Words
Words are important, to communicate ideas, and to persuade others. The same word can have multiple pronunciations. Is milk pronounced “mill-ka” or “mel-ka”? Me, I’m a “mel-ka” guy. Or do you say “Toe-mah-toe” or “toe-may-toe”. And there’s words with multiple meanings. “Cool” means temperature if you’re talking about weather, or soup. Cool means it’s good, or fun, or you like it, if you’re talking about new shoes or a car or the latest movie.
To trend back to the subject at hand; there are also words with similar meanings. We talk a lot about Democracy, the idea that the “people” are the ultimate authority in a country. And then there are the hair-splitters, who will quickly point out that the United States isn’t a true Democracy, but a Republic, where representatives are chosen by a democratic voting process. And there’s the compromisers who say that the United States is a Democratic Republic. That way everyone is “right”. It’s the dreaded “participation trophy” of political science.
Studying Mice
And there are words that have specific meanings, like waste and fraud. Waste, at least in government, means that money is being spent for frivolous purposes. We’d all agree that it’s a waste if a school principal spends $50,000 in furniture for his office. It’s waste, but it’s probably not fraud.
We can also “agree to disagree” on some forms of waste. The current White House complains that the Biden Administration spent : $455,000 on “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses”. The Trump people claim they were trying to make “transgendered mice”. That’s sounds pretty wasteful.
But click the link on the dollars. Here’s what the actual study would do:
“There is a considerable gap in knowledge, however, surrounding the immunological responsiveness of transgender people, a population at considerably higher risk for HIV and other STIs. To address this gap, we propose to develop an animal model of feminizing hormone therapy to study the effects of estrogen/anti-testosterone therapy on HIV vaccine-induced immune responses.”
Policy Priority
Do transgendered people in transition respond to HIV vaccines the same way cisgendered people do? How can that be studied without putting the transgendered folks at risk? Immune responses of mice are similar to that of humans, so they are a safe “model” to test how those vaccines might work on real, live, humans. To fit the “model” , those mice have to model transition.
Now, you might make a “policy decision” that studies helping the transgendered are WRONG based on the belief we shouldn’t help the transgendered. That’s similar to the decision that the Reagan Administration made to ignore AIDS for a long time, because they thought it was a “gay disease”. But to argue that the study is a “waste” is disingenuous. They weren’t studying how to make mice transgendered, that was neither the goal nor the outcome. In more common terms, the Trump Administration lied to you.
FRAUD!!!
And the DOGE boys are telling America that they have discovered “FRAUD” in their exhaustive computer invasion of Federal agencies. Fraud is a very specific term. It means that money allocated for a specific purpose is being spent on something else, often to the benefit of undeserving individuals. It’s FRAUD if the high school principal gets $50,000 for his office furniture, then spends $15,000 on a desk and chair and pockets the rest.
Certainly if someone is dead and still collecting Social Security there must be fraud somewhere. And DOGE found exactly that, they thought. Folks who looked like they were still eligible to collect Social Security, born in 1875. They thought, that meant there are 150 year-old folks getting benefits, a very, very unlikely scenario (the oldest documented human was Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122). So, whoever is getting that benefit is committing fraud.
Unless, of course, it’s not true.
Place Holder
So when I go to Kroger’s and buy my favorite bottle of wine (Meomi, Pinot Noir presently), a high school kid running the check-out register asks for my identification. The fact that my hair has gone white, and I’m clearly over the legal age of 21 doesn’t matter – the kid needs to see the ID. So I give it to him. He glances at it, then taps in a date on his register: 1/1/2004. That’s the minimum birth date that is of “legal age” in the state of Ohio. Is he committing fraud? If I don’t correct him, am I? On 1/1/2004 I was not only over twenty-one, I was rapidly approaching fifty.
1/1/2004 is just the “place-holder” for reaching the minimum age. For every “legal alcohol” sold, a date is attached to show that ID was checked. It works.
1/1/1875 is the Social Security place-holder for dead. No one with my grandfather’s birthdate is getting Social Security. Though here’s an interesting trivia item: the last US Civil War pension was paid out by the Veterans Administration until 2020. Irene Triplett was born in 1930. Her father, Moses, was a Civil War veteran, and died eight years after her birth. Irene was mentally disabled, and retained her father’s benefits until her death.
Ignorance
No fraud, no “fat cats” living on the pensions of long dead ancestors. In fact, Social Security has a “fail-safe” mechanism, that stops payment to anyone at 115, just in case a death is missed. 1/1/1875 is just a placeholder like the 1/1/2004 typed into the Kroger cash register to signify legal age, this, a marker to note legal death. That is, accept for Irene, who received a $73.13 a month Civil War pension until her death in 2020. She was 90 years old.
The “fraud” here is the one committed out of intent or ignorance by the DOGE boys. They aren’t necessarily stealing anything. But they are telling Americans that waste and fraud exist when it’s a matter of policy priorities and, well, nineteen year-olds not understanding what a placeholder is in the “ancient” computer language of Cobol.
They’re the same age as the checkout kid at Kroger’s. And here’s another word that should be applied to the DOGE boys and their boss: hubris.
