Senate leaders for the Department of Government Efficiency have just invented a game taxpayers can play. Members of the DOGE caucus will release an NCAA-style bracket featuring 16 “seeds” of government waste, and we taxpayers will be invited to choose which eight are daft enough to advance to the top four, then to the championship two.
My pick for infamy will be the Media Empowerment for a Democratic Sri Lanka (MEND), which the United States Agency for International Development has awarded $7,906,904 to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid using “binary-gendered language.”
USAID is not the first government agency to be spoofed by gamers, whistleblowers and satirists. No one can top Charles Dickens, whose “Little Dorrit” lampoons Victorian England’s “whole Science of Government” — aptly dubbed the “Circumlocution Office.”
DOGE’s description of the USAID-funded MEND is an exact match for Dickens’ description of the Circumlocution Office: “It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office.”
A full set of lesson plans for how not to do it in Sri Lanka is not available, but MEND’s Facebook page includes a list of “gendered” terms journalists should strike from their lexicon. Journalists should follow The Associated Press’s rule to replace “biological sex” with “sex assigned at birth” and the Biden administration’s rule to replace “mothers” with “birthing people.” If MEND had survived Elon Musk’s chainsaw, Sri Lankan journalists might also be replacing “birthing people” with Wisconsin’s new coinage “person inseminated.”
Additional lessons in how not to make sense echo Cal-Berkeley professor Judith Butler because “they” was among the first to argue that “gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint.”
In keeping with Butler’s fiat, MEND’s Facebook page claims, “Gender is a social, psychological, and cultural construct,” and journalists should “normalize the sharing of gender pronouns by actively sharing your own” and apologize if they inadvertently “gender-shame” or “fat-shame” a fellow Sri Lankan.
That latest addition to MEND’s list of taboos has become the object of at least one great satire, and Dickens himself would have cheered the heir apparent to his brand of humor. Posing as a nonbinary “fat pride activist,” comedian Steven Crowder submitted an essay titled “Embracing Fatness as Self-Care in the Era of Trump,” which was published to great acclaim in a 2020 issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society — by an editor who is as misguided as she is woke.
The beneficences of USAID’s reckless spending match exactly the targets of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office: “It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything … people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to address grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the fools cap of the Circumlocution Office.”
Playing himself in a Feb. 4 podcast, comedian Crowder commended Musk for showcasing MEND’s “crazy waste of your tax money,” and a former member of Sri Lanka’s parliament called MEND’s Sri Lankan project a “massive waste” of taxpayer dollars. But Wimal Weerawansa has also announced that Sri Lankans themselves “are seeing how $7.9 million was spent to push an ideological agenda,” for the project’s real aim was “to encourage LGBTQ+ activism” among the youth of Sri Lanka.
As a leader in the Senate’s DOGE caucus, Iowa Republican Joni Ernst has noted that while college basketball’s March Madness lasts only a month, the federal government’s “spending madness” has, for decades, advanced unchecked — until the DOGE caucus made plans to bring government waste, fraud and abuse to a “squealing halt.”
Nan Miller is professor emerita of literature at Meredith College and lives in Raleigh.
