February 22, 2025 • 19 mins
This week I'm talking about DOGE, Department Of Government Efficiency. I reflect on a personal journey that I had back in the day, in the '70's. I worked for the City of Kansas City, MO and I saw first hand what govenment waste is and I compare that to what Elon Musk is uncovering in the Federal Government.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Hello. My name is Keith Tede. I'm the host of New Media
(00:16):
Central podcast and this week I'm talking about Doge. I love that it's you know, Elon's
been a Doge coin fan for a long time and he's talking about it a lot. It turns out that
the acronym for his department in President Trump's world is Department of Government
(00:37):
Efficiency, DOGE. I'm sure they looked into it but figured it out the way only Elon can
do. The department is called Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. It's awesome.
I'm talking about that this week and I relay a personal story of way back in the day when
(01:00):
I first started working or near the first of my real jobs. I work for the city of Kansas
City, Missouri and I witnessed firsthand exactly what's going on in government and
that city government and county government, state government and federal government are
all worse progressively as you go up. I relate that story and it has to do exactly with what
(01:22):
Elon is up against right now. He goes into these departments and he sees one guy doing
the job of 20 guys and 19 guys stand around doing nothing and that's how we're going to
get this efficiency. We're going to get rid of all of that and I go into a lot more about
it in my own personal story about what I saw firsthand.
(01:48):
Here we go. So this week I'm talking about Doge, the department that President Trump
and Elon Musk put together to try to get rid of government waste of which there is tons
of and they're doing really good. I think the last check that I saw was 55 billion. That's
(02:09):
a lot of money. I don't care who you are. That's a lot of money. In the big scheme of
things as far as our total budget for this country, it's not huge, but it's a huge step
in the right direction after only three weeks. A lot more to come. I want to start this one
with a little story about myself. I worked for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. This
(02:30):
was way back in the 70s and 80s. But the reason I'm talking about it is because I saw firsthand
that I was standing right there looking at it. Inefficiency in government. The way I understand
it, city government is bad as far as waste. County government is even worse. State is
(02:50):
even worse. And then of course, federal is by far the worst as far as waste. So we got
a lot of cutting to do. I want to relay this little story. I worked in a department in
city engineering that we did maps. We're mappers. What happened, the way we did it was whenever
(03:10):
we do anything with a sewer or a sidewalk or a driveway or a road, driveway approach,
or anything like that has to do with engineering. Of course, we didn't design the plans in-house
in the city. We'd have where the people actually who were doing the work had the engineering
firms design the project and then we'd approve it to make sure it was all according to Hoyle,
(03:36):
according to city standards. There were in this little teeny department in city hall,
there were I worked on the 18th floor is awesome. Matter of fact, at one point I had a corner
office. Try to figure that one out. But it was awesome. We had a beautiful view of the
city from there. I digress. There were 12 people in the department. Four people of 12
(04:00):
did everything, literally everything. Whenever a project came in for approval, they would
company that was going to do the work would have the engineering firm figure out how to
do it and put it down on blueprints. We'd approve those, then they'd go do the work,
put an InnoCe or whatever. Our job was to keep the maps up to date. This was way before
(04:24):
computer mapping. We did it all by hand and it was awesome. I loved it. It's one of my
favorite jobs I ever had. They would do the work and then we'd send out our people to
check to make sure that the job was done right. A lot of checking going on there, but you
got to do that in government to make sure it's all done right. But then we'd get it
back. So we had people who would check to make sure that it was all according to city
(04:50):
code. Then we had people go out and check to make sure that the people putting it in,
put it in according to the plans. So ensuring that it was to code. And then we get the plans
back and I go done, approved, everything's done. And we updated the maps to reflect what
they had done, whether it's a road extension or a sewer extension or a driveway approach
(05:11):
or whatever. We'd have the plans back that said it was done and we could proceed with
updating our maps. So there were the two engineers who approved the plans before they went out
and then approved them again when they came back to make sure everything was done. Then
we had our draftsman who actually drew on the physical maps, the improvements that were
(05:35):
made. So that's where most of those 12 were, where the draftsman who were supposed to be
doing the updates on the maps, on the physical maps. There were three engineers actually
for the big boss was an engineer, but he was never there. He was always out lunching or
meeting or something like big bosses do. And so of the three engineers to did all the work
(05:57):
as far as the engineering end of it where they had to figure out if everything was okay
according to engineering standards and city code. When it came back, then the draftsman
would get that information and actually draw it on the maps. So we had see the eight draftsman,
(06:18):
well six draftsman we'll call it because two of those, one of them was the position I was
in. I didn't actually do very much drawing. I did it before I got the advance, but there
were basically six draftsmen who were supposed to be doing these updates. Okay, so we had
different kinds of maps and we would get that information. We had to update the maps. And
(06:42):
what would happen was an improvement job that was completed and ready to be put on the maps.
