Uncle Sam, Deadbeat Customer

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

 

Michelle’s company is one of those proud American manufacturing businesses we keep hearing about from the Trump administration, which is doing its level best to wreck her business through its entirely predictable managerial incompetence. Elon Musk proposed to bring that famous “Move fast, break things” Silicon Valley ethos to the federal government, but he only managed one half of that package—and it wasn’t the half you’d want.

 

Here’s a portrait of a broken government in miniature:

 

Michelle’s company is a Rust Belt industrial concern that makes … let’s call it widgets. She is understandably worried about the vindictive character of the current administration and doesn’t want to be identified. I’ll share this much: She has a lot of clients, both in the private sector and in government, but her No. 1 client in any given year is one of the few federal agencies with which most Americans interact pretty much every day of their lives, and that agency simply cannot carry out its core mission without Michelle’s product or a workable substitute, which would have to be made to spec, as Michelle’s widget currently is. We aren’t talking about the assistant DEI specialist in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights here—we’re talking about a real factory that makes a real product, the absence of which Americans would—in a hurry!—notice.

 

Elon Musk and the rest of these DOGE schmucks are big on “efficiency”—it’s right there in the name!—but that’s mainly a matter of rhetoric. As Michelle and other government suppliers can attest, the Trump administration already has shown itself considerably slower and less competent than its predecessors (she’s been providing her product to the government for many years), which is not entirely surprising when you consider Trump’s penchant for filling leadership roles with people who may know a lot about hosting a weekend morning show (the secretary of defense) or managing a professional wrestling empire (the education secretary) but who don’t know the first thing about actually doing the job to which they have been appointed.

 

Michelle’s client typically ordered widgets on a roughly quarterly basis. And then came in the new secretary and the DOGE clowns, who had more important things to do than running the agency. And so she ended up getting a panicked call from the No. 2 guy in the department, telling her that they were down to their last couple of boxes of widgets and instructing her to “move heaven and earth”—at whatever cost—to get them some more. The problem was that they needed that product in a matter of days, while the agency is currently taking weeks or months to approve new purchase orders. Plus, some of the raw materials have a long lead time, taking additional weeks to procure, so Michelle usually needs four or five weeks to fill an order. “They were out of everything, so it was the biggest order they’d ever placed,” she says. “And they needed it in a week.” Michelle did a little old-fashioned scrambling and finagling to get the materials she needed from a supplier other than her usual one and got the agency those widgets post haste.

 

At which point the agency—utterly predictably, this being The Trump Show—refused to pay.

 

The agency refused to pay on the grounds that Michelle hadn’t followed the standard procurement process—even though making an end-run around the standard procurement process was the whole point of the exercise. That same No. 2 guy eventually reversed that decision, but then the agency started making different demands, for example asking for separate paperwork for the cost of transporting the product instead of the usual process of simply incorporating freight as a line item on the order. According to Michelle, the scuttlebutt was that the Cabinet secretary himself was personally reviewing all new purchase orders—which sounds like admirable dedication to the nuts and bolts of the agency, until you consider that a lot of these orders are for a few hundred dollars to a few thousand—hardly the stuff a Senate-confirmed appointee could not safely delegate.

 

At one point, Michelle had to list the government of the United States of America as a “delinquent” account and refuse to fill new orders—a first for the longtime supplier. Being delinquent on a bill would be nothing unusual for Donald Trump’s personal business operations, which were infamous for stiffing small businesses and mom-and-pop vendors while threatening to litigate them into insolvency if they demanded full payment—but this is the U.S. government. Under the Trump administration, Uncle Sam is a deadbeat. The overdue bill was eventually paid, months late, and subsequent bills have been paid late, too, though not as late.

 

Operations at the agency continue to move as though through molasses, with routine administrative work taking weeks where before it would have taken days, and with different ends of the agency giving contractors such as Michelle contradictory advice and direction.

 

And she’s preparing to go through another round of it, because while her supply chain is mostly U.S.-based, one of her major inputs comes from those nefarious … Canadians. That material will be subject to a tariff, which will be passed on to the client, meaning that the tax collectors will tax the taxpayers in order to pay the tax the tax collectors are collecting from … themselves, like something from a William Gaddis novel. But, of course, Michelle doesn’t know what the price is going to be, and neither do her suppliers, and, hence, neither do her clients, because nobody knows what the tariff is actually going to be. Trump simply changes his mind from day to day, and Congress apparently has decided that the president gets to be the national sales tax dictator.

 

“I get my tariff news from X,” she says. “So, who knows? I’m just tearing my hair out and drinking martinis at night.”