Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is… hiring?
Here’s the actual post on Twitter.
Hey, I could use another job for which I don’t get paid! On the upside, there’s no background check that I definitely wouldn’t pass for, uh, undisclosed reasons. Maybe I should apply. Or just post my application here:
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Dear @DOGE, @VivekGRamaswamy , @elonmusk , @JDVance : if you're serious:
My CV: I know how to cut actually large spending without you getting fired and your department abolished, because I write code on population health databases and therefore see how to reduce the demand for trillions of spending. Nothing else matters. If you don't realize why that matters, then you're never going to manage to cut anything of any significance anyway.
If you actually want to cut costs, "unglamorous" or "low IQ" or "not enough work hours" isn't your biggest problem, it's enabling political support for the largest cuts to the largest budget items. If they didn't have massive political support - not just special interests - they wouldn't have gotten so large to begin with.
You have to remove the demand for the spending before you can cut the spending, or else voters - and your political patron who desperately wants their approval - will throw you under the bus. Cutting silly monkey studies won't cut it, you need to reduce spending on medicare, social security or the military.
But we can actually do that. The largest single discrete driver of the demand for that spending is medical, and the largest single avoidable driver of that is type 2 diabetes and its attendant symptoms and conditions. It is currently possible to cure, without long term expensive drugs like ozempic, and there are companies (and random individuals) who do so every day (like Virtahealth) whose techniques you can simply copy and deploy with relatively untrained staff. Good federal policy - I hear you might know a guy - can eradicate the disease in a generation, simply by changing medicare reimbursement to incentivize the same methods. This takes trillions in otherwise mandated, not-voted-on-by-congress spending out of the budget - forever.
The federal budget crisis is one image: the 70 year old vet suffering from type 2 diabetes and all the associated stuff, on 15 different expensive meds, 30 doc visits a year, dying slowly and painfully and humiliatingly. Tortured for 3.7 more expected years at a cost of millions. He can be rescued from the burden of pain, disease and cost. You just need to choose to do it.
You can cancel all the silly studies you want - please do - but you won't even dent the debt. But this would, and without getting you kicked out of office.
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