“Observe how he has made a breast out of his back.
In life he wished to see too far ahead of him,
And now he must crab backwards round this track.”
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno (Canto XX, Circle Eight – The Fortune Tellers and Diviners)
Watching and, God help me, listening to Donald Trump’s address to the nation last night, I was reminded of Dante’s special place in hell for those eternally condemned to eat their words.
If you sat down to watch the event and were ready for an address documenting the State of the Union, you were out of luck. Not one word was said about that.
The speech, lasting one hour and forty minutes, was fact-free, lie-filled, and offered nothing but a cruel, transactional future for America.
I think it’s the gleeful cruelty that bothers me the most. For example, as Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, said in a speech in 2023: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want them to feel trauma.”
Score one for them. There’s trauma aplenty.
Even now, Vought refuses to label his targets as anything but bureaucrats and the bureaucracy; he never mentions “workers,” which would humanize them.
Watching USAID employees sobbing outside the building where many of them worked for decades, seeing them frantically collect their office belongings because they’d been given a grand total of 15 minutes to do so, realizing the vanishing national security benefits of USAID’s soft-power initiatives in health care and education around the world, and viewing the complete dismantling of the nation’s foreign policy built up since the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s — all of this is heartbreaking.
However, it was indisputably apparent last night that neither Donald Trump nor his co-conspirators on the right side of the Chamber, as well as in the gallery, could care any less about any “trauma” in the disappearing workforce. The joy they all took in Trump lauding Elon Musk’s wood-chipper approach to remaking government was palpable — and disgusting.
An interesting point came when Trump acknowledged and celebrated Elon Musk as the head of DOGE. Last week, the administration’s lawyers argued in Court that Musk was simply an advisor and that someone named Amy Gleason, who happened to be vacationing in Mexico at the time, was, in fact, running DOGE.
My mother always advised me to avoid lies, because, “Lies will come back to haunt you, Tommy.” However, does anyone believe there will be any haunting here? Mom was always right — but in this case…?
Last night, Trump bragged, “We have done more in 43 days than any other administration in four years, even eight years.”
Mr. Trump, for once, I agree with you.
Meanwhile, over at the IRS
This morning, ProPublica is out with a deeply-researched story on the huge staffing cuts about to fall on the IRS.
According to ProPublica’s story, the IRS is drafting plans to cut its 90,000-person workforce by as much as half through a mix of layoffs, attrition, and incentivized buyouts, according to two people familiar with the situation. Six thousand have already been fired.
A reduction in force of that magnitude would render the IRS “dysfunctional,” said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner.
As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, congress approved $80 billion in new IRS funding, intended to support the troubled IRS crackdown on tax cheats and provide better service to taxpayers. A 2021 Treasury report estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade with that $80 billion investment.
For some reason I’ve never fully understood, Republicans were apoplectic about all this. They insinuated the IRS would use this funding to go after “hard-working Americans.”
In reality, the Treasury Report showed the IRS had been severely understaffed for at least a decade, and tax cheats were scoring big. In 2022, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers that staffing had shrunk to 1970s levels and that the IRS would need to hire 52,000 people over the next six years just to maintain current staffing levels to replace those who retire or otherwise leave.
So, following enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS began hiring.
However, since Donald Trump’s inauguration, Musk’s DOGE has had the tax agency in its crosshairs.
Perhaps a pertinent question is: What does this mean for tax revenue?
According to the ProPublica story:
Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Now, the stated purpose of DOGE is to find “fraud, waste, and abuse.” If that is so, something is crazy here. If that is not so….?
