Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently agreed with the sentiment expressed by the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) set to be led by multi-billionaire Elon Musk and prominent Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. Taking to social media, Sanders criticized the Pentagon for its budget concerns and audit failures.
Taking to X over the weekend, Sanders blasted the Pentagon, writing, “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”
Elon Musk commented under the post with two American flags. The surprising post from the staunch leftist garnered numerous reactions from numerous other high-profile conservative influencers. End Wokeness wrote, “Has hell frozen over?” Matt Gaetz commented, “Welcome home, Bernie.” Conservative commentator Collin Rugg wrote, “Glad you realized Elon Musk is not the problem. The problem is the federal government which has wasted and lost trillions of dollars of taxpayer money.”
The American Tribune previously reported on possible plans D.O.G.E. will enact to reel in government bureaucracy. Speaking at a recent event, Vivek Ramswamy outlined ways in which the Trump administration could slash the bloated institutions by skirting civil service protections provided to federal employees. . “I think it turns out that the US President, novel idea, just as the CEO of a company has over his company, the US president has authority to decide who is or is not hired in the executive branch,” he said.
Addressing supposed civil service protections, he continued, “Now, the main objection to this is that there are so-called civil service protections. Okay? These are supposedly protections that stop an executive from being able to unilaterally fire somebody who is part of a federal employee or has special employee protections in the bureaucracy.”
Speaking about the regulations, Vivek said, “We gotta read the rules carefully. Those employee protections protect against individual firings. They do not protect against mass layoffs.” Vivek added that large-scale layoffs will be required to correct the course of the federal government. He added, “And mass firings are absolutely what we require to fix the Washington DC bureaucracy.”
“If you had a president, who came in on day one said something to the effect of…treat it as a thought experiment for now…if your social security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in,” he said, suggesting that random firings would be the way to go. “Now you get in round two. If your social security number starts in an even number, you’re out. And if it starts in an odd number, you’re in, that’s a 75% mass headcount reduction across the bureaucracy, which is completely compliant with the Civil Service protections because they do not protect against mass reductions in force.”
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Watch Vivek outline ideas for him and Musk to pursue with D.O.G.E
Featured image credit: Shelly Prevost from San Francisco, United States, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernie_Sanders_2016_(27049475591).jpg