2:00PM Water Cooler 2/12/2025: DOGEbags to Infest Entire Federal Government with Bolshevik-Style Parallel Party Structure

Bird Song of the Day

Patient readers, I apologize for the enormous typo. This is what I (and you) get then I deviate from my standard template. –lambert

Brown Thrasher, Sippo Lake–Exploration Gateway, Stark, Ohio, United States.

* * *

By Lambert Strether

There’s a quotation from John D. MacDonald’s Pale Grey for Guilt that I can’t find; of the villain, mild-mannered economist sidekick Meyer remarked (as my memory has it): “I seem to have taken a dislike to the fellow.” This Musk dude. It’s really too much. He’s ruined my timeline, and looks to ruin more than that. So I thought I would devote most of today’s Water Cooler Elon and his doings, especially DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), which has just ballooned in size, if not in stature, owing to a new Executive Order From Co-President Trump.

Readers will also notice that after decrying snark — and with much success, avoiding it — I have returned to my roots c. 2003, by inventing a term of abuse for a political opponent: DOGEbag. Nobody seems to know quite what to call the Elon’s callow lackeys at DOGE, so I thought I would step in. “Young, inexperienced engineers,” as Wired has it, is obviously far too polite. “DOGE kids” (LeMonde and “Kids of DOGE” (The Hill, aren’t nearly judgmental enough, leaving out the tantrums, testosterone-fueled nicknames, the casual law-breaking, and their angiogenic pathways to Thiel and his neoreactionary network. Sadly, “greasy beavises” is just too esoteric.

So, DOGEbag with the soft “g” (I mean, obviously), that being the dominant pronunciation, from the world of coins, but also with the hard: That is, a brownish bag in which one takes the leftovers home, there to be devoured by small animals (or left rotting in the fridge). Do feel free to propagate! (“But we’re rooting out fraud!” Oh? Where are the audit reports?)

And with that prolix introduction, on to the Executive Order, and as much demolition of Elon’s absurd and insulting meme-age as I can get to, because there’s a lot. I won’t be doing Covid today, and probably no other Water Cooler feature but the Birdsong and the (very lovely) Plant.

* * *

Trump’s Newest Executive Order

“Implementing The President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Workforce Optimization Initiative” [Whitehouse.gov]. Let’s start with Section 3:

Sec. 3. Reforming the Federal Workforce to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) Hiring Ratio. Pursuant to the Presidential Memorandum of January 20, 2025 (Hiring Freeze), the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall submit a plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition (Plan). The Plan shall require that each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart, consistent with the plan and any applicable exemptions and details provided for in the Plan.

Swell, except it makes no sense to take hire one employee for every four that depart for all agencies, because that penalizes lean agencies (say, Social Security) and allows bloated agencies (say, the Pentagon) to remain bloated. More:

(b) Hiring Approval. Each Agency Head shall develop a data-driven plan, in consultation with its DOGE Team Lead, to ensure new career appointment hires are in highest-need areas.

(i) This hiring plan shall include that new career appointment hiring decisions shall be made in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, consistent with applicable law.

(ii) The agency shall not fill any vacancies for career appointments that the DOGE Team Lead assesses should not be filled, unless the Agency Head determines the positions should be filled.

(iii) Each DOGE Team Lead shall provide the United States DOGE Service (USDS) Administrator with a monthly hiring report for the agency.

In other words, as far as hiring goes, the DOGE “Team Lead” is functionally the agency head. A stronger way of saying this is that the DOGE, essentially a party faction (despite its dubious status as a “temporary organization” in the Executive Office of the President) is both parallel and superior to the Executive Branch as provided for in Article II. Interestingly — and this speaks well of whatever the organizing entities behind DOGE have been — this is just what the Bolsheviks did, when they consolidated power in the Soviet Union, c. 1936:

Along with the state administrative hierarchy, there existed a parallel structure of party organizations, which allowed the Politburo to exercise large amounts of control over the republics. State administrative organs took direction from the parallel party organs, and appointments of all party and state officials required approval of the central organs of the party.

