By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
“You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?” –Ursula LeGuin, Wizard of Earthsea
“Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” –Sam Rayburn
DOGE has become a sprawling story. In this round-up, I’ll look at how the DOGEbags butchered their own website, and this week’s assault on government agencies. I’ll conclude with a brief look at the sociology of DOGE. This week, I won’t be tracking court cases, or Democrat counter-measures to DOGE (readers, if you locate any, do feel free to leave a link in comments).[1]
The DOGEbags Still Butchering Their Own Website
The last time we posted on DOGE, we pointed that that its website was, basically, a placeholder (this after Elon boasted how transparent DOGE was). As if in answer, DOGE brain geniuses threw together a website hosted on CloudFlare the very next day, but left it open for anyone to edit, so it was promply hacked and defaced, but that was three days ago, and the story is now forgotten.
The site looks a bit more normal now, despite the (still) missing American flag. The home page (“Latest work”) purports to be an X feed — the squillionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, also runs DOGE as a “special government employee,” no conflict there — but in fact the posts shown on X don’t match those shown on DOGE’s home page. Here is the top “Latest Work” post there:
And here (to be fair, there’s a clickthrough) is the original:
Why on earth does DOGE remove the link in the original that supports their claim? And why remove the dates? So now, every time I look at “Latest Work” in the DOGE page, I have to check it against the original to make sure DOGE hasn’t edited taken anything out of context or omitted important data. Make it make sense. (Here is the story about classified information on the DOGE site to which Kaine via Rupar allludes; I haven’t much sympathy for squawking about classified material, but I’ve got to say that HuffPo’s sourcing is better than DOGE’s, which in the post was a Link, and on the DOGE site was nothing at all.)
Next, we have the Savings page. It reads in its entirety: “Receipts coming over the weekend!” Not, apparently, this weekend, although to be fair, the DOGEbags could be taking the Federal Holiday, President’s Day, off.
Next. we have the Workforce page. This in essence an org chart of the government, which is interesting, I suppose, if you believe that government should be run like a business, but it omits the White House, even though the chart is based on Office of Personnel Management data, which includes the White House. You will recall from last week that DOGE is setting up an entirely parallel government, with commissars in every agency, and so the omission of this parallel government is highly deceptive.
So much for the state of doge.gov this week. Perhaps next week they will improve it!
DOGEbaggery of the Week
Now let’s look at DOGE’s latest thuggery at the agencies (USAID[2] being so last week).
Centers for Disease Control. CDC’s “disease detectives” halved as part of DOGE cuts at health agencies (CBS):
Half of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — a group known as the CDC’s “disease detectives” — were among the cuts made Friday by the Trump administration, multiple health officials tell CBS News.
The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service or EIS officers are hired in annual classes through a competitive process.
As part of the fellowship, they serve for two years around the CDC or deployed to health departments across the country, often on the front lines of public health responses. Many go on to rise through the ranks at the agency after being selected for the program.
“The country is less safe. These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a former top-ranking CDC official and alumna of the program, in a message.
As readers know, I hold no brief for CDC’s performance on Covid, and they’ve been awful on bird flu. Still, it’s not like we’ve got any [cough] pandemics going on, or new ones [cough cough] on the horizon. What could go wrong?
Department of Energy. Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in DOGE reversal (Associated Press):
One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, which saw about 30% of the cuts. Those employees work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise, with the highest levels of clearance.
“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, referencing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”
While some of the Energy Department employees who were fired dealt with energy efficiency and the effects of climate change, issues not seen as priorities by the Trump administration, many others dealt with nuclear issues, even if they didn’t directly work on weapons programs. This included managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn’t further contaminate nearby communities. The NNSA staff who had been reinstated could not all be reached after they were fired, and some were reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE.
While I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for the atomic establishment, I don’t want to hear “Whoopsie!” come from the Pantex plant, either.
Federal Aviation Administration. Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash (Associated Press):
The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The firings hit the FAA when it faces a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.
Impacts, eh?
Internal Revenue Service. Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS (WaPo):
Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to three people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.
