Great news, everyone! Elon Musk and his gang of 20 year old doggie boys have discovered a source of waste and fraud, just the type they expect us to believe they’ve been after: the people making sure your MawMaw doesn’t starve to death.
There are many more examples of DOGE dysfunction, of course, but this one really rattled my cage. It rattled my family. We just sacked 40% of the staff at the Administration for Community Living.
While Musk and the international billionaire class skip and twirl through the flaming wreckage of the post-WWII global order, disrupting, dismantling and deregulating, the Department of Health and Human Services has decided that what this country really can't afford anymore is Meals on Wheels and energy assistance for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.
Maybe you’ve never heard the Administration for Community Living (ACL) - that’s an agency that runs programs that benefit the elderly and disabled, like senior centers and Meals on Wheels, which distributes more than 200 million meals a year to elderly and sick people who can’t work and can’t leave their homes.
Cutting ACL’s staff by 40% will absolutely impact their ability to do their job. Absolutely. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There is no reason to think that anyone in this administration would take the time to actually audit this organization like a professional, and say, “Hey, love what you do - here’s some bloat, this is redundant, this code is outdated, how can I help?” Why bother with careful, data-driven audits when you can swing a hatchet and claim victory over “big government”—even if it’s a program run by churches, neighbors, and retired nurses?
After all, nothing says “small government” like letting someone’s 89-year-old mom starve on her sofa just because Project 2025 thought it better if she just tried the whole “bootstraps” thing.
Speaking of moms, my own mom, - retired after 40+ years of working as a pediatric nurse - volunteers for Meals on Wheels in a largely rural part of Colorado where I was born. Five days a week, she gives her time, energy, and heart to bring food, companionship and dignity to people who can’t get it any other way. She is the most regular visitor for most of the people she sees. At her own expense, she throws in cat and dog treats for those who have the need.
She's just one person in an army of selfless volunteers, of literal angels doing the work these folks’ families cannot or will not do — and now there’s a damn good probability that her list of deliveries shrinks, her service hours are cut, that she or any of her fellow volunteers are told their efforts are no longer needed because the food is simply no longer there to deliver. Why? Again, because the most elitist-of-elite Washington DC think tank, oozing with dark, dirty money, thought it would be cute to gut the government to own the libs.
In addition to the cuts at ACL, every single staffer at the Division of Energy Assistance was laid off too. That office runs LIHEAP, a program that helps nearly 6 million low-income families (including 95,000 here in Louisiana) pay their heating and cooling bills. If you’re poor and old and on oxygen or need refrigerated insulin and that support goes away, maybe you can’t pay Entergy that month. You might find yourself gasping for your last breath in 110 degree weather or watching your medicine spoil in the dark, all because of Elon Musk’s little chainsaw.
I can practically hear the responses now so let’s jump out in front. These cuts will hurt these programs. These programs aren’t “waste.” They are not “fraud.” It’s not just cash assistance; they are smart public health and safety programs. They are harm reduction. They are crisis prevention. They prevent us from having to pay five dollars tomorrow for what we could cover with one dollar today.
They are life savers for people who built this country, went to church, raised their families, paid their taxes, and now rely on a little help in their silver years. They are money-savers for hospitals and state and local governments who are on the hook when one of my mom’s neighbors and beneficiaries has to go into assisted living, or MawMaw shows up at the ER with heat stroke.
But thanks to Project 2025 (which, by the way, I was the first WWL personality to talk about back in February of 2024 and have turned out to be entirely correct about, thanks), we’re supposed to believe it’s our patriotic duty to kick seniors and the disabled in the teeth and then celebrate the "savings!"
Maybe your response is “well, the Federal government doesn’t need to be doing that stuff.” OK, so who’s gonna do it? Are the Meals on Wheels angels supposed to cook and deliver dinner for 20 people by themselves every day, for free? Of course not. When the smoke clears, MawMaw’s only option will probably be a voucher program to get microwave soup delivered from DoorDash or something like that. This program will have no oversight, it will have no accountability, and it will be profoundly more expensive to administer. In the end, that’s all that any of this is really about. Destroy public service - then restore it with a private sector service, but now there’s a profit motive, and no response to poor execution. It’s a step by step recipe for corruption and despair.
This isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s a toxic mix of cruelty, greed and ineptitude. It’s un-American and un-Christian. This is not making America great again. And it’s personal to me and my mother.
So if you're looking for someone to thank the next time your neighbor’s aging parent gets their power shut off, or you drive by the local soup kitchen and see a line always getting longer, made up of desperate people looking for their single meal of the day, or your buddies’ auntie is headed for the dead-end nursing home because without the help she couldn't pay her rent - just remember: this was a choice. And it wasn’t made by people who care about public service — it was made by Musk, RFK Jr and the rest of their syndicate of ideologues who believe empathy, intellect and compassion are concepts a little too “woke” for their playground.
What the apologists and collaborators are calling “budget tightening,” I consider a sinful butchering of public kindness. And it doesn’t even save us money anyway! We are not “draining the swamp,” we are draining decency from our public life. And those of us who pointed at this and predicted this - we should be the loudest voices in the room now, and the ones writing the history books later. Because it looks like we’ll be the only ones left who remember what it felt like to care.