(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute medical advice on the part of Newsmax.)
It's gratifying to see President-elect Donald Trump nominate Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
This department, even in an ex-officio role, can be a game-changer for America’s future.
In this new spirit of serious re-examination of how our country spends its money and sets its priorities, it's important to raise key questions involving areas of government inefficiency and profligacy that I've personally witnessed, for years.
Fully understanding where our government lacks efficiency and genuine purpose will help improve key government services to us.
We can also learn (by exposing) those who were responsible for less than meritorious service to the people, from our government.
Why did we fail for over 20 years to achieve a clear victory over the Taliban, despite the enormous difference in power and resources between us and them?
Why did we permit the Taliban to resume controlling Afghanistan in the same barbaric manner as they did before we invaded and attempted to defeat them?
Why did we spend trillions of dollars to fight Islamic jihadists when we could have spent a tiny fraction of such money to effectively defeat their ideology and cure the world of this disease?
The latter approach — defeating the ideology of Jihadism — could have saved many lives and huge amounts of money, money that could have been directed toward developing better technology to improve lives.
Instead, we wasted enormous resources attacking the symptom of the disease (terrorism) rather than treating the cause (radical Islamic ideology).
This does not in any way underestimate the occasional need for targeted military operations against militant jihadists.
Why has the U.S. government failed to adopt clear metrics to measure the extent and spread of radical Islam?
Was this to avoid measuring the efficiency of the approaches employed to ensure continued funding for the various entities involved?
Adopting clear metrics could at least guide the effectiveness of our strategic communications in this matter.
I have developed such a system: ABC's Test for Radical Islam by CI Centre Professor Dr. Tawfik Hamid.
Referring again to Afghanistan, why did we withdraw in such a humiliating way when we could have launched an effective PSYOP (Psychological Operations) to end the war with dignity, victory, as well as verifiable hope for the future of the Afghan people?
Our dismal failure in this case only worked to the advantage of all of America’s enemies.
Moving to a different topic, why did Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not insist on performing successful double-blind, controlled studies on wearing masks and stay-home- approach as he did with using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Dr. Fauci simply rejected HCQ on the basis that it did not have successful double-blind, controlled studies to prove its effectiveness in coronavirus, and at the same time forced us on wearing masks and stay-home-approach without having double-blind, controlled studies showing their effectiveness.
Why did Dr. Fauci fail to end the stay-at-home approach despite clear evidence that death rates from coronavirus in heavily infected areas were higher among those who stayed at home compared to those who did not?
Even though the United States has spent more money on health than all other nations, why are are we one of the worst in terms of deaths-per-million from the coronavirus?
For example, U.S. deaths per million from the pandemic were more than 3500, while India’s rates from the same virus were fewer than 500.
Was this because the Indian government distributed millions of hydroxychloroquine tablets as part of its COVID-19 relief program?
Despite not knowing the long-term side effects of the Covid-19 vaccine, why did we attempt to force it on our people?
Would it not have been wiser to temporarily recommend using the vaccine only to the most vulnerable groups while we intensely studied the medicine’s effectiveness and possible dangerous side effects?
Why does our Food and Drug Administration insist on using substances like starch as a placebo instead of natural remedies to compare their effectiveness to pharmaceutical medications?
A placebo is an inert treatment or procedure used in clinical trials to determine whether changes to participants result from an actual treatment or occur by chance.
On yet another topic, we continue spending hundreds of millions of dollars on organizations such as the UNRWA.
Again questions.
The UNRWA has never adopted policies to promote the peaceful coexistence of the Palestinians and other groups with Israel?
Giving money to UNRWA without requiring educational programs that promote peace and tolerance has been a total waste of our resources and harmful to the Israel and its people.
I sincerely hope that the patriots serving in this new and unusual federal agency will address these questions and place our country on the road to a better and much more efficient future.
Dr. Hamid is a physician and a former Islamic radical. He is the author of Inside Jihad: How Radical Islam Works, Why It Should Terrify Us, How to Defeat It. He is also the creator and host of the YouTube medical education channel Medlearn. Read more of Dr. Tawfik Hamid — Here.
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