Since he was tapped to lead the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, tech billionaire Elon Musk has been subjected to no end of insults and abuse by those opposed to his vision for a massive federal downsizing.
However, recently unearthed footage reveals that one of the Democratic Party's most revered personalities, namely, former President Barack Obama, once called for precisely the type of cuts now advocated by Musk, as Fox News reports.
The footage, dating back to 2011, sees then-President Obama advocating for significant reductions in federal spending, even if it impacted programs that “a lot of people care about.”
Obama went on, “Everyone knows that getting rid of the deficit will require some tough decisions, and that includes cutting back on billions of dollars in programs that a lot of people care about.”
The then-president added that even if deeper discussions needed to take place when it came to cutting well-established or well-loved programs, the country should at least eliminate “pointless waste and stupid spending that doesn't benefit anybody,” and he said that such cuts ought to occur “even if we didn't have a deficit.”
“No amount of waste is acceptable, especially when it's your money,” Obama asserted, expressing sentiments that sound eerily similar to those underlying the efforts of Musk's DOGE.
Interestingly, Obama even took aim at “thousands of buildings across the country that no one uses,” but for which the federal government was still paying, a lingering dilemma at which the Trump administration's cost-cutting team has been taking a very close look.
To address the aforementioned concerns, Obama created the “Campaign to Cut Spending” and tapped then-Vice President Joe Biden to take the lead, as Breitbart notes.
According to the 2011 footage, Biden was put in charge of “a renewed effort to hunt down misspent tax dollars in every agency and department of this government.”
The initiative, Obama suggested, was poised to be a great success because, as he put it, “nobody messes with Joe.”
Despite Obama's accompanying issuance of an executive order establishing something called the “Government Accountability and Transparency (GAT) Board,” the cost-cutting push eventually fizzled without achieving the sort of results the then-president seemed to have envisioned.
Upon seeing the unearthed video of the former president's cost-cutting proclamation from years ago, Musk himself took to X and mused, “Obama sounds exactly like @DOGE!!”
The key difference between the government waste reduction initiatives launched by Obama and Trump's seems to be the resolve and ability of the person tapped to lead them.
The fact that Musk is actually following through on the president's promises and getting the job done for the American people has sent liberals into a tailspin from which they may not recover.