According to a draft of the memorandum obtained by The Washington Post, DOGE software engineer Gavin Kliger is set to work at the IRS for 120 days, though the tax agency and the White House can renew his deployment for the same duration. His primary goal at the IRS is to provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.
After Treasury, they’re doubling down? More on Kliger here and here; he was at DataBricks, now marketing itself as an AI firm. I don’t think 120 days will be enough even to make an assessment of whether IDRS can be ported to DataBricks (though that would certainly help DataBricks in its competition with OpenAI). And with that, let’s turn to AI.
Conclusion
What social structure does DOGE have? Leaving aside its extraordarily hazy place in the governement org chart, how has it come together as a social entity, at the (fluid) boundary between state and civil society? Josh Marshall writes:
First of all, there’s DOGE proper. The White House took the U.S. Digital Service, an organization which grew out of the botched launch of the Obamacare exchange system in 2014, and rebranded it as the U.S. DOGE Service. Get it? They keep the same initials, USDS. That gave DOGE a ready-made administrative shell, based out of the White House, to operate from. [Second, there are] a number of people who are part of the same operation have gotten appointments at various agencies around the executive branch. They’re not formally part of the rebranded USDS. But they’re part of the same operation, the same group of Musk operatives carrying out Musk’s plans across the federal government. On it’s face it might seem like the centrality of what we might call the feral/incel group was overplayed, or that as events have proceeded they’ve been joined by a more established group. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Each time we hear of DOGE showing up at a new federal agency it usually or perhaps always includes a member of that original feral/incel group in the lead. So for instance, when DOGE showed up at the IRS on Thursday that group was lead by Gavin Kliger, 25, part of the original group who said Matt Gaetz had been a victim of the “Deep State” when he was forced to withdraw his nomination to serve as Attorney General. He also played a lead role in the dismantlement of USAID. I could speculate as to why this is the case. But for whatever reason Musk seems to place especial trust in that group of seven or eight young men.
Sounds rather like a FlexNet to me. To these two elements — (1) feral/incel (harsh, but fair) + (2) “older heads” — I would add Elon’s (3) squillionaire associates, like Peter Thiel and (now) AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia. Interestingly, Trump relates to this entire network only through Elon (at least so far). Note also that older (RINO?) organizations have no place in this FlexNet whatever[3]..
I have written previously that the dominant drive behind DOGE — besides money, of course — is party power: Power for the Republican party, and more precisely for the DOGE faction within that party (and not particularly for MAGA, as shown by the whipping MAGA took from the Silicon Valley boys on H1B). As Madison writes, all factions represent property interests: In DOGE’s case, I would urge that the unifying property interests across the DOGE Flexnet include the symbolic capital of technical “genius” (as Trump has it), the social capital of AI skills, and the economic capital of Silicon Valley (whether as an owner like Thiel or a contractor like Kliger). For all three factions, the destruction of government is seen not only as a source of all three forms of capital — though it turns out that replacing everything with AI wasn’t as easy as imagined[4] — but a moral act. Ed Kilgore writes:
So don’t be too fooled by the smoke and mirrors of DOGE technological virtuosity in doing its job. At bottom, it’s the same approach to the federal budget that knuckle-dragging conservative ideologues have adopted at least since the Reagan administration. Like his low-tech predecessors, Musk regards even good government as inherently wasteful, which in turn makes efforts to improve what taxpayers get for their money a waste of time. What DOGE is doing could in theory be good, bad or just mindless. But it’s mostly a blast from the past rather than any sort of cutting-edge “reform.”
I am not a believer in DOGE’s technological virtuosity. It ought to be possible for an organization full of technical virtuosos to produce a decent website, especially given all the money in the world. I am a believer in DOGE’s political virtuosity: Going for the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management was brilliant; like Trump, DOGE is very good at sensing weakness. However, if that parallel governement of DOGE commissars is going to be tasked with installing AI in every corner of every agency, there’s going to be a lot of wreckage. Of course, I say “wreckage” like that’s a bad thing.
