They Blew Your Money, DOGE Exposed It

Our money funded DEI scholarships in Burma, a study on lizards being blown off trees with leaf blowers, a bearded ladies cabaret show, circumcisions in Mozambique, and smart toilets.

As it turns out, it’s still there.

Of all the tea I could have chosen to write about, I decided to focus on DOGE.

Truth be told, I’m obsessed with the “unpresidented” bromance between Trump and Elon Musk, and I wake up every morning like a kid looking for the elf on the shelf to see what ridiculous things our government purchased with our lawfully stolen tax dollars. (I also wake up each morning hoping that today is the day that Trump will abolish the IRS.)

If you want to know what our government has really been up to and what DOGE uncovered while we were sleeping, keep reading.

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We’re only one month into President Donald Trump’s second term, and the literal swamp is draining at the speed of a Category 5 hurricane. This endeavor wasn’t a haphazard effort—it was a meticulously planned, strategically executed offensive against the bloated bureaucracy that has been bleeding taxpayers dry. The revelations so far are nothing short of staggering.

Political ideology aside, most reasonable people don’t like having their hard-earned money stolen and wasted on nonsense—unless, of course, you are a Congressman reaping the benefits or an insider profiting from the grift.

Nobody goes to work each day hoping the asinine amount of money they have to pay to their government in taxes goes toward “Diversity Equity Inclusion” (DEI) scholarships in Burma (a country in Southeast Asia), securing Paraguay’s border, a Harvard study on lizards being blown off trees with leaf blowers, a bearded ladies cabaret show on ice focused on climate change, voluntary circumcisions in Mozambique, or a study on ‘smart toilets’ that recognize the user’s ‘anal print.’

Enter DOGE—the “Department of Government Efficiency.” In just four weeks, this initiative, led by Elon Musk, owner of X and founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and countless other companies, has uncovered and dismantled some of the most wasteful, nonsensical, and downright ridiculous spending projects Washington has been dumping our tax dollars into.

And the Democrats’ response? Well, if you thought they’d take a moment of self-reflection, you’d be sorely mistaken. Instead, they’re clutching their pearls, crying about extremism, and fighting tooth and nail to keep the cash flowing to their pet projects—despite the fact that the American people overwhelmingly voted for this.

Let’s take a moment to look at where our money was actually going before DOGE entered the chat, shall we?

Within five minutes of hitting the scene, DOGE revealed that ten million dollars in taxpayer funds were spent creating transgender mice, rats, and monkeys, and another million was spent to find out if these “transgender rats” would overdose on date rape drugs.

More than two million dollars was awarded to pay for “gender-affirming care” in Guatemala. While millions of Americans struggled under Biden’s inflation, Washington elites thought it was a great idea to send your tax dollars to fund gender transition surgeries and hormone therapies in Central America. Because, apparently, that’s a top national priority. DOGE, of course, shut it down, and Democrats had a meltdown.

According to them, cutting this funding is hateful. Imagine living in a world where the government of the United States owes Guatemalans taxpayer-funded gender transitions but doesn’t owe its own citizens secure borders or an economy that doesn’t crush the middle class.

As if taxpayer-funded gender transitions in Guatemala weren’t bad enough, DOGE also exposed millions of dollars being funneled into absurd cultural programs overseas. For example, under Biden, the State Department thought it was a great idea to fund drag shows in Ecuador as part of an initiative to promote “diversity and inclusion” abroad. Evidently, what struggling American families really needed was for their hard-earned money to bankroll gender-bending cabaret performances in South America.

DOGE further revealed that $47 million was spent to “improve learning outcomes” in Asia while American students fell further behind, $20 million was handed to Iraq for Sesame Street programming, $1.5 million went to Liberia to boost “voter confidence,” $101 million was wasted on 29 DEI contracts, and $100 million was funneled into condom distribution in Gaza, which reports suggest was repurposed by Hamas to make bombs.

But that’s not all. DOGE uncovered millions sent to Pakistan to fund “gender studies programs” aimed at promoting feminism and LGBTQ+ activism. While American veterans went homeless and inflation crushed the middle class, Washington elites decided Pakistan needed a crash course in gender theory—courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were also used to rent the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan to house illegal migrants, proving once again that non-citizens were a higher priority to the previous administration than the people footing the bill.

