This is an excerpt from Nellie’s weekly column, TGIF, which brings grown men to tears—of laughter. Sign up here to get her take on the week’s events in your inbox, every Friday morning.
Elon Musk continues to floridly slash the budget, holding up random annoying Serbian DEI programs as great examples of silly flab, and apologizing nervously for also cutting into the bone sometimes.
We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly. So for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.
Whoops, our national parks. Whoops, pediatric cancer funding. Whoops, research on how to teach kids to read. And actually, maybe Ebola funding is still canceled, double whoops. When Marco Rubio wanted AIDS prevention to remain funded, the DOGE boys decided Actually, Marco, no, and rejected each little payment. They even cut a program that made food aid delivery less wasteful, which is just meta-level budget cutting: Slash programs designed to reduce waste. The philosophy is: Cut the spending, then correct it after people point out really loudly that we need Ebola prevention. Built into the philosophy of the program is that people need to complain and yell, “NOT EBOLA.” It’s like you have to specify if you want your car to come with airbags now, or else we’ll assume you don’t need those.