If you ever needed a clearer picture of just how catastrophically broken Washington really is, look no further than the latest revelation from Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency—yes, the perfectly acronym’d DOGE.
On Fox News, Musk dropped what might be the most outrageous nugget of federal absurdity we’ve heard in a while: the government spent almost a billion dollars on a survey that could’ve been done for a few thousand. You read that right—a billion. With a “B.”
Now, to be fair, most Americans are already numb to government waste. We’ve seen $500,000 studies on shrimp on treadmills, $3 million on watching hamsters fight on steroids (yes, that’s real), and of course, the ever-reliable $1,200 Pentagon coffee cup. But this? This one takes the cake and eats it too.
A 10-question survey, with no feedback loop, no action plan, no purpose—just a glorified “Do you like trees?” questionnaire about national parks. Musk even joked you could do it on SurveyMonkey for $10,000. But of course, D.C. being D.C., it cost the taxpayers nearly a billion.
Imagine that. A billion dollars that didn’t go to veterans. Didn’t go to border security. Didn’t go to rebuilding inner cities or fixing roads. It went to asking people if they like Yellowstone.
And now the left is melting down because Musk and his DOGE team are pulling back the curtain on this nonsense. They hate that someone with actual competence, business sense, and zero patience for bureaucratic fluff is pointing out the emperor has no clothes. The Democrats in D.C. don’t want accountability; they want to keep the gravy train rolling. And Musk is standing on the tracks.
Naturally, once Musk announced plans to shake up USAID—one of the federal government’s most bloated, unaccountable, and questionably motivated agencies—the resistance hit high gear. This is the same agency that’s been funneling American taxpayer money to questionable “humanitarian” projects abroad, some of which suspiciously line up with the left’s favorite pet causes, and others that seem to flirt with outright national security risks. When your foreign aid has a real chance of ending up in Taliban hands—or routed through networks that once palled around with the Wuhan Institute of Virology—maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pause and re-evaluate.
And that’s exactly what Musk and DOGE are doing. But rather than cheer on the effort to save billions—billions—the left is throwing a fit. Why? Because accountability isn’t their brand. Because if you dig deep enough into this swamp, you start finding a lot of blue fingerprints on the waste.
Bret Baier, trying to keep up with the sheer scale of what Musk was saying, asked whether DOGE could really get the job done in 130 days. Musk’s answer? They’re already saving $4 billion a day. Let that sink in. Every 24 hours, this team is uncovering waste, fraud, and bureaucratic rot worth more than most countries’ annual budgets. And they’re doing it faster than Congress can organize a hearing to yell about mean tweets.
This is what happens when you finally bring in someone who’s not beholden to lobbyists, not drunk on bureaucratic inertia, and not obsessed with looking busy while accomplishing nothing. Elon Musk didn’t take a government job to make friends. He took it to clean house. And judging by what we’re already seeing, Washington should be very, very nervous.
NEW: Elon Musk says the federal government spent $1 Billion on a survey that would have cost $10,000 on SurveyMonkey.
Bret Baier: What’s the most astonishing thing you’ve found out in this process?
Musk: There was literally a 10-question survey that you could do with… pic.twitter.com/Z2YVkjAkI0
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 27, 2025
Because if it only takes a few months to shave a trillion off the deficit just by stopping the madness, the American people are going to start asking why no one else did it sooner. Spoiler alert: because too many in D.C. were too busy cashing checks and protecting the circus. Now, the tent’s coming down.
