rs later because the airplanes last a long time somebody says oh we need to add a cup dispenser or we need some cups that will fit the dispensers that are already on the plane or they need to be some special kind of cups that I don't know don't leak or something.

Well to make that little tiny order of whatever it is that Air Force One needed but nobody else will ever need anywhere they might have to develop part of a factory. They might have to buy equipment to manufacture that thing. They might have to design it because they don't have the design anymore and then they manufacture it. When they're done they spend a million dollars to make something that you think should be worth five dollars but it actually cost a million dollars and there wasn't any other way to do it except build the factory, build the piece, put all the overhead in it and try to get it.

Now I want to be very careful because I know half of you are so mad at me right now that you can't hear the next thing I say so I'm going to say it three times to get through your wall of anger. It's probably still overpriced. That's the first time. It's probably still overpriced. That's the second time. Now this one should penetrate your wall. It's probably still overpriced. All right so don't argue with me about whether it's overpriced. I concede that. But it's probably never overpriced in the way that you think it is that it only costs them a nickel to make it and they charged a billion dollars. That's almost never true. It's usually some overhead, that special case, blah blah blah.

So even though it's fake news in my opinion, again without doing any research on this specific case, it's always fake news, has been since the 60s, is really useful because the public doesn't know it's fake news so they say what the Pentagon's charging me a billion dollars for a hammer. We're going to have to go in there and shake things up.

Well if what you want to do is go in there and shake things up and cut costs it's really useful if the public thinks that they are charging a billion dollars for a screw. It's really useful because then you can get the support. Likewise the same strategy is being used on the cuts for USAID. If you told the real story to the public okay public the reason that these weird little charities exist is not because somebody really really cared about the trans events in Uruguay for example. It's because we were trying to control Uruguay and teaming with the trans community gave us a little bit of capacity building so that we'd have a little more leverage over Uruguay.

Now that's the story that the government can't tell you and even Trump can't tell you that and I don't think Elon Musk is going to say that in a press release because it basically owns our entire intelligence operation. USAID is basically just a front for the CIA. This would be the Mike Benz version of reality. And if you see it as a front for the CIA the real argument is do we need the CIA doing this stuff? Now I think the answer is no. I think that probably we can get what we want without doing this stuff and that maybe it is going too far and it was too easy to get money for anything so you know maybe there's some of this stuff that needs to happen for intelligence reasons and for legitimate protection of the Republic but probably the best thing is to cut it all and then have whoever needs it make a better argument and then add it back if we need it. That's probably what makes sense.

But notice how complicated that is. Wait what are you saying? You're saying that USAID is just the CIA? Well do you have a document that proves that? No nobody could possibly have a document that proves that. You can get there by inference. You can get there because somebody told you and you've been around it and you know what it really is and maybe you've worked in the CIA so you know exactly what's going on but there's no document. I don't think Trump and Musk could come up with oh here's the memo look right here it says everything we do is for the CIA. No they can't prove it.

So what are they going to do? So you do the thing like the million dollar hammer. You just tell the public something they can understand. Maybe we shouldn't be spending 50 million on condoms for Mozambique and then the public says oh yeah I don't know much about this topic. I never heard of USAID before but yeah that's a lot of money for condoms. I think I'd rather save that money. And then you could just go down the line. All right do you want to support trans events in Uruguay? No no I don't. Yeah shut that thing down.

Well there's more. They're also doing DEI in Slovenia. DEI in Slovenia are you kidding me? Get rid of that. Get rid of the million dollar hammers. Get rid of it all. Close it down. Go Musk.

So there is a veneer of what we're seeing but for a good purpose. The public it would be hard to bring the public up to speed on what's really going on in the real world. It's painful to figure out what's real. It's painful and most people aren't going to even want to put in work. So yes if you could make the argument based on ridiculous expenses in the context of our budget being way out of control if it works it works.

There's a Democrat progressive analyst. He's been called, he's worked with a lot of top Democrats. Guy named Ruy Teixeira. Now so the first thing you need to know is that he's deep in the Democrat world so he's not a Republican. He's a deep Democrat. And here's something he said recently. He said that in policy terms the Democrats have a point about the legality of DOGE's efforts. So yes I would acknowledge that there is an argument out there that DOGE needs to be within the frame of legal activity. Of course yeah I agree with that. And if it isn't I'd like people who are smarter than me to figure that out and then we'll adjust. We'll make whatever adjustment needs to be necessary.

So the questions about whether DOGE is legal or not legal I think that's fair game and so does he. That's fair game. I mean I don't like how it's working out because it's slowing things down but you can't say it's not fair to ask if something's legal. That's the first question you should ask. Is that legal? And if we don't know for sure let's work through the process. Let's go through the courts. Let's figure out if it's legal.

But here's the more interesting thing. He says that Trump occupies the high ground in this fight meaning that all the USAID looks like things that the public doesn't want right. So even though they do basic stuff or the claim is that USAID is doing some real charity there are so many things like DEI in Serbia's workplace that if Trump says we're going to cut