NOTES
[1] I had to leave the most interesting ideas on the cutting room floor: Due to the proliferation of AI tools, this generation of coders doesn’t actually know how to translate business logic into programming logic. That will be a problem when dealing with Treasury, the IRS, etc., etc., with miles and acres of COBOL crafted to express business logic in a language and using concepts they don’t understand, and at a scale where they have never performed.
[2] To my jaundiced eye, these supposedly humanitarian efforts, with their tiny budgets, are transparently cover stories for spookdom:
Donald Trump Truth Social Post 02:22 PM EST 02/16/25 pic.twitter.com/DMBsJSD2Ft
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 16, 2025
But perhaps I’m too cynical, and people with actual knowledge can comment.
[3] It is a truism in blue circles that DOGE is simply implementing Project 2025. I doubt that very much. Here is what Project 2025 has to say on USAID, in a lengthy part of a very lengthy chapter:
Branding. A deeply embedded culture within the foreign aid bureaucracy views public recognition of U.S. assistance as secondary to a larger philanthropic mission and is embarrassed by the American flag. Citing vaguely defined security concerns, USAID’s implementers—U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and contractors—often fail to credit the American people for the billions of dollars in assistance they provide the rest of the world even as they engage in self-promoting public relations to raise other donor funds. This approach has negative foreign policy implications as China relentlessly promotes its own self-serving efforts to gain influence and resources. Worst of all, malign actors sometimes appropriate credit for unbranded U.S. assistance: Houthi terrorists, for example, claim to provide for the people under their occupation with anonymous U.S. humanitarian aid. The United States is in a struggle for influence with China, Russia, and other competitors, and American generosity must not go unacknowledged. The next conservative Administration should build on the Trump Administration’s branding policy, which revamped ADS Chapter 320, to force the aid bureaucracy to fully credit the American people for the aid they are providing. The Senior Advisor for Brand Management in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA) (discussed infra) should be a political appointee who is responsible for maximizing the visibility of U.S. assistance by enforcing branding policy on every grant, cooperative agreement, and contract. The LPA should liaise with counterparts at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to ensure local media pickup of these activities.
Nothing about gutting USAID whatever. In fact, Heritage wanted to give USAID more prominence.
[4] I was going to write a much longer section on Doge’s push for AI. The stories were ubiquitous in early February. But then they stopped. DOGE is almost completely opaque, but I would guess that “AI everywhere” turned out to be a lot harder than the feral/incel team thought it would be. After all, they don’t understand government, how could they scope anything? Hence, perhaps, the 120-day contract at IRS, as a test site (gawd help us). And of course the Hoovering up of useful data.
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On the clash of Silicon Valley and DC culture and methods, I found this Politico piece interesting.
Every democratic government should seek to serve its people and not the self-interest of opaque,self-serving government institutions, corporations, and the clients of lobbyists whose primary concern is to milk any government for whatever interests they are paid to represent.
While I do believe we are witnessing a smily faced Stalinist purge (no bullets to heads… so far) of The Blob, with both retribution and control as motives, I have no reason to believe Musk has changed his stripes in any way.
While I have no doubt the major functional focus of the general DOGEbaggery is Trumps revenge/control dictum, there’s way to much power at stake and opacity of process to not assume some monstrous new phishing equilibrium is being engineered through the various impacted government data systems.
Gen 9:13-15 you linked to in Water Cooler doesn’t really strike the right tone for the “creators” we’re dealing with here.
Purge the Blob by all means but why purge workers at our national parks? With all the carnage of lost livelihoods and the termination of some apparently worthwhile government functions going on, for some inexplicable reason I was today particularly angered by a radio news snippet, an interview with one of the purged, an avid outdoorsman who supports his nature habit by working as a custodian cleaning toilets and picking up litter in a national park.
IIRC, there has been an effort to close and sell off or lease the national parks since at least President Reagan. His first Secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt seemed more interested in destroying the parks than managing them.
Firing half of the remaining staff of an underfunded agency and includes firefighters, which scares me, might be considered by some as another way to make selling off the parks more likely.
It’s like DOGE does not realize (if they did, would they care?) that firefighters especially federal firefighters were already underpaid, underfunded, and understaffed, which was a major complaint of the agency’s management. I am not relaxed about this summer’s fire season.
