Waste Removal

DOGE does its job:

“Over the last two days, agencies terminated 239 wasteful contracts with a total ceiling value of [roughly $1.7 billion] and total savings” of around $400 million, DOGE said in a March 13 post on the social media platform X. It added that one of the contracts was for consulting. The contract, it said, was regarding “fiscal stewardship to improve management and program operations in order to drive innovation and improve efficiency and effectiveness of business services; rethink, realign and reskill the workforce; and enhance program delivery through a number of transformational initiatives.” Later that day, DOGE wrote on X that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) canceled multiple grants and programs, including a $100,000 study for Vanderbilt University to evaluate “social networks” among “sexual and gender minorities,“ a $37,000 study for the University of Houston to investigate the “fear of deportation” in “Latinx young adults,” $681,000 for the University of Pennsylvania to study “anti-vaping messages” on social media among “sexual and gender minority teens,” and $225,000 for the University of Colorado to look into the “effects of hormones on headaches in transmasculine adolescents.” The NIH, according to DOGE, also canceled several other grants and programs with similar topics of study earlier in the week, including “an LGB+ inclusive teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys” that cost $620,000, a $699,000 study that looked into marijuana usage among “sexual minority gender diverse individuals,” $740,000 to study social networks among “black and Latino sexual minority men in New Jersey,” a $75,000 study on “structural racism,” and a $50,000 program to look into “LGTBQ+ Latinx youth in an agricultural community” and their “sexual health.”

Garbage in, garbage taken out...