Extremely Powerful Men Who Can’t Be Arsed

I guess we got the government we deserved.

The British have a great bit of slang, “can’t be arsed,” which basically means “can’t be bothered to try.”

I thought about that phrase after reading about the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The outlet NOTUS reported that the report’s 500+ citations “are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions,” and that “Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.”

These weren’t minor errors:

Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”

In follow-up work, The Washington Post published strong evidence that at least some of these errors were due to the MAHA team’s use of AI. In all likelihood, someone on the commission used AI to gather citations in support of certain claims, didn’t notice when the AI hallucinated papers that don’t exist (which, ask any researcher, is something chatbots do constantly), and then cited those papers.

This would have been a supremely easy error to prevent. You can check whether a paper exists simply by googling its title. If it exists, it will almost always show up in the journal in which it was published and/or an academic research database or three. But if you google the paper “Direct-to-consumer advertising and the rise in ADHD medication use among children,” for example, all you’ll find are links to either the MAHA report itself, or to coverage about the fact that it includes false and misrepresented citations.

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Kennedy Jr.’s truly embarrassing performance here reminded me of another MAGA iconoclast: former DOGE head Elon Musk, who is now out of government, trailed by questions about his drug use and family drama. As I wrote in The Dispatch in March (or here for paid Singal-Minded subscribers), part of what made his role as the budget-cut czar so galling was his complete lack of interest in learning the first thing about the federal government, how it works, and what can safely be cut.

As I wrote:

As soon as Elon Musk wandered into this new area, which is in many ways far more complicated than any of his prior endeavors, he came across like an overconfident child. Even his early promise, that he would cut $2 trillion from the budget in a single year (later downgraded to $1 trillion), betrayed astonishing ignorance of the basic contours of the issue, like a basketball neophyte going on ESPN and predicting Victor Wembanyama will average 60 points per game next season.

That’s how we’ve arrived at where we are: Elon Musk doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and doesn’t show any interest in wanting to know what he doesn’t know. He didn’t see the need to bring in any actual experts who could explain the intricacies of federal budgeting to him. You can only make mistakes as obvious as announcing an $8 billion cut to an agency whose entire budget is $8.7 billion if no one on your team has any clue what they’re doing.

The New York Times, a couple months later: “The cuts he wanted to enact were far more difficult than he expected and his lack of interest in learning more about the bureaucracy he considered toxic impeded his efforts, particularly on Capitol Hill, according to people familiar with his efforts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.”

Elon Musk’s disinterest in learning the first thing about government, combined with his enthusiasm for performatively cutting the parts of it that irked him politically (in at least some cases because he has become a deranged conspiracy theorist), led him to eviscerate USAID, and to brag about it on Twitter:

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone [sic] to some great parties.

Did that instead.

This decision led and will continue to lead to a heartbreaking amount of suffering and death — to children and babies dying because they were cut off from access to, for example, U.S.-provided peanut paste (cost: $1 a day). One statistical model published by a Boston University public health researcher projects that Musk’s cuts will cause hundreds of thousands of child deaths. I have not looked closely into that model, but let’s say its estimate of 300,000 is off by a massive amount and Musk’s actions only led to 75,000 deaths. Was it worth it?

I don’t think Elon Musk woke up one day and decided to starve some Yemeni children to death. Rather, I think he couldn’t be arsed to learn the details of what he was doing, and instead succumbed to conspiracy theories about USAID (the drug use can’t have helped here), until he really did convince himself USAID was “a criminal organization” that needed to “die.” (I shouldn’t even need to note here that of course an organization as large as USAID is going to have some waste, fraud, and abuse, but the extent of this appears to have been massively overstated by its critics, at least as far as what has been proven after a period of immense scrutiny on the organization.)

Similarly, I don’t think RFK Jr. or his underlings woke up one day and decided to lard their big report with fake citations. Rather, they couldn’t be arsed to do the most basic fact-checking work. Motivated reasoning is probably a partial explanation for both outcomes. In much the same way Musk probably didn’t see a need to look carefully at what he was cutting because he “knew” (from the psychotic accounts he follows on X) that it was a woke Marxist criminal organization, since RFK Jr. already “knew” certain things about the threats to children’s health, the report was window dressing, not a substantive attempt to better understand a complex issue.

But at the end of the day, can’t-be-arsedness really is a cause of these outcomes. And this gets to one of the (many) dangers of MAGA’s burn-it-all-down ethos. Yes, career government workers and bureaucrats often screw up, often do bad things, and are themselves responsible for myriad horrors. But there is a very large and important difference between someone who has familiarity with institutions, and who has the executive function to sit down and write (or supervise) a decently competent research publication — including, yes, having someone check the citations — and someone who doesn’t. In short, some people can be arsed and others can’t — a distinction that transcends left-right ideology.

Explaining to people why government is important and worth protecting is a major challenge, especially when the government in question is as large, decentralized (when it comes to state and local decisions), and frequently dysfunctional as ours. But Trump was not shy about his lack of interest in putting qualified people in positions of power on the campaign trail. This did not deter voters, and here we are, with profoundly important decisions being made by extremely powerful men who can’t be arsed.

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Questions? Comments? Predictions about how much I will be arsed in my future newsletters? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on X at @jessesingal. Image: Elon Musk (L) holds a chainsaw alongside Argentine president Javier Milei during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025. The chainsaw was a present to Elon Musk from Argentina’s President Javier Milei. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)