Last Friday, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance browbeat Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the oval office and and attacked him for being ungrateful, as well as blamed him for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What Trump, Vance, and the MAGA Republicans (who all fell into line behind Trump like the good little sycophants they are) seemingly forget is that the Russia/Ukraine conflict has never required the U.S. to put troops in the field, unlike all the other wars in which we’ve been involved. Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians have never asked for troops, only for weapons and equipment.

Trump (et al) also ignored the horrific acts continuously perpetrated by Russian troops, not to mention the prolonged drone attacks on civilian populations, and kept claiming that Zelenskyy wasn’t properly grateful. Shortly after that, CNN aired a montage of more than thirty separate occasions over the past three years in which Zelenskyy offered lengthy public thanks.

As usual, Trump made a raft of lies and misstatements, as is his wont, but when Zelenskyy attempted to set the record straight, that apparently offended Vance. No matter that both the British Prime Minister and the French President had to correct Trump as well when they met with him.

To date, Ukraine has lost 46,000 soldiers in combat, with 380,000 wounded, and suffered 40,000 civilian casualties, including 12,000 documented deaths, of which at least were 600 murdered children. In addition, Russia has illegally kidnapped nearly 20,000 children.

Russian military death claims total 85,000, and the Russian casualty figures are at least 500,000 and could be as high as 875,000. If I wanted to be purely mercenary about it, I could point out that we made a very good investment in supporting Ukraine, just because of the military and economic burden our aid imposed on Putin, all without costing an American life.

All Trump and the Republicans are concerned about are dollars, but the total of U.S. military aid sent (as opposed to that appropriated for possible use) to Ukraine amounts to some $120 billion, while European governments have supplied $140 billion – figures very much at variance with those incorrectly claimed by Trump.

But Zelenskyy clearly wasn’t subservient enough to Emperor Trump. But why should he be? He’s speaking on behalf of a nation that’s suffered roughly 60,000 deaths and half a million casualties from a Russian invasion, while Trump is demanding that Ukraine surrender to a despot so that the U.S. can save less money than it wastes annually (according to Trump), while claiming the U.S. is sending far more assistance that it actually has.

All this suggests that we’ve got an ignorant bully in the bully pulpit.

Governments owe certain services and infrastructure to their people, such as highways, impartial laws and courts, civic order, defense against invaders, and open and affordable communications systems.

Historically, the United States was one of the first nations to emphasize a national postal system. Among our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin was firm in his determination that the United States should have a postal service. He even served as Postmaster General before there was a United States.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution mandates that Congress establish post offices and post roads. One of long-standing aspects of the Post Office and its successor, the Postal Service, has been the mission to provide mail access to all Americans, not just to people in cities or people who are physically or economically convenient to serve, but the vast majority of Americans.

While the Postal Service should be as cost-efficient as possible, cost-efficiency shouldn’t be its primary mission. Maintaining service to all Americans should be. That was why the post office and post roads were an essential part of the Constitution.

This background seems to have been forgotten. Amazon can use the Postal Service on Sundays to deliver packages for what I suspect is below the actual cost, using cost structures that I’ve critiqued previously for their unreality, and now Trump is talking about privatizing the Postal Service, enabling that “private” successor to gouge the public and provide less service.

We can run huge deficits for national defense and all manner of other “necessary” services, but comparatively small deficits for postal service are apparently taboo… which says a great deal about people and politicians, particularly about Republicans.

With all of the headlines about the actions of Trump and DOGE trying to cut out “wasteful” jobs with a chainsaw, so far, at least so far as I can tell, no one seems to have given much thought to the secondary and tertiary impacts of those cuts.

A relative of mine was let go last week. He wasn’t a federal employee, nor was he a lobbyist. He was a technical writer for a publishing services company, and he was laid off because one of the company’s larger clients was the Veterans Administration.

What Musk, DOGE, and Trump clearly fail to understand is that, in a great many instances, contrary to popular belief, it’s cheaper for government agencies to contract out services than to do them with government employees.

And even if it’s not, adding additional workloads on agency personnel to accomplish tasks previously contracted out is either going to slow down everything, actually increase costs, or reduce the amount of work done, if not some combination of all three, particularly if the agency is also cutting back on personnel.

Not only that, but the savings from cutting federal employees are limited. In 1960, federal employees were 4.3% of all US workers; today, they amount to only 1.4%. Zeroing out the entire federal payroll would save $271 billion a year, a mere 4% of the federal budget.

I’ve run a Congressional office, and several offices at EPA. I’ve also been a consultant working for some of the largest corporations in the United States, and the greatest waste I’ve seen has largely come from unwise Congressional mandates and laws.

First off, there’s the practice of “earmarking” where Representatives and Senators add or direct appropriations to pet projects in their state or district. A number of organizations and members of Congress have documented such earmarks, and those documented over the last ten years that I’ve been able to total amount to more than 10,000, costing more than $50 billion. And those were the ones I could easily find.

Far more serious are the instances of manipulation of defense funding for local economic development. I can remember the F-7 [The gutless Cutlass] mess from when I was a Navy pilot, because older pilots were still talking about the fact that Congressman Jim Wright (later Speaker of the House) dragged out production of the F-7 so that Chance-Vought would be able to deliver the far superior F-8, which massively increased the cost of the last F-7s, just in time for them to be retired.

