Comedian Roy Wood Jr. mocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) over its sometimes stumbling efforts to downsize the federal government, during his CNN show on Thursday night.
“We’re literally watching DOGE, like watching DOGE in the way that they’re making these cuts, it’s like watching somebody put together LEGOs without the instructions,” Wood said during a panel discussion on CNN’s “NewsNight” Thursday.
“And then you realize on page 20, you need to go back to page 2 and go all the way back and figure out what you did wrong. And that’s just backwards.”
Wood hosts CNN’s “Have I Got News for You” comedy news show, and was a former correspondent for The Daily Show on Comedy Central.
Musk, the tech billionaire leading the DOGE effort, joined President Trump this week for his first cabinet meeting, where Musk acknowledged mistakes have been made in the process. He said the DOGE team “accidentally” canceled an Ebola prevention program that was later reinstated once the blunder was realized.
“We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect,” Musk said. “When we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly.”
On the team’s potential for misses along the way, Musk said in a joint interview with Trump on Fox News earlier this month that “nobody bats a thousand.”
“But we’re going to fix the mistakes very quickly. That’s what matters: not that you don’t make mistakes, but that you fix the mistakes very fast,” he said.
Despite Musk’s reassurances, officials told The Washington Post this week that USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts remain largely halted.
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, Nidhi Bouri, who oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks during the Biden administration, told The Post.
The Department of Agriculture earlier this month admitted that it accidentally fired employees working on the federal bird flu response, and was seeking to rehire them. And the agency that manages the U.S. nuclear arsenal rescinded all but 28 of 180 firings, admitting “we made mistakes.”
LEGOs enjoyed a surge in popularity amid the COVID pandemic, among both children and adults. The company offers customer support with challenging projects when users don’t follow the detailed instructions provided and end up with a mess of blocks.