We'd go grab the physical map either out of our department or on another floor, then what
kind of map we were working on. These maps by the way were either vellum, which is a
kind of a plastic that has tooth on it so you can actually draw on it. And there were also
(07:04):
fabric maps. I gotta tell you that was some kind of, it was like a canvas that an artist
used and we drew on these maps and they had holes in them where they could be put in the
book with like giant books because these maps were big with like three ring binder holes
in them, but they were put in this map. The six people who were in charge of doing the
(07:28):
updates would get the map that needed to be updated. They'd get the plans that were approved
and everything was to code and then they'd proceed to put that information on the map.
And then there was a guy there, Gordon, not his real name, but he was the main draftsman
guy and he would check everybody's work. Well, of those six people who were actually doing
(07:53):
the maps, not including myself and the engineers and the big dog, they would take, and all
the projects were different sizes. So they would take a map that they got, the plans
that were approved and proceed to put that information on the map. So of the six, two
of them did almost all of it. And I'm going to tell you about this guy. He was a friend
(08:16):
of mine and I really like him still to this day. I don't communicate with him much anymore.
He was, you know, one of those were, we were friends a long time ago kind of thing and
we drifted apart, but his name was, we'll call him Kevin, not his real name, or he
would be assigned an update and he would go get the map and he would sit on his desk
(08:38):
and put the map down. Of course, we taped them down to our desk. We had these big drafting
desk and we would tape them down with all of our instruments so that we could do the
drawing and he would get all taped down and look real good. And then literally for months,
that thing would sit on his desk. One project that would take the two in the department
(08:58):
that actually did them. The one I'm specifically thinking of right now that he really did spend
months on, one of the two guys that do all the work in that department could have done
it in a day or less, maybe four hours, maybe half a day. He had that 40 acre map on his
desk for months and he would go talk to the big dog, Draftsman, I was telling him about,
(09:22):
that did all the pre-ools and he'd go, how do I do this? How do I do this? Well, this
is something you're supposed to know before you get the job, but he would go ask questions.
How do I do this? How do I do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And he'd go over there and
he'd act like he was really going to work and he'd bend over and assholes and elbows
we called it and he'd be working away and working away and the Draftsman boss would go over
(09:46):
and say, Kevin, I just wrote a name. No, that's not quite right there. Oh man. Oh man. And
he'd get out there and see we had electric erasers, they were awesome. And he'd go racing
and it's hard to erase on that stuff because they're fragile. And if you erase, if you
(10:06):
erase a little bit, it doesn't hurt nothing. If you erase a lot, it messes up the whole
map. Well, he erased like just somewhere around like 10% of it. He had drawn all over it and
he did it all wrong. So he races it and it took him a couple of days just to get it erased
and he starts over and he asks a whole bunch more questions and he thinks he's got it all
(10:28):
correct and he goes to town again. And this time, Gordon is standing over him a little
bit and he goes, you can't stand there. It makes me nervous. Gordon backs off and he
goes to town again. It's like a week later. He takes it over to Gordon's desk and he goes,
so now this is how I'm supposed to be doing this, right? Gordon looks at it and he's shaking
(10:48):
his head and he goes, no, this is not correct. So here's Kevin again, got his electric eraser
out, messing up the map. He literally did one and it's not this project I'm talking
about. It was a different one. He messed it up so many times and he raced it so many times
we had to redraw the 40 acre map. We had to redraw the whole thing because he messed
(11:12):
it up so many times that it ruined the map and we had to redraw it, which is a big project,
starting from scratch and doing a whole one. That's the mentality there. And this is the
city, not the county, not the state, not the feds. This is the city, the one who has the
least problem with that kind of situation. So eventually he got that one little project
(11:34):
done that should have taken that day at the most done and it was months later and I'm
not exaggerating. I'm not kidding. This is how it went. This is how this was normal.
