The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart Challenges DOGE's Reckless Budget Cuts | Rupa Bhattacharyya
Tue, 25 Feb 2025
Jon Stewart dives into Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE, and how the Elon Musk-led project masks its allegiance to corporate overlords and negligence to the American people under the guise of slashing the government's budget. Georgetown Law’s Rupa Bhattacharyya, former Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, joins to discuss how Elon Musk and the DOGE project’s reckless budget cuts are affecting valuable programs like the one she used to oversee. She explains how federal agencies and programs were typically non-politicized until Trump’s second administration, how similar uncertainty is affecting the World Trade Center Health Program, and why these roles are what the government exists to provide.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)?
As you know, the Doge Project, the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by the Nick Cannon of white people, Elon Musk, is in... It's in full effect. And it may surprise you. I, for one, happen to be, quite frankly, Doge curious. I'm actually somewhat Doge adjacent. So, Mr. President, if you would.
We have to solve the efficiency problem. We have to solve the fraud, waste, abuse, all the things that have gone into the government.
Yes. Now, if you had woken up from a coma and heard nothing else that this man had said for the last 10 years, you might think to yourself, I like this guy. I, too, believe government needs to be more efficient to weed out waste, fraud and abuse and deliver the necessary services that Americans rely on more agile. So what do we do first?
Report through the inspector general's reports that have addressed these things. Utilize computerishness to excise redundancies in the system. Find ways to more efficiently deliver the government assistance so many Americans rely on. What's first?
Elon Musk and his Doge team firing thousands of federal workers.
They're trying to cut 10% of the federal workforce, which is 200,000 jobs.
Have we determined if those are effective workers? Is it based on performance? Are you going in with a scalpel so that we don't hit any vessels and vital organs?
This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!
So, straight amputation. We're just amputation. It's like we're treating public servants as some kind of underclass.
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Chapter 2: How is DOGE impacting federal workers?
The DC creature is like an animal infested with ticks and parasites. Our money is lining these swamp creatures' pockets.
You know what you call someone who sucks up resources in return for nothing? You call them a parasite. And that is what the federal workforce has become.
These saboteurs, the dead-enders, the DEI undercover agents.
The fraudsters, liars, cheaters, globalists, and deep state bureaucrats are being sent packing. Yeah!
F*** you! Guy who tests water for appropriate levels of fecal matter? What are we talking about? What? You know, this is a stark emotional whiplash from looking for efficiencies. But apparently our nation's civil service is now synonymous with waste, fraud, and abuse. And MAGA World is celebrating with Maximum Folksy.
The gravy train for a lot of these folks, it's been on biscuit wheels, and it's about to run off the dadgum tracks, and it's about time.
First of all, there is no way you actually talk like that. No way. You're a congressman from Tennessee. You didn't spring fully formed out of a primordial cracker barrel. Oh, this here bureaucracy is a Chattanooga choo-choo to a prophet's boil on the flapjacks. I'm just stringing food words together like nonsense. Pew, pew.
Other reactions were just creepy. Doja's dishing out spankings like daddy daycare.
I don't remember the spanking scene from daddy daycare. Oh, you must mean the gay porn film, Daddy Daycare. I get it, Jesse. I get it. You were watching the film that answers the question, what would happen if a bunch of dudes f***ed in a daycare? And it just stuck in your head. You know...
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Chapter 3: What are the misconceptions about government spending cuts?
President touting the first ever negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of 10 drugs.
And today, I'm proud to announce that Medicare has reached agreement with all manufacturers on all 10 drugs selected in the first round of negotiations.
Oh, can it be? The companies we subsidize with billions of dollars are allowing us the privilege to negotiate the price of 10 of their drugs? And 10 is all of them, right? It would be embarrassing if it was a small drop in the bucket and that the American people didn't expect that we should negotiate for all their f***ing drugs because we've already paid for them with our subsidies. Come on!
going to the hospitals. What we do at pharmaceutical companies is like the worst Shark Tank deal in history. Well, we're asking for billions of dollars of your money. Oh, what do we get, 10% of your company? No. Do we get a discount? No. What do we get? Have you checked your perineum? We live in the upside down. And don't blame the corporations.