History doesn’t repeat…[1]. Do note that Trump’s expansion of DOGE cannot be based on any hard or performance-related data that any members of the public have been permitted to see (see below on DOGE’s site). That means — hold onto your hats here, folks — that this decision is (a) entirely political and (b) probably gamed out in advance.

NOTE

“The Policy and Regime of Extraordinary Measures in Russia under Lenin and Stalin” Europe-Asia Studies (1995). The term chrezvychaishchina is also suggestitive:

Elon Musk’s Many Careless Memes

The man is a posting machine:

Despite being controlling six companies and sharing the Presidency with Trump, Elon seems never to sleep! Perhaps some shareholder could ask him about that. Be that as it may, the trade-off between quantity and quality is pretty clear in the following examples…

DOGE’s Website

Here it is:

Elon Musk to reporter: “We post our actions to the DOGE website. All our actions are maximally transparent. I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”

Here’s the https://t.co/qX0KHBxdq2 website—it’s literally a blank page! pic.twitter.com/K2xjGBSmoa

— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) February 11, 2025

That was February 11. The Department of Government Efficiency — replete as it is with Silicon Valley brain geniuses — can’t throw together a site overnight? Here is is, you try it:

The DOGE website is so transparent it’s like there’s nothing there! But wait, it gets better. I have helpfully highlighted the tagline: “An official website of the United States government” Here’s how a real government department does it:

Three parts: (1) The flag, (2) the tagline, and (3) the “Here’s how you know” link. That’s how the State Department, The Health and Human Services Department, and the Defense Department all do it. The DOGEbags copied only the text, part 2 (or maybe their AI did, I don’t know), and not the flag (they must hate our country) or “Here’s how you know” (of course, with DOGE, you never do know, so maybe that’s fair). “Details count.” –Peter Wrinberger, Bell Labs. Cf. Luke 16:10. NOTE The IRS uses (1) and (2), and USA.gov uses (1)-(3). The White House does not. So what is DOGE? Part of the White House, or not?

UPDATE Apparently, the original doge.gov — yes, *.gov — was formatted like a coin scam. Some DOGEbag removed the AI slop, but left the butchered tagline. Was somebody in charge of the website project? If so, who? Is everything DOGEbags do like this? Atrios has an excellent timeline of how our famously free press covered this farce. Not in detail, I assure you!

Stanning for Malcolm Tucker

I can almost forgive Elon for using his official position to pump (and, I assume, dump)….

The most powerful person in government other than POTUS, who has been in bleary-eyed conspiracy-theorizing spiral for weeks and who the WSJ reported has used "LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine" in a manner that has alarmed his companies' execs and board members, has… pic.twitter.com/Ae4Lm60s5e

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 11, 2025

…. because the man knows his classics (NSFW):

Rather the flip side of the West Wing, both “In the Loop” and “The Thick of It” are.

Elon Understands Neither Social Security Numbers Nor SQL

Let’s start with the SQL:

TIL Elon has never used SQL pic.twitter.com/6ewtNHoIga

— James Rosen-Birch ⚖️🕊️ (@provisionalidea) February 9, 2025

(Structured Query Language (SQL) is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is bog standard across the corporate world and the Federal government). Elon’s response and (to his credit) the Community Note:

TIL Elon has never used SQL pic.twitter.com/6ewtNHoIga

— James Rosen-Birch ⚖️🕊️ (@provisionalidea) February 9, 2025

More importantly, Elon doesn’t understand the technical issue, which centers on the word “deduplication” in his first post. First, deduplication doesn’t work the way Elon thinks it does. Quoting (sorry) Reddit/r/facepalm:

De-duplication has nothing to do with how many times a given SSN is stored in a database. De-duplication is a process used during backup of the full database, not just the data within. After the first full backup of the original database, the next backup de-dupe process reads and stores raw data blocks from the entire database structure, skipping duplicate blocks during the backup storage process, writing only changed blocks out to the backup repository while updating a key/block pointer at the destination.

De-duplication was developed and adopted to help enhance and speed up backup and recovery times and save on disc space/transport requirements. Applying de-duplication to ASCII data stores during backups can realize upwards of 50-to-1 reduction in storage space requirements for long term backup repository needs.