As DOGE peeled back the layers of wasteful government spending, one agency kept appearing at the center of the grift…

Why Dictators Fail (I just hoped we'd have a bit longer)

Every dictatorship starts as a fantasy.

A population enveloped by problems beyond its control desperately seeks a daddy-figure to make everything right again. They cling to soundbites and bullshit, convincing themselves that they be true. In these environments, arrogance outmuscles rationality, so those pointing to evidence or logic are left behind.

It’s childish. Reminds me of the nonsensical promises teens make when running for class president. Remember Summer Wheatley’s speech from Napoleon Dynamite?

I would make a great class president because I promise to put two new pop machines in the cafeteria, and I’m also gonna get a glitter Bonne Bell dispenser for all the girls’ bathrooms. Oh, and we’re gonna get new cheerleading uniforms. Anyway, I think I’d be a great class president. So, who wants to eat chimichangas next year? Not me. See, with me it will be summer all year long. Vote for Summer.

Change a few words and these tricks work just as well with the unwashed masses. Unfortunately, unlike high school the consequences are disasterous – especially, when checks and balances are dismantled by dictators.

Dictators will promise anything to get into power. Once unrestrained, they are reckless, paranoid, and more focused on holding onto power than governing well.

Dictators don’t answer to anyone. They replace competent officials with loyalists. They rule by fear. They rarely step down voluntarily. Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years before rebels dragged him out of a drainage pipe and shot him. The Kim dynasty in North Korea clings to power by isolating their people from the outside world. When dictators fall, they take their countries down with them.

I started this article researching examples of successful dictatorships, economically and socially. “Success” is subjective, but one could argue China over the past 25 years has made significant economic and social progress, despite (or because of?) it’s political structure. Clearly most dictatorships don’t share this degree of success.

As I did my research, what I started to find common reasons why most dictatorships cannot succeed. Structurally, its almost impossible for this type of system to last. I consolidated these findings into three broad themes, which I share below.

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” — Attributed to Joseph Stalin

1) They Rule by Fear, Not Competence

Dictators fear opposition, since opposition risks displacing their power. So they surround themselves with yes-men, marginalizing – often by imprisonment or execution – those with contradictory views. Given the the consequences of speaking up, facts, intelligence, and information is suppressed in favor of alignment.

Valuing loyalty over competence, they weaken both their government and country.

Stalin’s Great Purge (1936-1938) was a masterclass in self-destruction. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Stalin used it as an excuse to purge rivals. He had 700,000 people executed and sent millions to the Gulag. The NKVD, his secret police, tortured people into confessing to imaginary crimes. He purged military officers, leaving the Red Army weakened before World War II. His paranoia crippled his own government, ensuring that survival – not effectiveness – became the priority.

When competence isn’t protected, as it is in a democracy, a country becomes vulnerable economically and militarily.

2) They Destroy Their Own Economies

Dictators promise economic miracles, but they usually end up making things worse. Without accountability, they make reckless choices. Corruption runs rampant. Mismanagement turns prosperity into collapse.

Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward to rapidly industrialize China. He forced millions of peasants to stop farming and work on backyard steel furnaces, which produced useless metal. Meanwhile, collective farms had to meet impossible grain quotas, and local officials, afraid of punishment, lied about production numbers. The government took food that didn’t exist, leaving millions to starve. Mao’s policies killed 30 to 45 million people. Instead of admitting failure, he launched the Cultural Revolution, purging intellectuals and wrecking institutions.

Nicolás Maduro turned Venezuela, once one of the richest oil nations, into a failed state. He seized businesses, set price controls that discouraged production, and printed massive amounts of money to cover deficits. Inflation skyrocketed past 1,000,000%, wiping out savings. Basic goods became luxuries. Over seven million people fled. Instead of fixing the economy, he jailed opponents and crushed protests.

Similar to point #1, in a country where competence is suppressed the leader can do no wrong. They overestimate their planning prowess, and start fiddling with things instead of allowing economies to operate organically.