This was okay by everybody that worked there. I mean, it was just known that a very small
percentage of the people working there actually did the work. The rest of them, it was just
(11:57):
a party or a social place to be. They'd go and one of the things they did religiously
was complain about how abused they were and how hard they worked and how they didn't get
paid for what they did. And reality is they didn't do much, if anything at all. Kevin,
as much as I liked the guy and as fun as he was to be with when we weren't in the office,
(12:20):
actually, even when we were in the office, he was just a fun guy to be around, but he
couldn't do anything for the city for pay. He couldn't. He couldn't do it, but here he
was and we made pretty good money. People often think of, oh, the government doesn't
pay very well. Yeah, for what you do, it pays really well, but in the city engineer's office,
(12:43):
we got a little more money than the average Joe on the street. So here's this guy. He
couldn't make it as a bus boy in a restaurant. And I hate saying that and it will never get
back to him. He will never know about this. He would understand even if he did, but he
was a fun guy to be around, but he couldn't do work. But it was all okay by everybody
(13:08):
who worked there. Everybody understood this. These two guys here do all the work. All the
rest of them are just, and I thought about it one time. I thought, well, maybe this is
this is how the city keeps unemployment down. They hire all these people that could not
get jobs anywhere else to work for the city and then they're actually employed. So it
(13:32):
lowers the unemployment rate. Anyway, I don't know if that's true. I think it partly is,
but there's a lot of other things involved. But what I'm getting to on this whole thing,
the reason I'm telling this story, it's long. That's the city. Now multiply that times 10
and you get the county. So instead of two people doing all the work for a department
that has 10 people in it, there's four people doing all the work with 40 people in it. So
(13:57):
36 people are doing nothing in the county. Then you get the state. It's even worse and
federal even worse. So the whole thing about this story that I'm telling you is there is
massive, massive, massive waste that you can't even begin to understand if you have never worked
for a government entity. If you work in private and you're not doing your job, you get fired.
(14:22):
If you work in the private sector and you're doing your job, but you're not doing it very good,
you get a talking to. And if that doesn't get fixed, you get fired. Public employment
for the government, none of that matters. Doesn't have anything to do with whether you're
keeping your job or not. And that has been going on literally for decades. Like I said,
it was the 70s and 80s when I was doing it. So that's what 40, 45, 50 years ago. It's gotten a
(14:49):
lot worse since. And that's what they're dealing with, a doge. And Elon Musk is pulling his hair
out going, this can't be happening, but he's catching it. He's finding it. He's finding all
this stuff. He's seeing what I saw when I worked there, but he's able to do something about it
where I wasn't. Honestly, it bothered me, but I understood that's how it was. You don't rock the
(15:12):
boat. To me, after going through that and seeing how that worked, I got out of it. Actually, I
went to work for the water department eventually and had a really good job at the water department.
I was a big dog. The person in charge of that department was very happy to get me. And she was
so not understanding when I left because it was a great job. I could have had it the rest of my life
(15:37):
and everything would have been cool. But I left. I went to the private sector because I got to the
point where I couldn't take it anymore. And the water department was even worse than city engineering.
There were more people doing nothing in that department. It was a bigger department. It was
crazy. I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't stand to come in and be one of the five people in the
(15:58):
whole department that did everything while 25 or 30 people sat around and did nothing except
complain about how hard they were working and how abused they were and how they didn't get paid for
their job. I couldn't take it. So I went to the private sector and never looked back. Anyway,
that's what Elon Musk is faced with right now. He's going in and he's going, well, these people
(16:19):
aren't doing anything. And he's got an eye for that kind of thing. That's why he's so successful.
