No one has yet figured out how to usher in the utopia. And the wisest among us do not bother trying.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that to do the most good for the most people, particularly those least fortunate, President Donald Trump’s administration must rid the United States of its parasite class, namely those who have enriched themselves and their friends while squandering America’s precious resources and spreading misery in the process.
In an interview Thursday with Fox News’ Bret Baier, cost-cutting and parasite class-destroying hero Elon Musk, head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, reported that his team discovered a ten-question survey for which the government paid nearly $1 billion, a sum large enough to house 4,000 homeless veterans for free.
The revelation came in response to a question from Baier about what discovery so far had astonished Musk most.
“The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government,” Musk replied. “It is astonishing; it’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more casually.”
That prompted the DOGE leader to reveal the expensive survey.
“For example,” he continued, “the simple survey that was — literally ten-question survey you could do with Survey Monkey, [and it would] cost you about ten thousand dollars — the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.”
“For just a survey?” an incredulous-sounding Baier asked.
Should housing homeless veterans be the top social program for the government?
“A billion dollars for a simple online survey: ‘Do you like the national park?’ And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go to nothing,” Musk replied.
One would think that for nearly a billion dollars the government could have demanded a feedback loop.
In any event, Baier moved on to another topic.
Readers may view the entire interview in the YouTube video below. The relevant segment began around the 1:00 mark.
Of course, one cannot help thinking about this story first and foremost in terms of sheer waste. Imagine what good people could have done with that money.
For instance, in January 2024 the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that nearly 33,000 veterans “experienced homelessness.” (Note the sanitized verb “experienced” where genuine honesty would have required the use of “suffered” or “endured.”)
Furthermore, by February 2024 the price of an average starter home had surged to nearly $250,000, per CBS News.
Thus, even at that criminally expensive cost, up from a pre-COVID median price of $169,000, the nearly $1 billion the federal government wasted on a ten-question survey could have provided free housing to 4,000 of those homeless veterans.
The devil in the details, however, makes the loss of that nearly $1 billion all the more evil.
In short, a sum that large, earmarked for a survey, almost certainly signals money laundering. Bad government actors, in all probability, took our money, spent it on something indefensible — fully aware that no one before Trump and Musk had bothered to look into such things — and then funneled that money back into the pockets of the well-connected.
After all, the suburbs of Washington, D.C., did not become America’s wealthiest counties by accident.
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