You Don’t Want to Know How Much Taxpayer Money Went Into Changing the Na...

You Don’t Want to Know How Much Taxpayer Money Went Into Changing the Name of the Department of Defense

Did you know that changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War cost us all $125 million? Well, the Congressional Budget Office would like you to know that. And Russell Vought, the jumped-up sub-level bureaucrat hired by the administration in order to make lives miserable as the director of the budget, would like you to know how much sense that makes. Vought appeared before a House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. He was at his smarmiest, which is very smarmy indeed. And Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Maryland) asked Vought about what would appear to the conscious mind to be a prodigious waste of money just to make Pete Hegseth feel tingly. IVEY: Last week at the one of the appropriations markups there was a discussion I know that you're using the phrase Department of War instead of Department of Defense, but I we were said we were told that the CBO said it's going to cost $125 million to change the name from Department of Defense to Department of War. Do you do you agree with that estimate? VOUGHT: We haven't done our own estimate at OMB on the cost, but it's something that I think makes common sense; it's what the department was called for most of our nation's history. (Ed. Note: "For most of our nation's history," there was no Air Force. Or a CIA. Or an Office of Management and Budget, for all that.) IVEY: I'm focused on the amount...The nomenclature concerns me less from an Appropriations Committee standpoint than the fact that we're going to spend $125 million, or so...That's a lot of money, and we spend a lot of time hearing that a lot of the needs we'd like to fund. We don't have the money to fund. It certainly will buy a lot of nameplates. These really are the mole people.