3) They Start Wars They Can’t Win

Dictators need enemies. It distracts from their failures and rallies their people. Just look how quickly US tariffs imposed on Canada rallied the Canadian people around a common cause. Dictators use that to their advantage.

Wars require strategy and resources, and dictators often have neither.

For example, despite early successes, Hitler pursued an expansionist vision that was doomed to fail by his own arrogance.

Early in the war, Blitzkrieg tactics crushed Poland, France, and much of Europe. But Germany relied on quick victories and couldn’t sustain a long war. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he underestimated Soviet resistance. He expected a swift collapse, but the Soviets had manpower, brutal winters, and an industrial base far from the front lines. Then he declared war on the U.S., bringing the world’s largest economy into the fight. Germany couldn’t match Allied production. His refusal to retreat or adapt sealed his fate. Like most dictators, he valued loyalty over competence, and that ensured his downfall.

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” — Winston Churchill

How the U.S. Is Following the Authoritarian Playbook

Dictatorships sometimes work in the short term. They promise order, discipline and reforms that benefit the public. That is their appeal. But absolute power breeds corruption, fear, and incompetence.

Democracy isn’t perfect, but it’s the only system that allows for self-correction. Leaders come and go. Power shifts peacefully. People have a say. Dictatorships promise stability, but history shows they always end in collapse.

Sadly, the U.S. has been following the footsteps of many failed states.

Non-partisan civil servants, military leaders, and supreme court justices are being replaced with loyalists. Cabinet members and party representatives are captured by group think, with little room for unaligned views. This was plain to see in yesterday’s State of the Union address.

Overall, competence is being replaced with obedience. We’ve seen how this plays out. This is the same playbook dictators use – gutting institutions, consolidating power, and justifying it with promises of restoring greatness, eliminating enemies, and enforcing order.

We are abandoning facts and discourse, and accelerating the destruction of our planet and civilization. The loudest voice wins, and no right-leaning politician would dare push back on plans to ban the words “climate change” or to end environmental regulations. Rather, we’re at the stage where plutocrats count their money as the world burns.

I have long predicted the polycrisis, like other crises before, would trigger the rise of authoritarianism. It’s just sad to see it play out so predictably, as everyone cheers.

Like those preceding it, this is bound to fail. Unfortunately, it’ll take the rest of the world with it. Perhaps this was the final inescapable death blow – the planet in crisis was going to off us either way. I just hoped we’d have a bit longer.

I also invite you to take a look at this site- www.whatfinger.com

Bird Flu: Canada Buys 500,000 H5N1 Vaccines While USA Scrambles to Rehire Bird Flu Staff That Was 'Accidentally Fired' At The Urgings of Dodgy DOGE Officials.

According to a report in the BMJ online news journal, Canada has bought half a million vaccines designed to prevent H5N1 avian influenza in humans. The Canadian government finds it necessary to vaccinate persons working close to sources of possible infection, such as farm workers, medical staff and veterinarians. Some of the doses are held in store as a contingency while most are distributed for immediate local use. The vaccine is produced by traditional influenza techniques and was approved in Canada on 19 February, when the order was then immediately placed. According to the report, experts fear that Canada is at danger when migratory birds return from their southern winter grounds and are expected to carry new mutations of bird flu virus. Canada has already seen infection, illness and death caused by this type of bird flu virus that can infect cattle, cats or other mammals. Vira are constantly mutating and once the bird flu has broken the barrier to mammals, it is getting close to infecting humans, which has already occurred, as mentioned.

Five years after the first patients in Europe were diagnosed with Covid-19, scientists are worried about if the World is prepared for the next similar pandemic. Last time, the president of USA was also called Trump and the response was clumsy and non-existent in the beginning.

Electron microscopic image of Avian Influenza A H5N1 virus particles (seen in gold). CDC/ Courtesy of Cynthia Goldsmith; Jacqueline Katz; Sherif R. Zaki. Public domain

Because of the many cuts in scientific research grants and government health supervision, the next global pandemic is likely to spread from the United States. The mutations stem from anywhere but highly dependent on favorable conditions, such as negligent management of the risks of mixing different animals in limited space like on farms. Ignorant politicians and politicized health services fuel a fire in the undergrowth that can break out in open flames any time soon. Unless the current administration is cut short in its term, there is a near 100% likelihood that the pandemic will break out an get out of control during the term of this administration. The rest of the World must prepare measures to rein in the contagion and all the appropriate counter measures.

