too on the nose? What's the one thing that every one of us would have predicted when Kash Patel got nominated for the FBI? Every single one of us would say, oh, they backed up the shredders. They're going to be burning their files and deleting things. Every one of us said that. And then there's a story with one anonymous source that's exactly the thing that every one of us was expecting. How do you judge that one?

Now, the only thing that's going for it is Shellenberger, because he's highly credible. But if this one turns out to be not true — and I'm not sure we would ever know that if it turned out to be not true — don't be surprised, because that too-on-the-nose thing, it's just deadly accurate. Deadly accurate.

All right. Even Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan — I would call him the country's top banker, and when he says stuff about economics, people listen. I listen. I think he is very credible. And he says that DOGE needs to be done. He said something like that before. But everybody has to say that, right? As I said, even the Democrats, pretty much every Democrat has agreed, okay, if you can get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse, yeah, that would be kind of good. So it's not a surprise that the smartest guy in banking says it too.

But here's where I'm going to get into the they've shifted from what to do, which is hard to be against getting rid of fraud and waste abuse, to how it's being done.

I wanted to add what I call the Dilbert filter. You ready for this? So as the creator of Dilbert, I write about things that seem like good ideas but in the real world they just always go wrong. That's sort of what I do for 37 years or something. And this is one of those.

I'm going to give you a couple of stories from my own experience about cutting expenses in a big company. So if you don't know, I worked for two big companies before I became a cartoonist. One of them was Crocker National Bank, and then later Pacific Bell, the local phone company. And my jobs were usually the budget guy, finance guy, for most of that time. So I would be the one who was in charge of making sure the budgets were cut when they needed to get cut. But I didn't have any power. I just had to be the organizer, basically.

So here are two stories, and this will get us into the chainsaw versus the scalpel as well.

Story number one: I was asked to put together a budget for the technology group within Pacific Bell. And we were going to do what's called a bottom-up budget. You've heard of it. They say we should only do bottom-up budgets. Now, a bottom-up budget is when you go to each department head and you say, all right, I want you to add up all the things you absolutely need to do, and then that'll be your budget. What we're not going to do, because that would be crazy, is to give you the same budget as last year plus, you know, 5% or something. Because we really need to know what you're doing. Maybe this year you don't need as much. Maybe next year you need more. So a bottom-up budget is the most responsible, thoughtful, rational way to do it. You all agree so far? Everybody on the same page that if you want to be a good manager, you want to be smart, you want to do the right thing, you're definitely going to do a bottom-up budget, because that's the only time you can put the scalpel on things. This is sort of a scalpel approach, right? You're really looking at each little project.

Now, I did that. So I collected everybody's bottom-up budgets. It took a lot of work. You'd have a list of projects and it'd be a mile long. And that would be for each department head, and every department had their list of projects that were a mile long. And then I would take it to the VP — might have been an assistant VP — the top guy in the technology department, or at least in my end of it. And I would show him this infinite list of projects.

Now, what do you think he did? Do you think that he looked at the infinite list of projects, which he only had a passing knowledge of, and then made scalpel-like decisions on each of these projects that he basically didn't even barely know that they were happening? Do you think that's what happened? Because I'm told that that's how the smart people do it. The smart people take the scalpel. They look at every expense and they cut just what needs to be cut. Do you think he did that? No. No, it was way too impossible. There's no way that he could have spent his entire life studying each of these projects to figure out on his own where to cut.

Now, if you think that the department managers did that for him, as in cut their own budget without being asked, do you think that happened? No. The individual departments wanted the most money they could get. So to them, their boss was their opponent. The boss was their opponent, and the other people who were other department heads were their opponent. They were trying to get the biggest part of the pie, and that was the game. So they couldn't do the scalpel. The people who actually understood the projects, they wouldn't do any scalpel, because they would lie. Oh yeah, if I ask the question, they'd say, oh yeah, essential. Well, if we don't do this, the entire company will fold in a minute. And then it gets to the boss, who would be able to cut it if he understood them, but he doesn't understand them. And there's no way he really could, because there were just so many of them.

So do you know what the big boss told me? He looks at me and looks at my giant list that's incomprehensible. He says, tell everybody to cut 10% across the board compared to the budget from last year. And I looked at him after doing all this work, and I looked at him and said, that's really... Is that how this works? He goes, yeah, just cut 10%. And I'd say, I've talked to all these managers and they say if you cut their budgets even a penny, the entire world will end. And they swear that's true. And he looked at me and said, they'll work it out. Just cut everybody 10%.

So I go back to everybody after I'd done this bottom-up budget, made them do all this work, and I said he just says cut everything 10%. Do you know how it turned out? Fine. Fine. Do you know how easy it was to cut 10%? Well, about a few months into every year, there would be people who imagined that they were going to start some new project on day one, but there was some vendor who couldn't deliver. There was some approvals they didn't get. So things were like six months delayed. So when somebody needed a little extra because it was really an important project or something new, they'd go to the boss and he'd say, oh, okay. Is there any projects that are delayed and not spending the budget for this year? Okay, just take it from that budget, put it over there. Problem solved.

Now, in that specific case, there was a little scalping going on, but it was after the fact. It was sort of doing it wrong and then correcting. Does that sound familiar? The big boss was doing it wrong, moving fast, being efficient, and then maki