Even DOGEraj Don T will be happy with this news. Because he has been proved right – yet again. It would also make the staff at POTUS’ favourite Department of Government Efficiency, with his favourite Tex-Tes-tech assistance at the helm, rub their hands with glee and opportunity. But the reason for such unadulterated happiness from the artful DOGErs isn’t in the US. It’s in our very own state of the union, Punjab. Earlier this month, we got to know that the AAP government of ‘Udta’ Punjab spent nearly 20 months assigning a minister, the fifth most senior in the state’s cabinet, no less, to a department that never existed.
If that isn’t peak DOGE dodging, we don’t know what is. The honourable minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal was in charge of ‘department of administrative reforms’, an entity that had, it turns out, never been created. No staff, no meetings, no paperwork. Nothing. For nearly two years, no one noticed.
After it surfaced, Dhaliwal was ‘stripped’ of the department and left with only the NRI affairs department, which – balle balle! – actually exists. Punjab basically admitted it was running a meme department. No files, no clerks, no pointless review meetings. Just a minister with a fancy title overseeing a bureaucratic black hole. And, somewhere, an imaginary undersecretary is still waiting for the first task to land on his phantom desk.