Preparation for the next pandemic: challenges in strengthening surveillance

For the preparation for future epidemics and pandemics, vaccine development is important in the prevention of infection, transmission, and reduction in the severity of disease in case of infection, such as in the case of influenza and COVID-19. Moreover, adequate supply of oxygen, drugs for symptom control (antipyretics) and immunomodulation (steroid) could also play an important role. Vaccines, especially those with mucosal protection, may halt further transmission of the pathogen when given during outbreaks, Therefore, versatile vaccine platforms and sufficient vaccine production facilities which have the surge capacity to produce timely amounts of vaccines or replenish stockpiles may be crucial to control the spread of potential emerging pandemics.

Another scientific article, from 2022, examines the botched response by the then Trump administration and indirectly issues some strong warnings about what might happen next time, which is what Trump-2 will respond or not respond with:

The Trump Administration and the COVID‐19 crisis: Exploring the warning‐response problems and missed opportunities of a public health emergency

Parker CF, Stern EK. Public Adm. 2022 Mar 29:10.1111/padm.12843. doi: 10.1111/padm.12843. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35601345; PMCID: PMC9115435.

Once China informed the world of a disease outbreak on December 31, 2019, the Trump Administration’s response was marked by downplaying the threat, inaction or partial measures, confusion, and inaccurate public statements. As a result, opportunities to slow the spread by facilitating a vigorous public health response of containment and suppression based on testing, contact tracing, and isolation were missed following the confirmation of the first US case on January 21, 2020. After banning foreign nationals from entering the US, if they had been in China in the prior 2 weeks, on January 31, an apparently overconfident Trump Administration was blindsided by the rapid community outbreak of COVID‐19, necessitating a declaration of a national emergency on March 13, 2020. At that time, the federal government remained unable to help states carry out widespread testing—despite Trump’s false claims that anyone who wanted a test could get one—and had not addressed the expected massive shortfalls of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators.

A week ago, the US Department of Agriculture implicitly announced that the non-agency, non-Musk led DOGE had fired much needed bird flu experts, and the the agency was bravely fighting to find them and rehire them.

CBS News:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it is trying to rehire bird flu experts that the agency accidentally fired as part of its efforts to cut costs based on recommendations from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Given the track record or lack of the same, we can expect that other agencies are in similar situations, or even worse. Vaccines are actively suppressed by both Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who recently ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to halt its “Wild to Mild” campaign promoting the flu vaccine. Kennedy wants future vaccine communications to focus on “informed consent,” by which he means giving people information about the adverse events associated with vaccines. 

That’s a distorted view, that deliberately aims at creating broader confusion about informed consent and the goals of public health. True informed consent requires an sophisticated approach to how risk information is processed, especially because vaccination is a collective benefit that goes even beyond national responsibilities. USA may become a risk factor to the global community when pursuing this approach.

I also invite you to take a look at this site- www.whatfinger.com

America: Gone Forever (There is no return from what's happening)

I didn’t write this. But it was too good not to share.

It explains why the concept of America is almost, if not already, dead. Assuming there’s a 2028 election, there’s no fixing the damage to America’s internal capabilities and international standing.

Here’s the full commentary by Reddit user r/Some-band2225:

Things really are bad. It’s different from last time. The damage being done here is permanent for a few reasons.

* Loss of institutional capabilities. When you completely close down a thing then there’s a knock-on effect down the road, you can’t simply change your mind and reopen it in four years. Take something like foreign policy analysts at the CIA, junior analysts spend a decade working within an existing structure, learning skills, making contacts in their area, integrating with the wider intelligence ecosystem. If you shut a division down because you find what they’re saying to be politically inconvenient then the next administration can’t simply reopen it, the staff have moved on, the relationships no longer exist, the skill base has been lost. They’re doing this with water management, disease control, disaster response, agricultural planning, FDA enforcement, CPFB, the weather service, NASA, cyber security, intelligence, basically all the things that we take for granted that the gov does.