That's why his companies are so successful because he didn't put up with that stuff for one billionth
of a second. First of all, they don't get hired if they don't know what they're doing and they're
very good at it. But if they did get hired and they weren't pulling their weight by, don't even look
back, don't even think about it. Bye. And that's what he's doing in the government now. And I'm sure
(16:46):
if things don't change, he's going to go through and get the feds right. And then he'll go through
and get the states right and then go through and get the government, the county right. And then
he'll go through and get the cities right and down to the small cities and all that stuff.
Eventually it'll all be taken care of. It'll be a bunch of unemployed people because the
unemployment rate is taking that into account where they have a bunch of people that aren't
(17:09):
working and are considered employed. So the unemployment rate is falsely lower than it
really is. So that's going to have an effect on that. But I just want to talk about that because
President Trump also noticed how a lot of people weren't doing anything in the government and he
wanted it out of there because he wants to get rid of the deficit. He wants to get rid of the debt
(17:35):
in this country. And the way to do that is raise taxes or do the same job for less money. Well,
he don't want to raise taxes. Thank goodness. So he's going to eliminate all that crap. It's going
out the door. Yeah. So anyway, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, like I said, the last
time I checked a few days ago, it was 55 billion. And that's just after a few weeks, think about what
(18:00):
it's going to be like after four years. Yeah. And there's going to be a lot of up and down and you
know, everybody goes, well, they fired too many people and they can't run the permit. Well, they
probably can. And they may hire back some of these people. They're not going to get it exactly right
on the very first try. The way to do it is cut way back. And when you go, oh, we really need that
(18:23):
person, then you put somebody in that spot. But you can't tell unless you take them out in the
first place. So anyway, I'm going really long here. And I just want to talk about that a little bit
of talking about what DOGE does and how fabulously lucky we are to have that. Because we're going
to get rid of all that stuff that we've been paying for you and me with our tax dollars that they
(18:46):
take from us at gunpoint. Also, the thing really got me was to getting rid of a lot of the IRS.
Yeah. What was the 8700 new IRS employees that Biden put in? They're gone. So yeah, we don't need
that many people in the IRS. Matter of fact, this is a different podcast, but I'm for getting rid of
the IRS 100% gone and just go to a flat tax and a consumption tax. That's a long story. I'm not
(19:13):
going to talk about it right now, but IRS is gone. We don't need them. We can save a ton of money
without them.
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Hello. My name is Keith Tede. I'm the host of New Media
(00:16):
Central podcast and this week I'm talking about Doge. I love that it's you know, Elon's
been a Doge coin fan for a long time and he's talking about it a lot. It turns out that
the acronym for his department in President Trump's world is Department of Government
(00:37):
Efficiency, DOGE. I'm sure they looked into it but figured it out the way only Elon can
do. The department is called Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. It's awesome.
I'm talking about that this week and I relay a personal story of way back in the day when
(01:00):
I first started working or near the first of my real jobs. I work for the city of Kansas
City, Missouri and I witnessed firsthand exactly what's going on in government and
that city government and county government, state government and federal government are
all worse progressively as you go up. I relate that story and it has to do exactly with what
(01:22):
Elon is up against right now. He goes into these departments and he sees one guy doing
the job of 20 guys and 19 guys stand around doing nothing and that's how we're going to
get this efficiency. We're going to get rid of all of that and I go into a lot more about
it in my own personal story about what I saw firsthand.
