Welcome back. With our USAID funding shut off, TGIF is barely hanging on. Let’s get to the news while we still have enough champagne to survive.
→ DOGE winning people over: Elon Musk’s team of savants are streamlining our entire government, and everyone is getting on board this week. After a brief resistance—a weak protest outside some office buildings—America is ready to get DOGE-pilled.
Even the men of Pod Save America, who all rose to fame as Barack Obama’s young-gun staffers, are impressed. Here’s Jon Favreau: “We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do.” And then here’s Jon Lovett: “Some of this is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should have done.”
The DOGE is posting all their various activities throughout the day, so you can go here and see how much money they say we’re saving, and imagine pictures of the new one-ply toilet paper. Here’s one example of something that the DOGE could fix that Democrats, at least in their current formation, would struggle with:
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. Seven hundred-plus mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.
Musk’s team sees this Alice in Wonderland filing scheme and decides it needs to end right now. It can all be done on a single spreadsheet and people can just click. We don’t need to send people spelunking in order to get someone’s 401(k) withdrawn. Except modern Democrats see this and think: charming tradition and special workers who must be defended. Every magazine would profile the limestone workers, featuring portraits of them with their grandchildren. There would be elegies to what’s lost when we digitize files in general, and how digitizing files led to this man’s depression and that woman’s divorce. It would be a constitutional crisis not to have a pulley system for the retirement papers. There would be rallies: These are 700 real people! What kind of heartless monster wants 700 lovely people out of a job? Not me! And so the limestone mine retirement processing center for federal workers would continue.
A few people are still fighting, like the Japanese soldiers who thought World War II was still going on decades after it was over: “At Oval Office, Musk Makes Broad Claims of Federal Fraud Without Proof,” writes The New York Times. But. . . but the government itself estimated fraud at $233–$521 billion a year even before Musk took shadow office. So there is technically proof? I can hear folks now: Oh, $521 billion is nothing. Stop shaming the government! What it does with half a trillion dollars is its business.
The pre-Trump government released this data showing suspected fraud as a percent of spending, which I’m stealing from Mike Patton at Forbes:
A good example of low-hanging fruit: It costs 3.7 cents to make one penny. Yes, almost four times its value. Billions of pennies are minted every year. And now Trump is ending pennies. Can you imagine the emotional processing it would have taken for Dems to end pennies? Profiles of every penny-operated toy in Iowa. How pennies are anti-racist because they’re copper, not silver like quarters. Profile of a lunatic who pays for everything in pennies and the impact this will have on him. A real headline: “Without Pennies, What Becomes of Penny Loafers?” Trump just said delete them.
Important government services are probably about to get deleted too. Which is why our thoughtful, empathetic Dems could have given this efficiency thing a try and even done it better. But they never tried (too much empathy, too crippling, can’t move). So here we are. Public school now is just Duolingo+, and social security is a comforting text message you get once a month.
→ Thank you for your service, Big Balls: This broke right as TGIF was publishing last week, and I couldn’t sleep for the shame of not including it. It brings me no joy to report this so late in the game but: There is a 19-year-old DOGE lieutenant—now a senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security—who is known online as Big Balls. We don’t really need to know more. We honestly don’t even need to talk about it. We can just do a stiff nod and say “okay” and continue. But the mainstream media took the biggest chunk of bait and decided to go all-in on this one random staffer with a gross username.
So the world gets a compilation video of legacy media stars with concerned faces discussing “Big Balls.” It was all “I’m getting word from my producer that a second ball has crashed into a second building.” It was terse smiles and serious stares. I promise you do not need to do that. I can guarantee you these boys have screen names no one should know or speak of, featuring racisms and sexisms you thought were extinct but live on in the yeasty world of teen boys. Big Balls is the least offensive screen name you will find.