Below is a good Wiki article describing this in greater depth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication

Second, even if “deduplication” worked the way Elon thinks it does, SSN keys can and do duplicate, because they are not “primary keys” to the Social Security Administration, at least. This is the best explanation I have found:

Every table in a well-designed database requires a primary key. This is a unique identifier that ensures every row in the table is unique, which maintains data integrity. To the data modeling novice, SSN would seem to be the obvious choice as a primary key since it is supposed to be unique for each citizen, permanent resident, or eligible nonimmigrant workers in the United States. One reason why SSN might not be the primary key is due to the sensitivity of the information. Because SSN’s are personal identifiable information (PII), the information must be managed with stricter security requirements than non-PII data. In this situation, an organization might create a new, unique identifier (or primary key) for individuals so the SSN is masked for most users in the organization.

Along the same lines from Reddit/r/sql:

Do not use SSN or any information that can be used to identify a person. You can get into a lot of trouble doing it. Other then being hacked, the personal information is all over the place for anyone to see. Hackers, developers, etc. Most corporations are encrypting personal information. If they have not yet they likely will do it soon. If you have it set up as a key that is going to turn into a lot of problems.

And:

One of the golden rules of primary keys is that you control their creation. An SSN is a terrible key because it is just a string that has no check digits and is created by someone else. Worse yet, it can change or be entered incorrectly. That’s apart from the whole privacy issue. It may be stored encrypted as a search field if that is really necessary, but it should never be stored as plain text.

Now, to be fair to Elon, we can’t be 100% sure that SSN is not a primary key, because we do not have access to the Social Security Administration’s database schema (the SQL code that defines the database structure, including its keys).

Bottom line here is that when Elon screams fraud, assume he’s wrong until proven otherwise. NOTE Newsweek fell for this.

DOGEbags in Breaking Stuff

“DOGE Is Hacking America” [Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, Foreign Policy]. “The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert. This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error.” • “Move fast and launch things,” eh?

“Treasury officials: Musk ally ‘mistakenly’ had power to alter payments system” [Politico]. “Treasury Department officials said Tuesday that the agency last week ‘mistakenly’ and ‘briefly’ gave a member of Elon Musk’s team the power to alter a sensitive federal payments database, prompting an internal forensic investigation that remains ongoing… Senior Treasury officials wrote in sworn declarations that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former SpaceX and X engineer, was erroneously granted ‘read/write’ privileges to a secure payments system on Feb. 5.” • Oh, totally “mistakenly.” How are we sure Little Marko didn’t install any back doors?

Whoops, the DOGEbags almost broke the mortgage market:

True. Heads were spinning across the mortgage industry today. “The DOGE guys are knocking down walls without knowing where there’s financial plumbing,” said a mortgage industry source. “Eventually, they are gonna to put a hole through something that matters.” @Capitol_Forum https://t.co/P61ayWZZy6

— Patrick Rucker (@PatrickMRucker) February 11, 2025

DOGEbags in the Midst of a Constitutional Crisis

“Why DOGE is unconstitutional” [Alan Charles Raul, WaPo]. A Reaganaut (!). “The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are nation of laws, not men and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power…. Even under the most aggressive view of the president’s “unitary executive” control over the entire executive branch and independent agencies, it is Congress’s sole authority to appropriate and legislate for our entire government. But in the end, the president is constitutionally stuck with the policies for the federal government that Congress enacts and appropriates. No one man in America is the law — not even a Trump or an Elon Musk. So, how can the radical overhaul Trump and Musk are undertaking be reconciled with our constitutional order? Quite simply, it cannot be. Congress must step in to enact this radical transformation — or the Supreme Court must stop it.” • Let me know how that works out….

“Not Hyperbole Anymore: Musk Is In Charge of the US Government” [Talking Points Memo]. On the Hiring Approval Section in the EO: “I tell ya, I’m tryin’, dear friends. I’m struggling here not to engage in hyperbole. But I don’t know what else to call these people besides political commissars. And again, they report to Elon Musk. He’s already very clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.” • Yes, Stalin would totally have loved running DOGE.