So was the Deep State a paper tiger all along? The ruthless baddies that we blamed for assassinating leaders (including our own) and overthrowing governments and blackmailing anyone who might threaten them–and covering it all up for decades–cannot handle 7 cocksure nerds and their bosses? They’re just going to shrivel in the face of Trump’s moral righteousness and Musk’s techno-genius and let themselves be tossed on the trash heap of history? And only the fake opposition Democrats clucking ineffectually in response? Wow! This is like a fantasy from somebody’s 4chan postings come to life. Even in the movies The Empire has to Strike Back before we can get to the foreordained victory of the Good Guys.
> So was the Deep State a paper tiger all along? T
I motice that neither the Pentagon nor the spooks have been touched, and that a thorough reckoning for NGOs like the Atlantic Council or the CFR is absent (in the guise of waste and fraud, of course).
They haven’t been directly touched. But, in the US A.I.D. “pause” and reevaluation they have been will likely have been defunded in a number of important ways.
Silicon Valley dbag bros doing the very Silicon valley thing of moving fast and breaking stuff, them leaving somebody else to come along and pick up the pieces.
American: that’s so Stalin/Mao/Putin/Xi/Kim…
Take some responsibility for your own culture and stop using it to demonize historical figures who have zero to do with the situation you’re comparing them to.
What if the whole point is to break things that can’t be fixed (in the sense of reverting back to how things worked on 1/19/25)?
What happens when something that has to work, but is now broken, is rebuilt according to the desires of silicon bros?
What happens if this turns out to be a heretounkown rug pull?
> What happens if this turns out to be a heretounkown rug pull?
I guess we’ll find out!
Break it and when people complain it doesn’t work, privatize it. Taxes that used to fund it will be spent elsewhere (more armored Teslas?), but rates won’t go down (for the 99%). Previously free or inexpensive government services now cost an arm and a leg through the new private owners.
This is worse than a crypto rug pull, this is attempting to pull everything everywhere all at once.
I’m sure this has been said but I haven’t seen it, but I like MuskRats. I must have seen this somewhere but don’t remember. It’s too obvious for me to be the first.
You are insulting muskrats which are very nice and interesting rodents.
Yeah Rats are cool bro.
🐀
I though ‘Nerd Reich’ was pretty accurate.
Oh, have not heard that one!
Probably the term ‘Turd Reich’ might be more accurate.
I object to the “spook and spook adjacent” tarring of all USAID activities. I know people at USAID global health – they work very hard, make serious efforts to evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and are dedicated to their mission. As for the paltry sums Lambert mentions in various projects, one LLM asserts that
USAID is currently on life support in the sense that the civil servants are “working” i.e. being paid and having access to communication networks, by court order. The buildings are closed and the signage has been removed. About half the staff were “contractors” and they were all fired weeks ago. At some point – maybe very soon – the plug will be pulled, and my spouse will retire.
In closing, I would like to cite Josh Billings, 19th century humorist, who wrote “It ain’t what a man don’t know … but what he does know that ain’t so.” This applies not only to the MuskRats, but to people who comment on blogs.
Muskrats are native and are generally OK. Musk’s troopers are more like invasive Norway Rats, true Aryans. Like Norway rats they will soon be chewing on the insulated wires and causing short circuit failures.
I am wondering if any of us will see a rise in governing ability during our lifetime or only the deterioration.
Personally I only expect the latter.
> I am wondering if any of us will see a rise in governing ability during our lifetime or only the deterioration.
“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” sadly said of Jefferson Davis, but I suppose the same could be said of Grant and Sherman, not to mention Lincoln.
On the AI topic – the very obvious path is to get read only access to a bunch of data that currently lives in different places in government – consolidate all of it and slap an LLM on the top of it.
It’d take a few sentence prompt to get a summary of anyone’s files across the entire government, any unusual patterns across that data, find connections that would be opaque otherwise.
Basically the power of an entire agency like the NSA/CIA but with timelines of seconds instead of years.
I suspect that’s the end goal.
I’m curious about this too. Is there any good investigative journalism on how these ‘efforts’ actually work on behalf of the spooks ?