(01:48):
Here we go. So this week I'm talking about Doge, the department that President Trump
and Elon Musk put together to try to get rid of government waste of which there is tons
of and they're doing really good. I think the last check that I saw was 55 billion. That's
(02:09):
a lot of money. I don't care who you are. That's a lot of money. In the big scheme of
things as far as our total budget for this country, it's not huge, but it's a huge step
in the right direction after only three weeks. A lot more to come. I want to start this one
with a little story about myself. I worked for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. This
(02:30):
was way back in the 70s and 80s. But the reason I'm talking about it is because I saw firsthand
that I was standing right there looking at it. Inefficiency in government. The way I understand
it, city government is bad as far as waste. County government is even worse. State is
(02:50):
even worse. And then of course, federal is by far the worst as far as waste. So we got
a lot of cutting to do. I want to relay this little story. I worked in a department in
city engineering that we did maps. We're mappers. What happened, the way we did it was whenever
(03:10):
we do anything with a sewer or a sidewalk or a driveway or a road, driveway approach,
or anything like that has to do with engineering. Of course, we didn't design the plans in-house
in the city. We'd have where the people actually who were doing the work had the engineering
firms design the project and then we'd approve it to make sure it was all according to Hoyle,
(03:36):
according to city standards. There were in this little teeny department in city hall,
there were I worked on the 18th floor is awesome. Matter of fact, at one point I had a corner
office. Try to figure that one out. But it was awesome. We had a beautiful view of the
city from there. I digress. There were 12 people in the department. Four people of 12
(04:00):
did everything, literally everything. Whenever a project came in for approval, they would
company that was going to do the work would have the engineering firm figure out how to
do it and put it down on blueprints. We'd approve those, then they'd go do the work,
put an InnoCe or whatever. Our job was to keep the maps up to date. This was way before
(04:24):
computer mapping. We did it all by hand and it was awesome. I loved it. It's one of my
favorite jobs I ever had. They would do the work and then we'd send out our people to
check to make sure that the job was done right. A lot of checking going on there, but you
got to do that in government to make sure it's all done right. But then we'd get it
back. So we had people who would check to make sure that it was all according to city
(04:50):
code. Then we had people go out and check to make sure that the people putting it in,
put it in according to the plans. So ensuring that it was to code. And then we get the plans
back and I go done, approved, everything's done. And we updated the maps to reflect what
they had done, whether it's a road extension or a sewer extension or a driveway approach
(05:11):
or whatever. We'd have the plans back that said it was done and we could proceed with
updating our maps. So there were the two engineers who approved the plans before they went out
and then approved them again when they came back to make sure everything was done. Then
we had our draftsman who actually drew on the physical maps, the improvements that were
(05:35):
made. So that's where most of those 12 were, where the draftsman who were supposed to be
doing the updates on the maps, on the physical maps. There were three engineers actually
for the big boss was an engineer, but he was never there. He was always out lunching or
meeting or something like big bosses do. And so of the three engineers to did all the work
(05:57):
as far as the engineering end of it where they had to figure out if everything was okay
according to engineering standards and city code. When it came back, then the draftsman
would get that information and actually draw it on the maps. So we had see the eight draftsman,
(06:18):
well six draftsman we'll call it because two of those, one of them was the position I was
in. I didn't actually do very much drawing. I did it before I got the advance, but there
were basically six draftsmen who were supposed to be doing these updates. Okay, so we had
different kinds of maps and we would get that information. We had to update the maps. And
(06:42):
what would happen was an improvement job that was completed and ready to be put on the maps.
We'd go grab the physical map either out of our department or on another floor, then what
kind of map we were working on. These maps by the way were either vellum, which is a
kind of a plastic that has tooth on it so you can actually draw on it. And there were also
(07:04):
fabric maps. I gotta tell you that was some kind of, it was like a canvas that an artist
used and we drew on these maps and they had holes in them where they could be put in the
book with like giant books because these maps were big with like three ring binder holes
in them, but they were put in this map. The six people who were in charge of doing the
(07:28):
updates would get the map that needed to be updated. They'd get the plans that were approved
and everything was to code and then they'd proceed to put that information on the map.
And then there was a guy there, Gordon, not his real name, but he was the main draftsman
guy and he would check everybody's work. Well, of those six people who were actually doing
(07:53):
the maps, not including myself and the engineers and the big dog, they would take, and all
the projects were different sizes. So they would take a map that they got, the plans
that were approved and proceed to put that information on the map. So of the six, two
of them did almost all of it. And I'm going to tell you about this guy. He was a friend
(08:16):
of mine and I really like him still to this day. I don't communicate with him much anymore.
