The Army Corps of Engineers colonel, who was ordered by President Donald Trump in January to release water from California’s reservoirs, knew that it would be ineffective in putting out the state’s devastating wildfires. But Trump did it anyway.
According to a memo obtained by The Washington Post, Colonel Chad W. Caldwell knew that the water released from California’s Lake Kaweah and Lake Success reservoirs would not reach the intended areas in time to prevent significant damage.
At the time, Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California called the highly criticized move “clearly nothing but a poor publicity stunt.”
“And it was a dangerous one,” he said, citing the risk of flooding.
This is just one example of how much Trump weighs down U.S. taxpayers and resources.
In February, while speaking to a group of Saudi billionaires, Trump lamented how work-from-home policies made people wasteful and lazy.
“They're not working. They're playing tennis, they're playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they're not working or they're certainly not working hard. You could never build a company or a country with that,” he said.
At the same time, Trump spent more time golfing during his first month in office than he had during his first term, during which he set records financed by taxpayers.
In February, the Department of Homeland Security launched a $200 million ad campaign featuring Secretary Kristi Noem threatening immigrants with deportation. There was just one stipulation for the expensive ad: Trump needed to be thanked in it.
According to Rolling Stone, shortly after the DHS announced its $200 million anti-migrant propaganda blitz, Noem said during a CPAC dinner that Trump was behind the entire operation.
“I want you to do [ads] for the border, and I want you to do those everywhere, not just in the United States, but I want them around the world. I want you to tell people not to come to this country if they’re going to come here illegally. I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads. But I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border,” Trump supposedly told Noem.
And she did.
One of the campaign's ads, which was released at the end of February, features Noem thanking Trump “for securing our border for deporting criminal, illegal immigrants and for putting America first.”
Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency seems to have missed that $200 million of waste. It must have been too busy cutting essential and popular government programs and agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Social Security.
In fact, DOGE has left many of the federal government’s biggest spenders—like Homeland Security—largely untouched.
It’s almost as if Musk isn’t really getting rid of waste and fraud as much as he’s just reallocating taxpayer money into the pockets of billionaires like himself.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