Well, there’s this:
From the Lancet: Polio eradication: the CIA and their unintended victims
Perhaps others might offer other examples.
As you might know, this is actually a huge rabbit hole. The idea that Obama killed OBL and then bizarrely disposed of the body has long been suspect, so many believed he had died of natural causes before the showy Obama kill. He had bad kidneys and was hauling dialysis equipment around in Tora Bora. More important, the occasional OBL videos in the later part first decade of the 2000s were of a man whose bone structure was notably different than the earlier OBL when you put them side by side.
So this IMHO is more of promoting the cover and getting a side bennie of planting a story about what supposed super sleuths they were.
I actually believe Raelynn Hillhouse and Seymour Hersh’s version. That the Pakis were being paid by the Saudis to keep him under wraps (hence him ‘hiding’ in a safehouse in the Pakistani equivalent of Annapolis, the metal bars separating the upper and lower stories of the house). When an ISI general narc-ed him out to us, we engaged in bargaining with the other stake holders and they acquiesced to our ‘surprise raid’. One of the conditions was that he be killed outright so that he couldn’t talk and his body disposed of, so that he couldn’t be buried in Saudi. Otherwise it would have been much, much better symbolically to drag him to the US or Gitmo and give him the Abimael Guzman treatment. (Cage him, humiliate him) and grind him under the boot of American justice like a common criminal, then hang him like Saddam.
*Sigh*
Hersh is a very mixed bag. He runs some great stories as well as ones that are spook state plants. The fact that there was a narc house and a dramatic raid does not prove that OBL was the one killed. The idea that we could somehow lose control of his body and it would wind up in Saudi Arabia is a bizarre excuse for its extremely hasty disposal, before anyone could sight it or DNA test it.
One might add that the entire team who made the raid died in a helicopter crash not long after. A bit too tidy.
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/139188948/for-navy-seal-team-6-a-huge-loss-for-a-small-unit
The Navy has form.
My brother-in-law was stationed at Camp Lejeune in early 1961 on his way to Guantanamo, although he didn’t know he was headed there as backup to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
After he was diagnosed with cancer a couple years ago, he thought to join the Camp Lejeune lawsuit.
The Navy had no record of his unit of pawns having been stationed at Camp Lejeune.
One might add that the entire team who made the raid died in a helicopter crash not long after. A bit too tidy.
Oh, this is something I did not know at all — I am learning about it today, on NC!
Yes, this indeed make the whole smoking out operation against Bin Laden even more suspect.
Many parts of the official 9/11 narrative are suspect.
See for example https://ine.uaf.edu/projects/wtc7/.
Seconded – I’ve read quite a bit about this operation, much of which doesn’t add up. But I don’t remember hearing about that crash before today either.
USAID in particular? It has had a vile history from the outset. For example, it was intimately involved with various policing, paramilitary, and CIA terror programs during the Vietnam War. I recommend Douglas Valentine’s seminal “The Phoenix Program” (1990) for more on this particular facet.
Similar activities on behalf of US empire predated USAID of course, but it absorbed some existing programs. Helping repressive regimes manage their populations, serving as cover for CIA operations, and so on.
The “vile history” is a feature, not a bug, since USAID was created as a new approach to replace the dysfunctional CIA in America’s fight against communists abroad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Public_Safety
In my view, Trump’s decision to dismantle USAID was not out of love for their DEI, but because they failed to overthrow the Maduro regime.
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-how-us-media-helped-trump-and-usaid-weaponize-aid-during-2019-venezuela-coup-attempt-6684ed8307be
> In my view, Trump’s decision to dismantle USAID was not out of love for their DEI, but because they failed to overthrow the Maduro regime.
I imagine if Orban expressed his irritation, that would also get Trump’s attention. Finally, these are alL NGOs, and Trump wants to lay waste to that sectot.
Can´t comment on the muskrats whatsoever. From very afar it seems as if there was indeed a lot of waste and corruption. But the comments here show that they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
One thing I know for sure myself is that the shut down of USaid to Ukraine was right on the mark. Just got back from Kiev and normal folks are delighted that all the grantfeeders (9 out 10 Ukrainian media was financed by USaid) are out on the street. I think it also made a great impression on the Russians. Much more than we think. This whole US influence machine has been shut down. The insufferable Samantha Powers wails and thrashes. What a delight!