He was, you know, one of those were, we were friends a long time ago kind of thing and
we drifted apart, but his name was, we'll call him Kevin, not his real name, or he
would be assigned an update and he would go get the map and he would sit on his desk
(08:38):
and put the map down. Of course, we taped them down to our desk. We had these big drafting
desk and we would tape them down with all of our instruments so that we could do the
drawing and he would get all taped down and look real good. And then literally for months,
that thing would sit on his desk. One project that would take the two in the department
(08:58):
that actually did them. The one I'm specifically thinking of right now that he really did spend
months on, one of the two guys that do all the work in that department could have done
it in a day or less, maybe four hours, maybe half a day. He had that 40 acre map on his
desk for months and he would go talk to the big dog, Draftsman, I was telling him about,
(09:22):
that did all the pre-ools and he'd go, how do I do this? How do I do this? Well, this
is something you're supposed to know before you get the job, but he would go ask questions.
How do I do this? How do I do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And he'd go over there and
he'd act like he was really going to work and he'd bend over and assholes and elbows
we called it and he'd be working away and working away and the Draftsman boss would go over
(09:46):
and say, Kevin, I just wrote a name. No, that's not quite right there. Oh man. Oh man. And
he'd get out there and see we had electric erasers, they were awesome. And he'd go racing
and it's hard to erase on that stuff because they're fragile. And if you erase, if you
(10:06):
erase a little bit, it doesn't hurt nothing. If you erase a lot, it messes up the whole
map. Well, he erased like just somewhere around like 10% of it. He had drawn all over it and
he did it all wrong. So he races it and it took him a couple of days just to get it erased
and he starts over and he asks a whole bunch more questions and he thinks he's got it all
(10:28):
correct and he goes to town again. And this time, Gordon is standing over him a little
bit and he goes, you can't stand there. It makes me nervous. Gordon backs off and he
goes to town again. It's like a week later. He takes it over to Gordon's desk and he goes,
so now this is how I'm supposed to be doing this, right? Gordon looks at it and he's shaking
(10:48):
his head and he goes, no, this is not correct. So here's Kevin again, got his electric eraser
out, messing up the map. He literally did one and it's not this project I'm talking
about. It was a different one. He messed it up so many times and he raced it so many times
we had to redraw the 40 acre map. We had to redraw the whole thing because he messed
(11:12):
it up so many times that it ruined the map and we had to redraw it, which is a big project,
starting from scratch and doing a whole one. That's the mentality there. And this is the
city, not the county, not the state, not the feds. This is the city, the one who has the
least problem with that kind of situation. So eventually he got that one little project
(11:34):
done that should have taken that day at the most done and it was months later and I'm
not exaggerating. I'm not kidding. This is how it went. This is how this was normal.
This was okay by everybody that worked there. I mean, it was just known that a very small
percentage of the people working there actually did the work. The rest of them, it was just
(11:57):
a party or a social place to be. They'd go and one of the things they did religiously
was complain about how abused they were and how hard they worked and how they didn't get
paid for what they did. And reality is they didn't do much, if anything at all. Kevin,
as much as I liked the guy and as fun as he was to be with when we weren't in the office,
(12:20):
actually, even when we were in the office, he was just a fun guy to be around, but he
couldn't do anything for the city for pay. He couldn't. He couldn't do it, but here he
was and we made pretty good money. People often think of, oh, the government doesn't
pay very well. Yeah, for what you do, it pays really well, but in the city engineer's office,
(12:43):
we got a little more money than the average Joe on the street. So here's this guy. He
couldn't make it as a bus boy in a restaurant. And I hate saying that and it will never get
back to him. He will never know about this. He would understand even if he did, but he
was a fun guy to be around, but he couldn't do work. But it was all okay by everybody
(13:08):
who worked there. Everybody understood this. These two guys here do all the work. All the
rest of them are just, and I thought about it one time. I thought, well, maybe this is
this is how the city keeps unemployment down. They hire all these people that could not
get jobs anywhere else to work for the city and then they're actually employed. So it
(13:32):
lowers the unemployment rate. Anyway, I don't know if that's true. I think it partly is,
but there's a lot of other things involved. But what I'm getting to on this whole thing,
the reason I'm telling this story, it's long. That's the city. Now multiply that times 10
and you get the county. So instead of two people doing all the work for a department
that has 10 people in it, there's four people doing all the work with 40 people in it. So
(13:57):
36 people are doing nothing in the county. Then you get the state. It's even worse and
federal even worse. So the whole thing about this story that I'm telling you is there is
massive, massive, massive waste that you can't even begin to understand if you have never worked
for a government entity. If you work in private and you're not doing your job, you get fired.