More recently, in 2023 the Navy discovered that the so-called advanced littoral combat ships built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity. The Navy decided to retire nine out of the ten ships built, because of the astronomical repair costs, telling Congress that would save $4.3 billion that could be used on other ships and systems. Various congressmen got involved, citing the 2,000 jobs that would be lost. In the end the Navy was only allowed to retire four ships and $3 billion more was allocated for repairs. – for ships originally budgeted to cost $220 million each and which eventually cost over $500 million each – before the $3 billion in repair costs.

Then there are the massive cost overruns associated with the F-35, and the Ford class of aircraft carriers, not to mention the cost of maintaining 750 military bases around the world, a number of which in the U.S. could likely be closed without adversely affecting military readiness – except they won’t be closed because various members of Congress will oppose closings in their states and districts.

But Trump and Musk want to funnel more funds to the armed services, while cutting the civilian logistical base, at a time when the military is having trouble retaining personnel.

None of this makes much sense.

The original idea behind insurance was to provide financial protection for infrequent, but catastrophic and unexpected events that a reasonable and prudent person could not expect to be able to pay, such as dying young, major damage to or destruction of a house or building, injury to others in an automobile accident, loss of an entire merchant ship and cargo… and similar events.

Insurance started out essentially as a form of mutual risk sharing for events that didn’t happen that often but which, when they did, could devastate an individual or a business. At that time, people were (theoretically) supposed to save for smaller adverse “rainy day” occurrences.

Yet now, rainy-day-savings seem to have vanished, replaced by what seems like insurance for everything. Not only do we have health insurance (which has become a necessity, given the high cost of medical care), but dental insurance, and nursing home insurance. The latest insurance bombarding the media is car repair insurance, but there’s now also appliance repair and replacement insurance, as well as pet insurance (possibly because veterinary medical costs have also skyrocketed). That doesn’t include roughly twenty other types of insurance, such as boat or ATV insurance and identity protection insurance and personal liability coverage.

The fact that so many types of coverage exist might just go hand in hand with the fact that the U.S. has a surfeit of attorneys, but the attorneys could easily counter with the fact that Americans tend to argue over everything.

Add to that the technological and legal complexity of our modern world and the increasing costs of everything, and the failure of working-class wages to keep up with the cost of living… and, unfortunately, because people have trouble in making ends meet in paying for the basics, insurance for everything becomes the default, because few Americans can save enough to pay for all possible adverse eventualities, particularly in a litigious society.

While Trump is “carrying out his promises” with a vengeance, what he’s doing is also carefully orchestrated political sleight of hand, spearheaded by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The majority of Americans (and particularly the far right and Trump supporters) has always been skeptical of foreign aid and federal intrusion into state and local schools (in the south especially). So how does Trump begin his second term?

By trying to abolish USAID and the Department of Education, of course, whose combined annual operating budgets are roughly $110 billion. Last year, from what I can determine, total federal outlays were $7 trillion, and the deficit was $711 billion. But eliminating USAID and the Department of Education won’t save $110 billion, because, for example, one of the Department of Education’s primary tasks is dealing with the $1.7 trillion student-loan portfolio and 40 million student-loan borrowers. So those administrative costs have to go somewhere else.

Most of the Department of Education’s budget funds federal student aid for higher education, subsidies for elementary and secondary schools with large shares of students from low-income families, and special education programs for children with special needs. States set broad rules that schools have to follow in return for those funds, but individual districts implement them, and they set the curriculum. The Department of Education is not controlling education. It is providing supplemental funds and requiring compliance with civil rights laws for using those funds. But eliminating the Department of Education would not “return” education to the states and would reduce the overall funding of primary and secondary education by an average of twenty percent, the greatest funding losses coming from schools in the poorest communities.

Other programs DOGE has marked for elimination are medical care for veterans, housing-assistance vouchers for low-income renters, college Pell Grants, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, and NASA’s major initiatives.

In the meantime,last Friday, Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned after Justice Department leadership instructed her to drop the criminal corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, in order to obtain Adams’s “cooperation” with Trump immigration policies. In short, the Trump-controlled DOJ wants to offer Adams a literal get-out-of-jail card for doing what Trump wants on immigration in New York City. Legal bribery, in effect, that Sassoon refused to be any part of, despite being a Trump appointee and a member of the extremely conservative Federalist Society. Within days, at least six more senior career DOJ officials resigned in protest. The mass resignation appears to be the largest in DOJ since Watergate. The mass resignation appears to be the largest in DOJ since Watergate.

The latest DOGE target is the Federal Aviation Administration, where apparently all recently hired employees working to maintain the hardware and computer systems dealing with aviation safety have been informed that they will be fired. The FAA operates an antiquated system that needs desperately to be updated, but Congress has refused to fund such modernization. Instead, Trump and Musk, in a single stroke, are making it even harder for the Air Traffic Control system to operate safely.

DOGE is now also trying to gain access to the IRS data on all American taxpayers, while reducing personnel and making it even more difficult to track down tax evaders.

What we’re already seeing isn’t a real attempt to reduce inefficiency and waste, but the beginning of an all-out attack on every aspect of government Donald Trump and Elon Musk dislike, and especially on any aspect of government that might hold them accountable.