Draining the Swamp - Hello DOGE

By Olivia Pierson
First published on the Good Oil 13th Feb, 2025

It is impossible to overstate the profound impact that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is having on America. His efforts are nothing short of a radical cleansing, and it is reassuring to witness Musk fielding press conference questions with President Trump seated beside him at the Resolute Desk.

This is something we never could've imagined this time last year.

Musk, ever the slightly autistic eccentric, had his young son “Little X” perched on his shoulders during the conference—an optic that could easily be dismissed as whimsical, but which underscores Musk’s and Trump’s disregard for convention.

I cannot help but think of another infamous historical figure—Caligula. As some may remember, the ancient Roman emperor was often paraded before the troops as a young boy, wearing custommade small military boots as a mascot for the Roman Empire. His father, the popular General Germanicus, who commanded a third of Rome’s entire military, died in mysterious circumstances on campaign in Syria, well before he could assume the title of Caesar. Caligula, a nickname meaning "Little Boots,” has become synonymous with his eventual sick depravity.

I bring up this comparison not to suggest any correlation, but rather to mock the ubiquitous and rather absurd claims by internet trolls who have begun to label Elon Musk the literal anti-Christ, or the Beast, or whatever. 



Musk’s undertaking—his effort to bring clarity to the tangled web of governmental finance and corruption, a la George Soros, may in fact be as noble a pursuit as any "divine" mission on Earth. Let there be Light, and all that.

DOGE has already exposed a staggering $100 billion annually being funnelled into recipient accounts without any of the requisite identification boxes being filled in —no social security numbers, no verification numbers, none of the basic safeguards that grants are supposed to include. When Musk inquired about the level of fraud within the data, he was informed by Treasury officials that half of these transactions could be classified as "obvious fraud." That’s $50 billion in American taxpayer dollars. That figure likely represents the tip of the iceberg in overall corruption festering within the government departments. With the forthcoming audit of Pentagon funds, I wager that the true scale of the Swamp’s dealings will soon come into full view.

To those who are up in arms over the absence of "proper procedure" or the lack of Congressional oversight regarding the cancellation of contracts within this deeply entrenched, off-the-rails bureau —please just take a step back and maybe sniff some smelling salts. The information that is now coming to light is utterly invaluable. It exposes the vast networks of fraud, who is connected to whom, the organised cultural assault with the funding of transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, perverted medical science and beyond; decades of venality and secretive governance that has hitherto been blocked to any kind of scrutiny.

I do not deny the importance of safeguarding the personal data of ordinary Americans. Indeed, such data should be fully protected under privacy laws. However, it is important to note that Musk does not have direct access to this data. His team operates on a "read-only" basis, meaning that they cannot alter any of the information, they can only analyse it —a point confirmed by Treasury Secretary Bessent. But even so, what we are witnessing here is the largest and most far-reaching data analysis in the history of the nation, and it’s already telling terrible tales that aren’t tales. They’re real.
​ 


The American people have a right to know how their money is being spent and who is spending it. It is long past time for full disclosure. Let it all come out.
​

[Edit from author: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that some $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were missing a critical tracking code, which made tracing the transactions “almost impossible.”]