They are profit-seeking psychopaths that need the lowest wages and the cheapest raw materials to drive their highest profits. But why do we, the taxpayers, subsidize their psychopathy? That's the waste, fraud, and abuse in our system. That's it. That's what we should be going after. Not the fantastical, over-generous terrorist condom allowances.
In another program, $50 million plus another $50 million for condoms for Hamas. You know about that? $100 million for condoms. Condoms. Does everybody know what a condom is?
You're delivering this speech in an elementary school? Why wouldn't... Why wouldn't they know what condoms are? Look, capitalism is by definition exploitative. It's how it operates. That's fine. But then government's role should be to ease the negative effects on Americans of that exploitation, not subsidize that treachery with our money.
We're getting at a Diddy party and they're making us buy the baby oil. I want Doge to work. I want better efficiencies. I want to get rid of the alphabet agencies that don't do enough, make the Pentagon pass an audit. But we are dozing in the wrong place if we want to really change the system.
Companies like Walmart, McDonald's make billions of dollars in taxpayer-subsidized profits, yet many of their hardworking employees need taxpayer-subsidized public assistance. Airlines get billions in bailouts that they use in stock buybacks and bonuses. But if you're on food assistance, you're not allowed to buy hot food with it. Because apparently heated entrees are for winners.
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Chapter 4: How does corporate welfare affect the U.S. economy?
with one or more 9-11-related conditions. And so the cuts that were made were indiscriminately made to cut almost 20% of the staff of the health program, which would have been devastating.
And what are, in practical terms, and you know the people love a good conversation about administration and... and paperwork. In practical terms, what does that mean? Does that mean people wouldn't be able to access the program? They wouldn't be able to sign up for the program? They wouldn't be able to make their appointments? They wouldn't get their medications? What would it mean?
All of those things. It means that people who are going to sign up for medical monitoring, over 140,000 people are monitored. 10,000 people tried to sign up for monitoring last year. Those applications wouldn't get processed or there would be delays in processing them.
There would be delays in certifying the conditions as 9-11 related, which means that there would be delays in getting them health care and delays in getting their compensation from the VCF, which depends on those certifications. It means that additional conditions couldn't be determined as potentially eligible because the studies that would have funded that were being taken away.
It means that the oversight of the program, which is largely run through contractors... The actual people looking for fraud.
The actual people looking for fraud. They got cut, too.
Got cut, too.
What are we doing? For God's sakes. And then they were rehired. And then they were rehired, what, two days later?
About a week later, thanks to the intervention of the New York congressional delegation. Shout out definitely to Representative Andrew Garbarino of Long Island.
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Chapter 5: What solutions are proposed for government inefficiency?
Because we didn't have enough money.
And it was thanks to you and thanks to a number of... To get it, all those people, they were tireless. And many of them were very, very sick.
To give you a sense of what that is, in the middle of the VCF funding and the victims' compensation, if your cancer had just been, if you had the unlucky occurrence of having a cancer diagnosed in 2021 or 2019 when the fund had lost money, you wouldn't have gotten the full benefit. because they had to resource guard. But that's what's happening. You had to resource guard.
It must have been heartbreaking.
But that is exactly what is happening to the World Trade Center health program right now. And Dr. Howard, who was a Trump appointee, who was reappointed to his position in the last part of the Trump administration, is going to have to make decisions very soon about how many people he can continue to allow into the program if they don't re-up the funding.
And so members of Congress, including New York delegations, are reintroducing that bill on Wednesday. It's already been agreed to twice and been stripped twice, once in 2022 and once just in December when the funding bill fell apart.
From an omnibus bill, they were going to sneak it into, like, a transportation bill or something along those lines.
So hopefully this time around, you know, these responders and these survivors, many of them have PTSD, many of them have very severe health conditions. To have to go up again and again and again to ask for this funding is just...
And again, this isn't just this program. This is happening across government. And this is what we talk about when this system must be torn down. The idea that people who need the funding, that's what government exists to provide. It doesn't exist to provide a smoother road for McDonald's. It exists to provide for people. And that's got it's got to change. And so I really appreciate you being here.
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