“When the sun goes down, the tide goes out, the people gather 'round and they all begin to shout, ‘Hey, hey, in the dusk, it's a lift to beat the left with ol' Mississippi Musk!’” Okay, okay, so it’s not as catchy as the actual song, but one thing that is catching is the Trumpian quest to cut the fat from government spending and make more efficient, and saner, use of the taxpayers’ money. In Mississippi, state auditor Shad White, also known as “Mississippi Musk,” has been hard at work against state government bloat, and what he has found is enlightening.
Ol’ Shad, as I imagine the folks down there in Clarksdale an’ Natchez call him, has found that Mississippi has wasted a staggering amount of money, and he would be the first one to tell you that it is extremely unlikely that Elvis’ home state is alone in this. Fox News reported Monday that White is releasing “a compilation of audits conducted by his office that tabulated a collective $400 million in waste over the course of his tenure.”
That compilation is as sure to be as big a hit as “Heartbreak Hotel,” at least among patriots who are tired of seeing the fruits of their labors devoured among the corrupt, incompetent, and undeserving. (By the way, that wasn’t just an Oxford comma there, folks; that was an Oxford, Mississippi comma.)
White remarked: "In the last few weeks, we’ve jokingly started calling ourselves MOGE, the Mississippi Office of Government Efficiency, like Elon Musk’s DOGE. We approach our work with the same attention to every penny as DOGE, and I’m happy to be Mississippi’s Musk." Indeed. Every state should have a Musk, and a DOGE. Just imagine what COGE, the California Office of Government Efficiency, or NYOGE, the New York Office of Government Efficiency, would uncover.
After all, Mississippi is a relatively small and poor state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since it went for Jimmy Carter in 1976 (clearly Mississippians learned their lesson from that). It is unlikely to have the kind of massively corrupt state government that comes from electing socialists who think they’re entitled to as much of your money as they can seize, so as to spend it on DEI, Critical Race Theory, and transgender madness. And even so, Mississippi Musk and his team found a great deal of money that could have and should have been better spent.
White is so concerned about state government waste that his MOGE efforts didn’t even begin in imitation of what Elon Musk is doing in Washington. He explained: "We've been working on this project really for the last couple of years. And what's encouraging right now is that President Trump and Elon Musk are doing DOGE, which has raised public awareness about the amount of fraud, waste and abuse in government. So people are starting to look closely at what we've uncovered. In our time in the state auditor's office, my team and I have uncovered about $400 million worth of waste."
He will detail all this waste in an 800-page report that will show, among other things, that “Medicaid is a major issue, in that tens of millions of dollars in subsidies are going to income-ineligible Mississippians.” Even worse, “one state agency was spending nearly $6,000 each on televisions, which the similarly bloated feds pay about $2,000 for similar tech.” White commented: "So, if you think the federal government is inefficient, I promise you, your state governments around the country are likely even less efficient."
White added that Mississippi was not exempt from the left’s craziness, for "when you dig into what they're doing with all of this staff time and all of these resources, they were doing things like holding microaggression training sessions for engineers — I don't know why we need to do that. They were handing out grants for social justice yoga for preschoolers. Just crazy stuff." Even in Mississippi, the leftist forces of indoctrination have been hard at work, with “$11 million in taxpayer funding has gone to DEI at colleges alone.”
Related: Useless Government Program to Be Eliminated, Just As It Was to Be in 2017
And while one in five Mississippians lives below the poverty line, White says that “we found dollars supposed to be going to poor folks going to pay for sponsorship of beauty pageants. Really, I think the big-picture point here is, this kind of waste happens at every level of government. And now that DOGE is taking the lead and showing the country how much fraud, waste and abuse there is, it's really incumbent on every single state government to take a look at their own house and make sure that that fraud, waste, and abuse isn't happening in state government, too."
“Lordy, how they play it! Goodness, how they sway it! Uncle Joe, Uncle Jim, how they waste taxpayer money with vigor and vim!” No, that’s not how it goes, either. But that’s how it should go.
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