The FDA also had people terminated, myself included. On my team of seven people, three were terminated that I know of and a fourth likely also terminated but unconfirmed. I don’t know exactly how many were let go across all of FDA. The termination letters were boilerplate. I assume these are illegal terminations since no one was ever given a notification of poor performance prior, nor the specific reason for being terminated beyond a lack of performance. This lack of performance was not correct as we just had our performance reviews and no one was given a poor performance rating.
> I assume these are illegal terminations
I’m sorry, that must have been an ugly situation.
If you will forgive me for asking, since I’ve never been in your situation: Faced with an obviously illegal termination letter, why did you comply? And where on earth was your union? Sorry if this is painful, I’m not blaming or judging, I just want to understand the situation.
I was a non-bargaining unit employee, so not eligible for union membership. Other people let go we’re bargaining unit employees and eligible for union representation but, as far as I know, the union has little ability to do much for probationary employees. My hope is that a class action lawsuit will be filed for probationary employees (whether NBU or BU) and an injunction will be issued which will extend our administrative leave pay (currently at four weeks, so a four week “severance package”). Obviously our court system is too slow for people to stay around for years waiting to be reinstated, so this mass termination fulfills it’s goal regardless.
For complying, they can lock you out of the IT systems, which effectively ends your ability to work. That hasn’t happened to me yet because I didn’t send a read receipt for the termination email and these people don’t seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. With loss of IT access, you also lose access to your personnel file. I downloaded my entire file a few weeks ago after learning that: 1. People were losing access within minutes of being fired, and 2. People were having previous performance reviews modified (this latter sounds like a rumor, so I don’t know if it’s true or not). The additional thing is your federal badge that allows you physical access. If that is deactivated, you can no longer get into your office location. You are also locked out of your computer since it serves as your PIV card as well. Mine still works, so I assume I can also go to HHS today for the RFKJ welcoming party at HHS HQ. While I’m taking my selfie with him, which was suggested in the event’s email announcement, maybe I can ask him about the terminations. Finally, they can just stop paying you. Everyone is terrified of being fired, so no manager or supervisor will say anything to anyone for fear of reprisal.
Just to let people know, I despised Biden and Harris and protest voted for (the not very serious) Green Party. I was willing to give the new administration a chance since my main concerns are not going to war with Russia/China/Iran/DPRK and supporting the working and middle class. The Trump team seemed to say enough to give me hope on those two fronts. But it took only a few days to see that that was false hope. I’m a Republican in the same sense that Teddy Roosevelt was one, and think we need a New Square Deal, but slightly more isolationist in the sense of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. I think that Oren Cass isn’t an idiot, and that the American Compass and the American Conservative can be voices of reason (along with Jacobin). What I’m seeing now is the wholesale destruction of our country through cronyism and a reinstatement of the spoils system. It’s like the clock has been unwound 130 years. But the world of 2025 isn’t the world of 1895.
Here’s a question for you or the audience at large that I’ve been wondering for a few years: If it’s known that CEOs or other higher-ups are actively colluding to, say, not poach each others’ workers or coordinating on prices, can they be charged under RICO?
I’ll also mention that I have decades of experience in data science (an area the federal government is well behind on), was a departmental deputy chief data officer (interim), and wrote federal, departmental, and agency guidance. I was known and well respected across the entire federal government.
Thank you for these extremely informative comments.
RICO cases are typically brought up on Federal court. Essentially, the Department of Justice drives these.
My observation is that the Department of Justice has been very passive in prosecuting white collar crime of any significance at least since Eric Holder’s days. Essentially, they decline to prosecute for political reasons. The fig leaf is always – these are not provable crimes (although unethical behavior might have occurred and mistakes were made).
Anyway, I do not see this changing anytime soon under Trump.
On a personal note – I am sorry about what happened to you. As someone who has been laid off 5 times in my life, I have a lot of sympathy for your situation. Hope things work out!
