Ted Cruz and Elon Musk: A Comedy of Errors in Government Oversight

The Tail Gunner's Taxonomy of Terror: Mint Plants and Marxist Plots

Senator Ted Cruz, in a move seemingly inspired by Elon Musk's crusade against perceived government waste, recently unveiled his own "investigation" into federal spending. Cruz, with the investigative prowess of a particularly oblivious toddler, declared he'd uncovered $2 billion in science grants promoting "radical political perspectives" and "neo-Marxist theories."

His crack team of researchers achieved this stunning feat by searching grant descriptions for keywords like "women," "diversify," "segregation," and "Hispanic culture." This highly scientific approach, as ProPublica hilariously reveals, flagged a grant studying the evolution and spread of mint plants as suspiciously "woke" due to the words "diversify" (referring to biodiversity) and "female" (referring to a young female scientist on the team).

AI vs. Ted: When Algorithms Are Smarter Than Senators

ProPublica, employing an AI model similar to ChatGPT, conducted their own analysis of the grants Cruz flagged. The AI, acting as a digital investigative journalist, found that Cruz's dragnet had snared numerous projects completely unrelated to his targeted social or economic themes. Examples include grants for developing bleeding control devices (flagged for "victims" and "trauma"), biosensors for infectious diseases (flagged for "POC," meaning "point of care," and "barrier"), and eye-tracking technology for concussion diagnosis (flagged for "traumatic" and "status").

It seems Cruz's team, in their zeal to expose "woke" science, confused botanical diversity with political subversion and medical terminology with insidious social agendas. One can only wonder what other hidden threats they might uncover – perhaps a Marxist plot lurking within the pages of House & Garden?

The DOGE Days of Summer: Elon's Wall of Receipts Crumbles

Meanwhile, over in Elon Musk's corner of the internet, his "DOGE" team (dedicated to uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse) proudly presented their own "wall of receipts." However, their claims of billions in savings quickly crumbled under scrutiny from The New York Times. Double- and triple-counted contracts, inflated totals, and claims of canceled contracts that were actually terminated under the Biden administration exposed the DOGE effort as more reckless than rigorous.

The DOGE team has since quietly deleted many of their erroneous claims. But the damage is done. Between Cruz's inability to distinguish mint plants from Marxists and Musk's DOGE debacle, the quest for government oversight seems to have devolved into a comedy of errors.