A CNN conservative compared Elon Musk's wide-ranging efforts to cut the federal workforce to a haphazard surgeon.
The tech billionaire and the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency have offered buyouts to large swaths of the federal workforce, and Musk zeroed in on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), putting a freeze on billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance to other countries, and conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg explained how that could come back to bite him.
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"That characterization of Elon Musk's approach from the old Twitter guy, where he says, 'If you're not putting stuff back in, then you didn't cut too far in the first place,'" Goldberg said. "I'm not sure I want a surgeon who has that philosophy. 'Oh, I shouldn't have taken out that liver, I'll put it back in now.' Right, like and on areas like national security, also, I mean, I'm not saying there's evidence for this yet, we just don't know, but, like, there are places where the government touches people. USAID really isn't one of them, but, like, Social security and Medicare, VA reimbursements, I mean, there are places where, like, that game 'Operation,' to stick with the medical metaphor, like, there could be one spot where Musk touches and the nose lights up and people are like, 'what the hell is this this guy doing,' and that that can have the tendency to cause people to retroactively view this whole period differently, right?"
"It's like you judge it by here's the screw up – oh my gosh," Goldberg added. "You look back and you say, 'This whole thing was a mess,' right, and it could be something to do with national security where somebody gets kidnapped, right. We reveal the sources and methods or something, or it could be something with entitlements, or it could be something with public safety, and presumably they know this. But if their attitude is cut first and fix later, just knowing it and actually doing something about it are two different things."
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