Antitrust can be brought by individuals
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/100m-disney-settlement-signals-end-animators-anti-poaching-fight-970887/
My brother was a 40 year career USFWS biologist and manager. He left in 2017, but keeps in touch with colleagues. He sent this on Saturday from a current Department of Interior manager:
I doubt DOGE can deny earned pensions, but don’t know if ERISA applies to government workers.
Should any of you feel the need to learn more about the terminations at HHS, the person who sent them out is the Acting CHCO:
Jeffery.Anoka@hhs.gov
(202) 691-2104
He will likely appreciate many people reaching out for information.
In most respects, especially given the old corps GOP, we’re witnessing the corpotocracy equivalent of a (old-country) purge. The bureaucracy “families” in the permanent government are losing out to the bureaucracy “families” in the Big Tech private sector. The other industries and departments look on as these two go to the mattresses.
That said I do think something else, more fundamental is going on.
As much as I dislike generational categorizations (boomers, millennials, etc), we must be mindful that the young in America have known nothing in their lives but the political, economic, and legal decay of post 9/11 America and its consequences. The last decade of political chaos has been for them, what is normal. The post-2008 permanent erosion of the middle class is all they have ever known. We olds must consider that what might seem reasonable or desirable or logical to us, might well come across as some kind of delusion to younger people at best, or at worst a direct patronizing insult.
Government employees typically receive lower compensation, quasi-tenure, and/or some kind of modest pensions for their public service. We’d see that as reasonable. A young person with 2-3 times more education, underwater with college debt, stuck in precarious employment with no hope (ever) of home-ownership or retirement might simply see red.
But where I think Musk and the GOP are making their (oldster) mistake, is to assume this (imho understandable) vindictiveness of youth will be restricted to public sector employees or merely those programs presently unpopular. I doubt this inferno left unchecked will be particularly discerning if allowed to spread to observing IRS tax-loopholes, DoD spending overruns, congressional remunerations, or indeed white elephant Mars “rocket man” projects.
Good luck explaining to the MAGA red guards that “of course we didn’t mean…”, or “that’s not the way Washington….” after the CIA’s entire eastern European agit-prop operation was terminated in the middle of a major war. The rest of the Pentagon’s budget or Wall Street’s tax breaks are somehow more sacred because…? Of course the original Red Guards were eventually brought to heel by the army, but not before the Cultural Revolution has burned half of China down to embers.
I believe the CCP old-guard likewise had no idea or control over the Red Guards for the duration of their campaigns.
P.S.
“Doggy”-bags, surely?
> “Doggy”-bags, surely?
From the original post:
i dont think musk alcolytes are the type of college student thinking about debt and pensions. the type of people i know who are most into musk treat scientific advancement like it’s a sort of religion. they truly believe in the doctrine of efficiency and innovation. they think this is cool and they are doing important work. also they are generally intelligent CS majors with decent job prospects and a freaky amount of linkedin connections. it’s true that some college students have really terrible job prospects. but muskbros seem to be the type to go “simply grind harder” and view their position as something they acquired by merit.
i will say. a lot of my friends have been embracing hedonism as of late. like they’re so burnt out by the state of things that they are now choosing to party more. or bedrot on the internet more. there really isn’t a clear opposition, just a depressed acceptance and choosing to enjoy life despite it. (i am a college student myself and i so get it.)
Taking a slight issue with Balan, I think that the team Musk has put together are undertaking a form of action learning, apprentices doggedly working on the easier cases of waste and inefficiency where the benchmarks, methodologies and the necessary protocols are relatively simple to establish before being turned loose on “IRS tax-loopholes, DoD spending overruns, congressional remunerations, or indeed white elephant Mars “rocket man” projects” which are the end goals, and where the greatest efficiencies will be realised and the areas of necessary redundancy highlighted.
