window closed yet. But 75,000, that's pretty good. If you're shooting for 100 and you get 75 that's really good because how in the world could you estimate how many people will take an offer? If you estimated it this well, you said 100 and you got 75, that's pretty impressive. I don't know if you've never done this kind of work where you're estimating things that are impossible to estimate. This is kind of impressive if you got within 25,000. So that's good. That's reported by Dylan Burrows at RSBN.

But the other thing the Trump administration is doing is getting rid of what they call the probationary employees. So I guess if you get a job with the government, I don't know if this applies to the whole government, but you're on a first probationary period. So if you don't work out in the first year then I guess it's easier to fire you. So after the first year there might be some protections that kick in, make it harder. So they make sure that the first year you've got plenty of time to find out if you're bad at your job and they can get rid of you. But the Trump administration will use that same fact to find the people who just joined and they're typically the easiest to fire for a variety of reasons.

Now you might say to me, Scott, the reason they hired these people is because they needed them. Yes, that's true. And let me say again, the DOGE process does assume that they will cut too much. It's just built into the process. It's not a mistake if they cut too much. It's the process. So the only way you can tell what really matters is to get rid of it and see how loud the yelling is. There is no other way. If you think you can study it and then scientifically and surgically get rid of only the important stuff, you know, you're only removing the tumor but the healthy skin around it is left intact. That's not a thing. That's not a thing. Nobody can do that. It's just not doable. And no company would do that. They would do exactly what Elon's doing. They would cut too far, too far and too fast. And then when the yelling started they'd say whoa, whoa, what'd you say? And they'd listen to it. And if they had a good argument they'd put it back.

Let me tell you what happened when I was working for Crocker National Bank in San Francisco and it was about the time that Wells Fargo was doing a takeover. So Wells Fargo was going to take over that bank. Now it happened to be just by luck that that was one of the times I got told that I could never be promoted because I'm a white male. So I had just quit just at the same time that Wells Fargo bought my former employer. And what they told all the employees, because I stayed in touch of course, what they told all the employees is don't worry about losing your job because we're going to look at each individual employee and each individual duplication of effort because two banks, if you put two banks together you have all kinds of duplication. So they said don't worry. If you're one of the good ones you'll still be with the combined entity. But you'd only have to worry if you're bad at your job. So that made it easy because everybody thinks they're good at their job. So nobody complained in advance too much because they're like oh well I'll be fine because I'm good at my job.

So then the transaction goes through. Do you know what the first thing Wells Fargo did after the transaction was complete? They simply eliminated completely everybody working in the duplicate areas of the company. They bought all of them. They got rid of all of them. And they just said we already have people who do that and we're the winning company. We're the company that bought you. You're the company that got bought. The company that got bought, you just lost all of your duplicated stuff. You're all unemployed and we'll just keep all of our people. So it was a complete lie. It was a big lie. Super lie. But some of us were smart enough to know they're not going to be able to talk to every employee and sort out which ones to keep and then combine these two weird departments that aren't exactly the same. Of course they're just going to fire the people in the acquired bank. Of course they are. And sure enough. Now it didn't bother me because like I said I just left to another company. But yeah, there's only one way to do this. You cut too far. You make drastic cuts and then you adjust if you need to. No other way to do it. And it's also common to get rid of first year employees. That's not unusual.

Well, Trump has again got outside of the box when he's talking about the military budget and he suggested that the US, Russia and China could possibly all agree to cut our mutual budgets by half. Now the first time you hear that you just laugh at it. Go, okay, you're not going to. Nobody can convince their adversary to cut their budget by half. And you're certainly not going to convince China who would like to become the dominant world power militarily, economically, in every other way. You're not going to