We’re writing in response to U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker’s Feb. 16 column in LNP | LancasterOnline (“Fiscal reform starts now: The case for Musk’s effort”).
“Why would anyone oppose efforts to streamline government operations, root out waste and improve efficiency?” Smucker asks.
Smucker, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are disguising their efforts as simple and commonsense, when they are neither.
This is not a routine audit to eliminate wasteful spending. A real audit takes months or even years and serves as the basis for action.
What’s happening instead is the rapid dismantling of government functions without due process. As others have pointed out, Trump fired more than a dozen independent inspectors general upon taking office. If the goal were truly to find and eliminate waste, why purge the very people responsible for oversight?
Instead, Musk and Trump ignore our laws, call their actions “innovative,” and count on the public being too tired to push back. Meanwhile, representatives such as Smucker copy and paste their talking points about “transparency” and “objectivity.”
This is not common sense. One look at Smucker’s column reveals that his “staggering” examples of waste are minuscule in the overall federal budget. Politicians such as Smucker are using “government inefficiency” as a pretext to illegally dismantle agencies and fire tens of thousands of Americans.
Let’s not allow them to expose our private data, halt medical research, jeopardize food safety and trash our government — all for the empty promise of a few extra dollars in our paychecks.
Those “taxpayer savings” are never coming, and if you call Smucker’s office to ask where they are, don’t expect an answer.
Kenny Whitebloom
Maura Tucker
Lancaster Township