* Loss of economic/social infrastructure. Basically the same as above but from an economic/social lens. If you cut off government benefits, or just close an air base, from an area then the Walmart serving that community closes. The next administration may restore benefits but the Walmart isn’t going to reopen, not when they might find themselves closing again two years later. And the employees will likely have left the area anyway, there’s only so long people can stay in areas without jobs. Same with health clinics, community centers, schools, veterans services etc. Infrastructure grows organically over time in a stable environment, if you rip it out by the roots then you can’t simply replant it, the environment has been damaged.

* Loss of international economic partnerships/integration. More or less the exact same problem. The US has demonstrated that it is completely unwilling to abide by its agreements, even those written by the current president such as USMCA. Long term investments in infrastructure and strategic partnerships were built on the premise of stability, that what the government commits to doing is what it will do. You build a pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast because the relationship is stable. You specialize into your local economic strengths because your partners want what you can do and you want what they can do. That’s all fucked. It doesn’t matter whether Trump keeps deferring the Canada tariffs every 30 days for the next four years, it matters that America is unstable, that the administration won’t keep its word and won’t honor its agreements. People here who work in industry can tell you about the work they’ve had to do on supply chain crisis analysis. If you’re a Canadian company and you’re looking to buy something then you’re not going to accept the lowest cost bid if it’s from an American company because there’s no guarantee that they can actually provide the service in the future. If you’re an American processing company you’re not going to invest capital in expanding to process Canadian raw materials because your own government may interfere at random with zero notice and zero recourse to prevent you from purchasing them.

* Loss of international alliances. More or less the exact same problem. The US has demonstrated that it is completely unwilling to abide by its agreements. NATO is dead, the ironclad guarantee that the US is willing to intervene if a meter of NATO soil is invaded is gone. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, but if you’re planning for the survival of your nation as the Baltic states are then you can’t rely on a maybe. You have to assume the worst case scenario. And again, this is about long term planning, the next president can’t undo this and declare that everything is normal again now because the next president can’t speak for the one after them. When the US asks Denmark if they can build a base in Greenland for arctic operations then Denmark has to wonder if a subsequent president will use that base for operations against them. When an allied military plans their air defense strategy they have to consider if using patriot will allow a future administration to leverage the supply of air defense missiles to hurt them.

* Loss of international credibility. The US has historically kept deals made by former administrations, even if they don’t like them. Biden’s pullout of Afghanistan after Trump surrendered to the Taliban is an example of this. Trump may have undone 20 years of work and $2T of accumulated spending when he agreed to stop supporting the American backed Afghan government against the Taliban in exchange for also releasing thousands of Taliban fighters but the deal was signed. When you make a deal with the US then the US keeps that deal, there aren’t huge geopolitical reversals on a weekly basis. The next time a US president tells an aspiring nuclear pariah state that they’ll take off the sanctions if the nuclear pariah agrees to abandon their ambitions with inspections etc. then that pariah state knows that the sanctions may just come back on at random, whether they comply with the treaty or not. The US is simply unreliable.

* Loss of soft power/prestige. Canadians, the people who routinely show up for firefighting in US fires etc., are booing the US national anthem. Europe is viewing the US with a competing mixture of pity and naked contempt. The idea that the UK would follow the US into Iraq, as Blair followed Bush, is laughable today. A huge part of the American global hegemony was built on soft power, that if you turned against the US led world order then you wouldn’t just lose access to US tech/markets/financing, you’d lose access to Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Australian, European, Canadian ones too. There’s a network effect there that is a huge force multiplier. America’s allies can’t follow where America is leading, not when it’s random threats of invasion against Canada and surrendering to Putin. They certainly can’t cooperate on things like intelligence and security with Gabbard as NSA. The US has openly taken an adversarial stance against its own alliance structure and the next president can’t simply say “sorry” and undo that because they can’t speak for the one who comes after them.

