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 WASHINGTON — In its efforts to identify and eliminate waste in the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced today that it could not physically locate a single chief warrant officer to fire. “We’ve been told that chief warrant officers were among the most inefficient of all government employees,” said DOGE department head Elon Musk. “But our initial research into the matter has cast their very existence into doubt.” Musk said his team searched bases, offices, and housing units across all U.S. military services, but they were unable to find a single chief warrant officer or even anybody who could confirm they’d seen one. “You can’t fire me if you can’t find me,” read a note at the bottom of a coffee mug at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, allegedly belonging to Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dennis Perrault, but which members of the unit say has been sitting on his desk “at least since the Gulf War.” The topic of chief warrant officer inefficiency has been controversial among policy experts. Some argue that chief warrant officers are among the most efficient employees in the federal government, while others claim they don’t exist at all. “We have archaeological evidence, in the form of old packages of cigarettes and their hats, that chief warrant officers may have shown up to the office at some point in history,” said Army historian David Bilbrough. “It is theoretically possible they could have performed work in some form, although it might not be something we would recognize as ‘work’ in the modern sense.” The standard formula for calculating efficiency is output divided by input, multiplied by 100, said Bilbrough. Given that a typical chief warrant officer’s input, or effort expended, would be an infinitesimally small number, if one were to produce a miniscule amount of output – say, an email or a salute – then their efficiency would approach 100 percent. “Contrast this with your typical GS-14,” Bilbrough said, “who is just zeroes all around.” While DOGE has not yet been officially created, its efforts to find and eliminate inefficient chief warrant officers have already experienced hundreds of millions of dollars and years of cost and schedule overruns, respectively. Adding to its troubles, Musk and co-department head Vivek Ramaswamy have noticed that their desire to do any sort of work has disappeared since they became federal employees. Ramaswamy has been out of office since Donald Trump announced him as co-leader of DOGE. His Outlook out-of-office message gives no indication of when he’ll return or who to contact in his absence. Similarly, Musk’s USAJobs application for the position mysteriously disappeared. He won’t be able to formally take the helm until human resources reposts the advertisement on USAJobs and completes the hiring process, which will take at least another 18 to 24 months. “I hope you inefficient government employees know that we’re coming for you just as soon as I return from an indefinite number of days of use-or-lose leave,” read Ramaswamy’s out-of-office message. At press time, DOGE announced it would be contracting out all of its work to Booz Allen Hamilton. Cat Astronaut is a demobilized mobile infantryman and the creator of medieval and fantasy satire site Ye Olde Tyme News. Bull Winkle contributed reporting.
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