Can't see the forest for all the incoming emails

How to pretend you're saving money

Bill Bonner wrote an excellent piece today, about “Real Heroes.”

Tongue in cheek, he called the real heroes, the federal employees that do little to nothing at all. Rather than actually “getting in the way” they sit back and do absolutely, well, nothing.

Bill took the stance that Elon’s hunt for federal employees that do nothing is a waste of time. Instead Elon and his DOGE staff, should be axing entire departments. Or agencies.

Not the individuals within.

I personally think where Bill is coming from, is simple. All politicians say they are going to do "something" about the country's biggest problems. Then they get into power, and simply put on a show.

Emails being sent to 2.3M federal employees? Hoping to get a reply from each them as to what they did of value last week? A monumental waste of time. Either the department is worth keeping, or it has to go.

It’s like the government is an overgrown beast of a tree, tangled with parasitic warts and tumors—forget asking each one its purpose, just rev up the chainsaw and carve off the dead weight, so long as the trunk still stands. And continues to live. For now.

Anything else is a waste of time.

There are "officially" 602 US government agencies. This shit isn't easy to find. Even ChatGPT couldn't help with this one. At least it pointed me in the right direction. I had to go here to find that list:

https://www.usa.gov/agency-index

Then by clicking on each letter of the alphabet, copying and pasting the result into a spreadsheet, I came up with 602 USG agencies.

So I keyed on one of those agencies. USADF. You know. The United States African Development Foundation. I asked ChatGPT to tell me what government department is responsible for this agency. As the USGOV website says zilch. ChatGPT replied:

"The United States African Development Foundation (USADF) is an independent U.S. government agency. It does not fall under any executive department but operates as a separate entity."

Wonderful. I certainly wasn’t expecting that, but definitely interesting.

I then asked ChatGPT to parse the Excel file I created with a list of all the government agencies and tell me which ones were independent. As the usa.gov website was absolutely useless beyond giving me a brief description of what the agency does. And a phone number.

Short answer - ChatGPT couldn’t do it.

I’ve seen ChatGPT struggle with spreadsheets and long “go thru this data and tell me about it” questions. It does not do well at all when it comes to analysis of data.

Enter Grok.

I asked it much the same questions that I did of ChatGPT. It couldn’t compile the list of government agencies, but once I told it that I had that list, it offered to go thru the spreadsheet for me. And find out which agencies reported directly to congress and the president.

Fabulous!

I uploaded the spreadsheet and it took a few minutes, grinding thru the data. I thought in fact that I might have overwhelmed it. But true to its name, it thought about it deeply and came back with a list. Of 115 such independent agencies. The other 487 agencies all report to one of the 15 executive departments of the government.

I then asked Grok to tell me the top 5 independent agencies that had the biggest federal budgets. Here they are:

Social Security - $1.5T (Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance) $13B in admin costs - 80% of all independent agency spending - Monthly checks to retired workers. About 51 million retired workers get about $2k a month. For a cool $1.25T every year. Out of taxpayer money.

NASA - $25B (fully discretionary for you know what) - Going back to the moon. And beyond. Apparently, while the mother ship goes bankrupt.

Small Business Administration - $15B - $25B+ (disaster loans and economic aid to small businesses). They dished out $800B in Paycheck Protection Program during COVID.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - $12.5B - insures bank deposits, funded by premiums, not taxpayers and is technically “off-budget.” The $13B to bail out Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 is an example of its work.

US Postal Service - while it is supposed to actually “make” money, it lost $10B last year. Meaning that it had to borrow the money. To pay for things like payroll. And getting that letter to your governor complaining about rampant spending.

The remainder of the agencies - 107 of them - are left to fight for $105B. They get almost $1B each on average.

Ones like USAID - $43B spent in 2024. According to GROK, it is closely tied to the State Department but reports to the President w Congressional Oversight. Ones like USADF that got $45M. Which is like a rounding error compared to Social Security’s $1.5T.

That would be a logical list to start with.

Now here comes the critical question. How do you determine whether a government agency stays or goes?

Grok said it best:

”What measurable problem do you solve that wouldn’t get handled better, faster, or cheaper by someone else—or not at all?”

I swear I’ve heard Bill put forth that same question. Grin.

Start on that list Elon. Stop playing games with email, getting Grok to sort thru emails and seeing if they are actually working. Or simply trolling you with replies like “I don’t report to you, buddy.”

Ask the tough question. At the base of the branch. Not on the twig holding the leaf.

Once you’re done, you’ll have the experience to tackle the bigger ones.

Like the subbranches (and my lord are there a lot) in the DOD.

Regards,

Lucas Kandia