* Loss of the rules based international order. The thing that has basically kept WW3 at bay is the general agreement that we don’t land grab anymore and so we don’t all need nukes. If a country tries to land grab then the response from the US and allies will smack them down in a way that makes that country lose and all other countries learn the lesson. Russia, which is still operating on a 19th C imperialist spheres of influence great power model, challenged the US and the US is now surrendering both Ukraine and the entire rules based international order. The taboo is broken. China can attack Taiwan. Russia can attack Estonia. Turkey can seize Greek Cyprus. Every nation that doesn’t have nukes is looking at their distance from a hostile imperialist power, which somehow now includes Canada looking at the US, and trying to decide if they need to get them. The odds of an uncontrollably escalating crisis descending into general war are higher than they’ve been since 1962 and there is absolutely no way to put the brakes on it. If you have young kids then the chance of them dying as young adults in a war has gone through the roof.

* Loss of social contract and values. As we’re discovering on a daily basis the main guardrail against doing things like simply ignoring Congress’s laws or openly taking money from undisclosed foreign sources as a government official is a culture of just not doing that. There’s nothing that actually stops you from doing it, you can absolutely threaten election officials personal consequences if they don’t fabricate the votes you need, but traditionally we’ve all agreed to just not do that. That’s built over generations, people in countries with high corruption aren’t somehow worse as people, they’re operating within a culture in which that’s the normal way of operating. If your boss is taking bribes then you take bribes, taking bribes is how he got enough money to make the appropriate bribes to become your boss, it’s the natural state of affairs. One of the great strengths of the US is that, by and large, Americans believe in the system they have built. They accept a judge’s verdict that they don’t like because they believe in the idea of nonpartisan justice. They accept laws they don’t agree with because those laws were created by a process that they believe in. That belief is intangible but it’s what keeps the whole thing from crashing down. And without wanting to sound too much like an internal auditor, tone at the top really matters for institutional culture. And once an institutional culture is broken it’s incredibly hard to repair it because the people who profit most under the broken system are those who keep abusing the system. If there is no punishment for bribery then the government contractors making the appropriate payments will absolutely outcompete the government contractors with the most efficient production line and the best product. This isn’t partisan either, we’re seeing it everywhere in America. Leftists cheering on the execution of a healthcare CEO is just as much a symptom of the damage that has been done to the belief in values underpinning America.

Even if you ignore the fact that senior DOGE staffers like Marko Elez are declaring on social media that “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.. You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Even if you ignore that all of our data is being handed over to unaccountable oligarchs. Even if you ignore the Nazi salutes. Even if you ignore the fact that the president is openly backing Russia over their own allies. Even if you refuse to accept the unapologetic pivot to a fascist Russian modeled mob kleptocracy, the US is fucked. For decades.

I also invite you to take a look at this site- www.whatfinger.com

Moving the US Navy in a Contingency

The Panama Canal – the Western Hemisphere’s vital maritime connection between the Atlantic and Pacific – currently commands levels of geopolitical attention not observed since President Carter negotiated the canal’s turnover to the Republic of Panama in the late 1970s. The United States retains strategic and economic interests in the canal, but the return of Great Power Competition has reinforced its importance to the US Navy and the joint force. No scenario better illustrates this importance than a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The White House has recently expressed concerns about a Chinese company operating ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. These hubs provide China with regional economic influence and could potentially serve as launch points for cyber and special operations against the Panama Canal in the event of a Taiwan invasion scenario. Should China successfully sabotage the canal or its operations, it could delay the movement of US forces into the Pacific and enable a fait acompli strategy to quickly seize Taiwan before the United States can halt an invasion.

Where in the world is the US Navy?

To understand the Panama Canal’s military significance, one must first understand the force laydown of the United States Navy. According to the homeport registry for Active and NRFA ships, the US Navy moors 248 hulls (including both surface vessels and submarines) across 25 homeports, as summarized in the table below.

Most ships are clustered in ports in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. In the event of a Taiwan contingency scenario, the most efficient route to the Western Pacific would encompass a journey through the Panama Canal for many of the ships stationed on the East Coast of the United States, with some exceptions. Notably, the five carrier strike groups stationed in Norfolk, Virginia would need to find an alternate route. Although the Panama Canal completed a massive capacity expansion in the last decade, its width still does not accommodate the flight decks of Ford and Nimitz-class carriers. Likewise, due to the sensitivity of their missions, SSBNs are unlikely to leverage the Panama Canal in crisis. After accounting for these constraints, I estimate that if responding to a contingency in Asia, approximately 69 US warships would need to pass through the Panama Canal to take the fastest route to the conflict theater. But what would happen if the fleet could not use it?

