DOGE cut malaria and Ebola research grants as part of its international-development purge. Now the State Department is trying to rebuild exactly those programmes after realising they protect Americans too. The cost of rehiring will be double the original budget, Katty Kay's daughter witnessed this firsthand.
Where this was said
At 38:20 · chapter starts 32:40
Scaramucci opens his DOGE autopsy with a sharp analogy: it was like a mouse standing in front of a bullet train of entrenched government spending. Musk came in with 'Potomac fever' — the billionaire's delusion that business genius transfers seamlessly to government — and quickly retreated from the third rails of entitlements and defence spending. [1] — Anthony Scaramucci "The structural reason DOGE failed: mandatory entitlements and defence spending are untouchable politically, and without pay-as-you-go guard…" 32:30 What remained was politically motivated cutting: DEI programmes, USAID, anything that could be filed under 'wokery'. Kay argues this was always the real agenda: Elon Musk had one goal, Stephen Miller had another, and Miller's goal won. DOGE's closure gets the 'holy trinity of lies' treatment from Scaramucci: Trump also promised to end forever wars and release the Epstein files, and delivered on neither. The budget context is damning — Trump spent $8.1 trillion in his first term and now accounts for 28.1% of the entire 250-year US budget deficit, making the efficiency rhetoric ring completely hollow.
Katty Kay argues DOGE had two separate agendas: Elon Musk's genuine (if naive) efficiency drive, and Stephen Miller's political agenda to gut diversity programmes and international development. The latter succeeded. The former failed completely.
DOGE closed on July 4th, 2026. Its own website claimed $215 billion in savings — a disputed fraction of the $2 trillion promised. Scaramucci calls it the third leg of Trump's 'holy trinity of lies': ending wars, releasing Epstein files, and making government efficient. None delivered.
Scaramucci stated that Trump spent $8.1 trillion during his first presidential term, undermining the credibility of his second-term DOGE efficiency drive.
Scaramucci claimed Trump, across six years as president, accounts for 28.1% of the United States' entire 250-year budget deficit.
The US government ran a $240 billion budget surplus in 2000, the product of Clinton-era pay-as-you-go fiscal guardrails.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
You rarely control your first reactive thought. But you can train your second thought — the response to the trigger — by asking whether your initial reaction is the most helpful one and replacing it with something equally true but more constructive. Over time, that second thought becomes automatic.
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