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- If You Don't Believe in the Mission of the Org,
If You Don't Believe in the Mission of the Org,
then the money is there for your personal pleasure
Joe is Wypoxic
March 10, 2026
We all know about the corruption and ridiculous spending by people high and low in the Trump Administrations. In many instances, the spending is a tiny fraction of the federal budget while adding up to real money to the 99% of us that live in the real world.
In Trump 1.0, there was HHS Secretary Tom Price, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, HUD Secretary and literal brain surgeon Ben Carson, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Veterans Administration Secretary David Shulkin, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to name a few.
In Trump 2.0, the pattern continues. Some of the spending is meaningfully expensive, others spending is stupid and petty. There’s the Qatar jet that required “upgrades”, the luxury jets for Kristi Noem, the spending by Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the spending by Department of Energy officials, and, of course, the time-tested practice of officials spending at Trump properties to line the pockets of the president and his family.
Example:
So we know the entire Administration is filled with unqualified (and mostly incompetent) sycophants who are corrupt in ways big and small.
But there’s a bigger underlying commonality here that ties everything together: most, if not all of these people, don’t believe in the mission of the federal government they are charged with managing/leading.
Quick Campaign Story:
At campaign events when I was running for office, I would frequently be asked questions that had a common theme: “The federal government doesn’t work, it’s a waste of taxpayer money, so why support it?”
I liked to respond with a question of my own. Something along the lines of, “What would happen if your boss at the company you worked for, and the CEO at your organization, didn’t believe in the mission of the company and were not qualified to run your organization?”
Blank stares. Eventually, I would answer my own question. “Your company would fail and everyone would lose their jobs.” Not everyone initially got where I was headed, but after my answer, most got my point. Heads would nod up and down in agreement.
I would then follow up with my conclusion from this little thought exercise: "So why do we elect - essentially hire - people to run the federal government who don’t believe in the mission of the organization and actually want it to fail? Because government is not inherently good or bad. Any organization, including the federal government, is only as good (or bad) as the people who are charged with running it. And if we keep sending people to Washington DC who want our government to fail, it will.”
In rooms full of potential voters in deep red America, I would get more people coming up to me after I finished speaking to tell me they appreciated my view on who should be running our government than on any other topic.
This is clearly the case with not only Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, but also the current version of the Republican Party.
In addition, there is a follow-on corollary to this point: trillions of dollars flow through the federal government every year. If people in charge don’t believe in the mission of the organization they are leading, then the huge sums of money available to them just become a grab bag for personal use and enriching themselves, their family, friends, cronies and donors.
After all, why should they waste money on something they don’t believe in when they can use that money for their own benefit?
This is where we are at today and this is a point that should be raised repeatedly. Simply put, government works when the people in charge believe in and care about the mission; it doesn’t work when the people in charge don’t.
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