How might the loss of the Panama Canal affect the US Navy?

To understand the impact of a canal closure, I’ll analyze a scenario in which the US Navy moves the 69 ships that might reasonably traverse the canal in crisis from their homeports to the Philippine Sea. Using minimum-cost flow and shortest path algorithms, I’ll compare scenarios in which the Panama Canal and Suez Canal are unavailable to US forces to quantify the impact of a canal closure in terms of both total distance traveled and voyage days.

The model makes several assumptions:

1. All ships start at their homeports. In reality, the US Navy always has ships underway and forward deployed. However, because their locations change often and are not usually published, ships are modeled starting at their home ports.

2. All registered ships will be available, subject to the constraints on canal usage outlined above. This simplifying assumption ignores the fact that ships have a readiness cycle which includes dry dock (and the inability to get underway for its duration).

In the best-case scenario in the model, the Panama Canal and Suez Canal remain open to the US Navy. Under these conditions, the algorithm selects the shortest path from US homeport clusters to the Philippine Sea, with ships on the East and Gulf coasts traversing the Panama Canal into the Pacific. Where applicable, ships avoid non-permissive areas like the South China Sea and instead use an alternative route through the Timor Sea. In this best-case scenario, the fleet must sail approximately 3.07 million kilometers to get to the fight in the Philippine Sea.

In a scenario where the Suez Canal is denied, carrier strikes groups from Norfolk must sail around Africa to reach the Pacific Theater. This routing increases the total sailing distance to 3.16 million kilometers.

If the Panama Canal is denied but the Suez Canal remains open, the total distance sailed increases to 3.6 million kilometers. All US warships on the East and Gulf coasts route through the Mediterranean.

In a worst-case scenario with both the Suez and Panama canals closed, significant numbers of ships would need to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope to get to the fight. This transit increases the total sailing distance to 3.87 million kilometers. Interestingly, the Strait of Magellan is never a good option, though this result may not surprise any true mariner.

The table below captures the impact of the four route permutations described above on force closure distances in terms of total fleet kilometers traveled.

But might this impact force flow timelines?

The longer it takes for the United States to respond to Chinese aggression, the more time the People’s Liberation Army will have to gain a lodgement on Taiwan. The US Navy remains the critical combat force that can contest the invasion. Conducting a time-phased force deployment analysis further reveals how canal closures could impact US Navy ship arrival times in theater.

Assuming an average ship speed of 20 knots to account for port calls, resupply, and other delays, analysts can calculate a ship’s closure time from its homeport to the Philippine Sea along the optimal paths from above. For simplicity, I assume that all ships depart simultaneously, and no vessel breaks down on the way. Across the four scenarios outlined above, the fleet arrival times diverge on day 21 of the conflict.

If the US cannot use the Panama Canal, up to 30% of its fleet could be delayed. Even if both the Panama and Suez canals are usable, US forces in the Chinese weapon engagement zone may need to persist for 30-60 days without significant support as the fleet musters its assets for decisive action. Conversely, the loss of the Suez seems less critical to US naval mobility unless it is the only canal available.

What is Old is New Again: Grading US Posture for Conflict

In 1964, a great debate raged about the value of the Panama Canal in the nuclear age. In a contemporary column, the New York Times examined arguments that the canal’s military significance had waned in a world in which the United States possessed a two-ocean navy with enough ships to contest adversaries simultaneously in both theaters, even as the Soviets clearly sought to influence and control maritime chokepoints globally through subversion. We have entered a new era of Great Power competition and maritime chokepoints are definitively back in focus. Force closure logic should inform US policy and drive a closer relationship with Panama to ensure the security of the canal. The United States cannot take sea lanes for granted and no longer has a two-theater navy. Just as it has been for a century, the Panama Canal remains a lifeline that enables the United States to project power and protect its interests with maximum efficiency.