Burn it down and start from scratch? It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans do not know much about what their government does or why or who is in charge. Fewer than half can name all three branches of government. A quarter cannot name even one. Philip Bump wrote recently, “On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot.” But there is lots of governement waste, fraud, and abuse squirreled away somewhere that should be eliminated so we can lower taxes. They’re sure of that. Like this genius Vivek Ramaswamy who wants to eliminate 75% of career federal employees. People we’ve trained to know their jobs. People who know important shit most Americans aren’t even aware is being done. Yeah, those people have got to go. I sat down recently with a grade-school friend I had not seen since I was maybe 15. He was retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’d captained vessels and flown planes as part of the agency’s data-gathering efforts. I asked if he’d read “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis. There’s a long section on what NOAA does as part of the Department of Commerce (for some reason). He had not. I told him he should. “The Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Information,” Lewis writes, because its real function is information-gathering and storage. The problem is its name isn’t particularly…