In The Dark Knight, there’s a explicit scene the place the Joker burns an unimaginable amount money. It is without doubt one of the movie’s most defining moments, chaotic, theatrical and profoundly unsettling. It takes place inside a dim, darkish warehouse owned by Gotham’s mob with Joker because the centerpiece.

At the middle of the wear and tear home are billions of dollars stacked flooring to ceiling in a crude pyramid. It’s spectacular. It can also be grotesque. It clearly symbolizes the mob’s greed as a bodily monument. Joker climbs to the highest of the pile dragging the mob’s accountant behind him. He casually sits Lao, the mob accountant, on the very high, like a sacrifice.

Below, the mob bosses look on, anticipating a deal. Instead, Joker offers them one among his most telling strains:

“It’s not about the money… it’s about sending a message.”

Then he lights a single match.

At the purpose, our authorities looks like a scene in a Batman film, the futuristic, dystopian variations like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight.

DOGE. I believe it’s time to acknowledge it was by no means reform effort. It was, at finest, a merciless stunt. Unlike Joker within the film, your authorities – our authorities – isn’t burning their very own cash. This expensive, chaotic, wildly irresponsible act burned up American taxpayer cash. The mission strutted in with unchecked swagger, promising to rewrite the foundations of presidency spending. Instead, it crashed into actuality and left $135 billion in harm behind.

That’s not political spin or partisan math. That’s the determine from the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, and it exposes the reality Trump and Musk by no means wished to confess: their “efficiency revolution” was nothing greater than a bonfire constructed out of our cash.

The Numbers Tell the Story — and the Story Is Ugly

DOGE began with the grand pledge of reducing $2 trillion in waste. The type of quantity designed for headlines, however not accuracy. Then Musk walked it again to $150 billion. Now impartial analysts say even that scaled-down determine was inflated by as a lot as 80 %.

That’s not reform, that’s cap. Lies. Myth-making.

They bragged about canceling contracts value billions when the paperwork confirmed these contracts had been value hundreds of thousands. In different instances, DOGE claimed “savings” for canceling contracts that had already expired. It was a PR spin that went on and on unchecked.

A Workforce Purge With a Massive Price Tag

Here’s the place the actual harm seems: DOGE didn’t simply trim fats, it really amputated limbs from the work drive. More than 260,000 federal staff have been pushed out by way of firings, buyouts and early retirements. That’s a damaging, rampant destabilization.

Entire companies are hollowed out. You can’t simply recreate that form of institutional data. Younger employee can’t be educated in every week The IRS faces an exodus so massive it threatens fundamental authorities perform. When you fireplace the individuals who accumulate taxes, you accumulate fewer taxes. Even the Joker is smarter than that.

Yale’s Budget Lab decided that the departure of twenty-two,000 IRS staff will price the federal government $8.5 billion in misplaced income in 2026, and almost $200 billion over a decade.

The math ain’t mathing.

The Price of Chaos

There are some numbers that made loads of sense when damaged down. Productivity quantity. Workers spent hours every week responding to Musk’s e-mail scavenger hunts demanding lists of their “five accomplishments.” Analysts estimate these disruptions ate up 165,000 hours of labor. Count how a lot a governmental ego journey price Americans.

Burn It Down

And now, quietly, with out ceremony, DOGE has been burned like that stack of cash the Joker devalued. Gone. Ten brief months after its triumphant rollout, it ends in silence. But we all know.

Nothing Musk and Trump promised got here true.
Not the financial savings.
Not the effectivity.
Not the cleaner, smarter authorities.

Instead, DOGE left behind a damaged workforce, a path of confusion and a price ticket that may make any deficit hawk choke.

The Real Cost

This Trump–Musk alliance is promoting a authorities too gutted to perform, however someway costlier than ever. The workforce stays so battered it could’t perform fundamental duties. A tax system starved of the personnel it must implement the regulation. And a public left footing an ever-growing invoice.

DOGE was alleged to be a revolution in effectivity.
Instead, it stands as one of the crucial costly cautionary tales in trendy governance.

The reality is straightforward:
They didn’t minimize waste.
They created it.
They didn’t save taxpayer {dollars}.
They torched them.
And now it’s as much as the American folks to sift by way of the ashes.

A comic book tremendous villain has extra ideas.

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