Elon Musk is not an idiot.

“Look it up,” Andy Harris said, “in the dictionary.”

That was one of the many things I learned from the Eastern Shore congressman’s tele-town hall last week. He said 10,000 people called in, and Andy, who has been avoiding in-person town halls, had us right where he wanted us.

The hour was chock-full of tidbits, all of them straight from the world according to Andy and direct to you and me.

“You’re on the tele-town hall,” the Republican greeted selected callers.

Andy told me that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has exposed massive fraud in the Social Security Administration.

Did you know a 300-year-old person is getting benefits? Outrageous!

How is that possible? Roll out the guillotine for those darn bureaucrats!

Oh, wait!

“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Acting Social Security Commissioner Lee Dudek squeaked.

Next on the tele-town hall ...

Did you know that President Bill Clinton laid off 377,000 federal employees? Yeah, Andy said, and Vice President Al Gore was the hatchet man!

That Al Gore. I’ma bust him a fat lip.

Andy, thanks for explaining this. Where was the outrage back then?

It’s proof that the lame-stream media is creating fake news and astroturfing protests to prevent the right-sizing of government through firing, rehiring and eventual re-firing all those lazy Deep Staters.

Take a breath.

Clinton and Gore launched the National Performance Review two months after taking office in 1992, and studied the federal government as part of Clinton’s pledge to balance the budget.

The results led Congress to pass the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, a bipartisan agreement to prune the workforce. It initially offered $25,000 buyouts to more than 250,000 managers and higher-level officials.

By the end of Clinton’s second term, the head of the agency set up to oversee the buyouts estimated that 426,200 jobs were cut.

The current indiscriminate job-slashing has no congressional vote behind it. That’s why the courts keep hitting pause.

With Trump seeking to raise the debt ceiling and cut more taxes, it’s hard to argue the spending cuts are tied to balancing the budget.

Welcome to the tele-town hall!

Andy told me the Small Business Administration made $330 million in fraudulent loans, some to people who claimed to be 115 years old.

Oooh, Andy. That makes me so mad!

Hold up, now.

A 2023 report by the SBA Inspector General revealed that $200 million out of $1.2 trillion in emergency business loans issued during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be fraudulent.

“The agency weakened or removed the controls necessary to prevent fraudsters from easily gaining access to these programs and provide assurance that only eligible entities received funds,” the report says. “However, the allure of ‘easy money’ in this pay and chase environment attracted an overwhelming number of fraudsters to the programs.”

The program was created during Trump’s first term.

In January, the once-and-future president fired at least 12 inspectors general, including SBA IG Hannibal Ware. Kinda mixed message on fraud and waste.

This is the Andy Harris tele-town hall. Go ahead, caller.

The federal government is too generous, Andy said, with your tax dollars for health research.

All those grants being cut by DOGE? It’ll be fine.

Rich guys try to buy their way into heaven with grants, but limit them to covering only 15% of indirect costs. The National Institutes of Health covers up to 60%, negotiating the cap with individual institutions like the Johns Hopkins University.

If that money were pushed out to other researchers, imagine what we could do!

Andy was a research doctor, so why would he make that up?

About that.

Andy Harris wanted to head the NIH.

He told Trump 1.0 that he was the right man for the job, with plans to cut overhead, lower the minimum age for grants, limit spending on indirect costs, focus on specific diseases and generally shake things up.

“I have conducted both clinical research and basic science research. And I have the background in the political arena to understand how funding occurs, how policies can change in new directions, and how reform can be accomplished,” he told the newsletter ScienceInsider in 2016.

Those indirect costs he complains about keep the world’s best research labs going for multiple researchers, including the ones at Johns Hopkins, where Harris proudly says he once worked.

Researchers quietly opposed Harris for the NIH job, questioning whether a man who studied the use of anesthetics in fetal sheep had, you know, the vision thing.

Hello, welcome to the tele-town hall.

Cutting taxes increases tax revenues. It’s magic.

Presto, Andy, change-o!

Spoiler alert.

The Laffer Curve, a theoretical model of economics long embraced by tax-averse conservatives, suggests an optimal tax rate where revenue is maximized. Beyond that, higher rates can lead to reduced revenue due to decreased economic activity.

It hasn’t road-tested well.

Back in the Reagan years, believers called it supply-side economics. George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics” before sticking a pin in himself to become Ronald Reagan’s vice president.

Cultural insensitivity aside, that pretty much sums up what serious economists think

There’s plenty of evidence that the 2017 tax cuts up for renewal made revenues worse.

We’ve got time for one more caller at the tele-town hall.

Andy doesn’t represent Maryland. He said so. (Really, he did.)

The good voters of the 1st District elected him, and they voted overwhelmingly for the Deep State evisceration of Donald Trump.

From Andy’s lips to God’s ears.

Wow.

He’s right — most of the counties within his district voted for Trump.

And he does represent his constituents, if you slice off the three counties where the vote was within a 5-point margin.

We should remember this the next time Harris talks about what Marylanders need in Annapolis.

Next up, tele-town hall Tuesday!