appointed to a cabinet post, which would have required him to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. As a rogue operator, he has been playing fast and furious with middle class American jobs — in total, 360 Montana-based U.S. Forest Service employees have received job termination notices, according to multiple news reports — while slashing departments and contracts with no knowledge of what they do, sowing chaos and uncertainty even at the local county level here in Jefferson County.
On Mar. 4, Reuters audited the claims of savings on DOGE’s website and found that “DOGE either modified or removed more than 1,000 entries on its list, nearly half of the spending arrangements it had listed the week before.” As we know, the administration has had to hire back people who guard our nuclear secrets and work to contain the bird flu.
Examples of the misinformation and mistakes are a $655 million contract that was counted three times and misstating a canceled contract for $8 million as $8 billion. Last week, the General Services Administration published a list, as Reilley calls them, of “vacant or underutilized buildings.” That list included the Main Justice building and FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. The first time DOGE posted a list of canceled contracts to its website, in mid-February, it added up to about $16 billion. By Monday, the total had dropped to under $8.9 billion.
Make no mistake, Musk is coming after Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He is testing the waters with his false claims that millions of people over 120 years old receive Social Security benefits, a lie that has been thoroughly debunked, but one that Reilly repeats in his article.
Beyond the facts of Musk’s wholesale destruction of American government, which we will begin to feel in our daily lives in Montana as Veterans Administration benefits, National Parks and Forests employees, Agriculture subsidies, and university research grants come under the ax, there is also the destruction of U.S. standing in the world. Reilley calls $64 billion in cuts for USAID “exactly the right place to start.” He is cautiously hopeful that medical food programs will continue. Yet as of March 1, cuts to USAID have stopped tens of thousands of children in Congo from receiving treatment for malnutrition, one million people in Ethiopia have lost food assistance, and the biggest malaria program in Malaysia has been shuttered.
Reilley claims that some programs are ridiculous and do not “obviously advance U.S. interests.” He questions specifically “money to drive social behavioral changes in Uganda.” USAID moneys supported shelters, health services, legal and educational services for LGBTQ citizens in a country that two years ago passed a law that punished homosexuality with life imprisonment and death. The State Department made exceptions in Uganda for some life-giving grants, but excluded programs that serve LGBTQ communities.
Of course, everyone wants to get rid of government waste. Reilley worries about the $36 trillion-dollar national debt and so applauds Musk’s cuts. Yet he doesn’t mention that Trump-era tax cuts are a major cause of that debt nor that the President is pushing to raise the debt ceiling to $4 in order to extend them.
Many people do not have “cautious praise” but rather outrage. That is why the GOP has told our Congressional representatives not to hold in-person town meetings, according to Politico. Everyone has a right to their opinion in these fractious times. We do expect, however, journalists to get their facts straight.
Kwasny, a Basin resident, is a past Poet Laureate of Montana.