(14:22):
If you work in the private sector and you're doing your job, but you're not doing it very good,
you get a talking to. And if that doesn't get fixed, you get fired. Public employment
for the government, none of that matters. Doesn't have anything to do with whether you're
keeping your job or not. And that has been going on literally for decades. Like I said,
it was the 70s and 80s when I was doing it. So that's what 40, 45, 50 years ago. It's gotten a
(14:49):
lot worse since. And that's what they're dealing with, a doge. And Elon Musk is pulling his hair
out going, this can't be happening, but he's catching it. He's finding it. He's finding all
this stuff. He's seeing what I saw when I worked there, but he's able to do something about it
where I wasn't. Honestly, it bothered me, but I understood that's how it was. You don't rock the
(15:12):
boat. To me, after going through that and seeing how that worked, I got out of it. Actually, I
went to work for the water department eventually and had a really good job at the water department.
I was a big dog. The person in charge of that department was very happy to get me. And she was
so not understanding when I left because it was a great job. I could have had it the rest of my life
(15:37):
and everything would have been cool. But I left. I went to the private sector because I got to the
point where I couldn't take it anymore. And the water department was even worse than city engineering.
There were more people doing nothing in that department. It was a bigger department. It was
crazy. I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't stand to come in and be one of the five people in the
(15:58):
whole department that did everything while 25 or 30 people sat around and did nothing except
complain about how hard they were working and how abused they were and how they didn't get paid for
their job. I couldn't take it. So I went to the private sector and never looked back. Anyway,
that's what Elon Musk is faced with right now. He's going in and he's going, well, these people
(16:19):
aren't doing anything. And he's got an eye for that kind of thing. That's why he's so successful.
That's why his companies are so successful because he didn't put up with that stuff for one billionth
of a second. First of all, they don't get hired if they don't know what they're doing and they're
very good at it. But if they did get hired and they weren't pulling their weight by, don't even look
back, don't even think about it. Bye. And that's what he's doing in the government now. And I'm sure
(16:46):
if things don't change, he's going to go through and get the feds right. And then he'll go through
and get the states right and then go through and get the government, the county right. And then
he'll go through and get the cities right and down to the small cities and all that stuff.
Eventually it'll all be taken care of. It'll be a bunch of unemployed people because the
unemployment rate is taking that into account where they have a bunch of people that aren't
(17:09):
working and are considered employed. So the unemployment rate is falsely lower than it
really is. So that's going to have an effect on that. But I just want to talk about that because
President Trump also noticed how a lot of people weren't doing anything in the government and he
wanted it out of there because he wants to get rid of the deficit. He wants to get rid of the debt
(17:35):
in this country. And the way to do that is raise taxes or do the same job for less money. Well,
he don't want to raise taxes. Thank goodness. So he's going to eliminate all that crap. It's going
out the door. Yeah. So anyway, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, like I said, the last
time I checked a few days ago, it was 55 billion. And that's just after a few weeks, think about what
(18:00):
it's going to be like after four years. Yeah. And there's going to be a lot of up and down and you
know, everybody goes, well, they fired too many people and they can't run the permit. Well, they
probably can. And they may hire back some of these people. They're not going to get it exactly right
on the very first try. The way to do it is cut way back. And when you go, oh, we really need that
(18:23):
person, then you put somebody in that spot. But you can't tell unless you take them out in the
first place. So anyway, I'm going really long here. And I just want to talk about that a little bit
of talking about what DOGE does and how fabulously lucky we are to have that. Because we're going
to get rid of all that stuff that we've been paying for you and me with our tax dollars that they
(18:46):
take from us at gunpoint. Also, the thing really got me was to getting rid of a lot of the IRS.
Yeah. What was the 8700 new IRS employees that Biden put in? They're gone. So yeah, we don't need
that many people in the IRS. Matter of fact, this is a different podcast, but I'm for getting rid of
the IRS 100% gone and just go to a flat tax and a consumption tax. That's a long story. I'm not
(19:13):
going to talk about it right now, but IRS is gone. We don't need them. We can save a ton of money
without them.
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