NPR is the radio station i listen to everyday, I sure hope they can survive! https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/media/pbs-npr-funding-fight/index.html PBS and NPR are in a once-in-a-generation funding fight. They might well lose CNN — America’s two biggest public broadcasters, PBS and NPR, are facing an up-or-down vote over their federal funding for the first time in decades. The Trump administration sees it as a worthwhile cultural fight, casting PBS and NPR as wastes of money that “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’” in a statement earlier this week. Station leaders assert that if you tune in, you’ll see that the White House’s portrayal is just plain wrong.
I think it's cute that the State of Texas is looking at starting it's own DOGE...all while managing to ignore the fact that the GOP has been completely in charge of every statewide office for the last 30 years.
Not shady! https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-doge-considers-bill-to-prohibit-surveillance-by-state-contractors/ https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/08/doge-texas-elon-musk-social-security/
"We found 10 trillion dollars of the Texas state budget goes to converting children into trans! WASTE! FRAUD! ABUSE!"
Do you really think that's what they're doing? Or do you think this might be a cover to get rid of programs that might seem not as conservative as they'd like?
Sweet Jeesuz. The reality is you can't hack your way into easy answers. Everyone knows our bureacracy is bloated and loaded with tripwires. Congress being the only group that can fix it is part of the insanity since they're primarily responsible for the system being the way it is. So uhhh wut nao? What Elon Musk Didn’t Budget For: Firing Workers Costs Money, Too Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Mr. Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion. That is about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year. The errors and obfuscations underlying DOGE’s claims of savings are well documented. Less known are the costs Mr. Musk incurred by taking what Mr. Trump called a “hatchet” to government and the resulting firings, agency lockouts and building seizures that mostly wound up in court. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000. Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department. “Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.” ... Mr. Musk’s methods have cast a pall over the latest effort by an American president to trim the federal bureaucracy, as most Americans say they want. In congressional town halls and interviews, even Trump voters have said they are tired of Mr. Musk’s bloodletting. In a poll released this month, 58 percent of those surveyed said they disapproved of how Mr. Musk was handling DOGE’s work, and 60 percent disapproved of Mr. Musk himself. ... ‘Money Being Deliberately Wasted’ In mid-February, the Office of Personnel Management targeted all 220,000 of the federal government’s probationary employees, who are new or newly promoted professionals serving a one- to two-year trial period with fewer worker protections. They included a cadre of younger, tech-savvy professionals hired at great expense to replace a wave of baby boomer retirees. Hiring and training them cost about $10,000 for a clerical worker to more than $1 million for an elite spy. “This is the equivalent of a major-league baseball franchise firing all of their minor-league players,” said Kevin Carroll, a former C.I.A. officer and lawyer who represents some of the fired workers. “It’s a huge amount of money being deliberately wasted.”
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/25...changing-direction-of-a-fleet-of-supertankers Elon Musk, has expressed mixed feelings about his first 100 days in office, acknowledging progress in Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but admitting limitations. Musk described his initial tenure in Washington as “very, very intense.” He praised his team’s efforts but pointed out the hindrance of an “entrenched set of interests” in achieving their goals. While Musk acknowledged his team’s progress, stating they had saved American taxpayers “$160 billion so far,” he accepted, “we haven’t been as effective as I’d like.” Musk had initially promised that DOGE would save the country “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, a goal later revised to $1 trillion. On Wednesday, Musk maintained that the $1 trillion target is “possible” but acknowledged that it’s “really difficult.” Musk criticized the structure of the federal budget, likening the difficulty of reform to “changing the direction of a fleet of supertankers.” Meanwhile, as per a Senate report, Musk’s influence over DOGE could potentially help him avoid over $2 billion in financial liabilities for his companies. This influence has led to major changes in Washington, with President Trump supporting Musk’s push for cuts.