I see on the DOGE official website that in the upper left hand corner is a Dollar Sign symbol. I wonder if that is a shout out to Ayn Rand, who considered it a semi-sacred symbol of Philosophical Objectivism. Here is a little article about several Randian semi-sacred symbols trotted out in the novel Atlas Shrugged. The first one talked about is the Dollar Sign symbol and what it means to the denizens of the Randiverse.
https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Atlas-Shrugged/symbols/
DOGEbag is a very cromulent new word. If it could be moved into the mainstream language so thoroughly as to be used by thousands and then millions, and recognized even if all lower case, i.e.–” dogebag” — then it would become a handy weapon perhaps.
If memory serves, cigarettes had the $ sign on them in Atlas Shrugged, but wouldn’t a fancy pre-rolled joint be more appropriate?
I noted that US$ sacred symbol being at the top of the DOGE website pages because I thought it might be a significant tell perhaps worth studying and following up on. Or at least making note of.
If somebody wrote a novel titled Spartacus Shrugged, I wonder how it would go. I am not qualified to write such a novel, but I hereby donate the title Spartacus Shrugged to anyone who might think thay can write a book to go with the title.
Where is that sacred heifer, just prime for slaughter as the best offering, DOD budget…?
The velvet glove is dispensable, the iron fist is not.
If you are speaking of the “Red Heifer” of Fundamentalist fame, then you are indeed speaking of the DoD. The ‘Red’ here betokens blood, lots of it. Remembering that the ‘Red Heifer’ is sacrificed to sanctify the rebuilding of the Temple, we must ask ourselves; which Temple? Most certainly not the French Revolution’s Enlightenment themed “Temple of Reason.”
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Reason
My money is on the old Temple that a reformist Rabbi of two thousand years ago tried to run the moneychangers out of. Look how that ended up.
Everything that was old is new again.
The Social Security Administration is now in the crosshairs:
Social Security head steps down over DOGE access of recipient information: AP sources
Since DOGE is able to unilaterally freeze payments, couldn’t they use this in a very transactional way simply to empower their base?
I like extreme hypotheticals, so bear with me, wouldn’t doing a bit of digging on individual’s political affiliation and then freezing SSI funds by to anyone insufficiently loyal be a great way to consolidate power (cash) within your group?
Doubt it will come to that but I like to keep an open mind when it comes to power politics.
> wouldn’t doing a bit of digging on individual’s political affiliation and then freezing SSI funds by to anyone insufficiently loyal be a great way to consolidate power (cash) within your group?
The scenario I think most likely is that when DOGE fails im policy terms, as it will, there will need to be a search for scapegoats….
If we talking about cutting off individual recipients’ social security benefits seems, it seems like an excellent way to start some civil unrest. It’s difficult to get disability and retirees are old and retired and make sympathetic victims.
Not that something being a stupid idea or even politically suicidal is likely to stop our current overlords, but would be the point besides being stupidly vindictive? Stealing the average SSI payment of $698 or $1900 of retirees doesn’t make practical sense.
I posted the notion earlier today through, alas on a social media site known across the land….let’s just get on with rewinding the time and era back into the late 1800’s. Except for the gold standard in place at that time, and the Federal Reserve wasn’t an entity yet in existence. The lead or header of that post was basically “should we stop the dollar printing and maybe end Social Security?”
I mean, after all as a country we do have prior form when removing critical barriers between commercial bank interests and investment bank interests. So the risks, or the likelihood of many things getting ripped asunder only then to find out they goofed or veered too far…seems real
Hey, to our US Treasury pals like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, that was fun times weren’t it during 2007 to 2010? A reminder too. Those barriers had held up quite well following the Great Depression.
If the policy is to destroy as much governmental function as possible beyond restoration, why would DOGE fail?
From WaPo:
And:
Sure is good to see the entire Democrat heirarchy respond as one, and leap to the defense of these principled civil servants. Oh, wait….
And this is their base in NOVA they’re throwing under the bus!
I believe they will cancel SS for everyone who lives outside of the U.S. What could we do then? Move back? Not a chance. I left in 1970. Not far enough away, it seems. I hear Kamchatka is nice this time of year.
Maybe they should learn to code.
ฺBWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
I’d rather have them purge too much than too little, it is easier to go back and rectify mistakes than never get through this corrupt, wasteful mess. Every time our county received a grant, I noticed they’d spend the entire grant adding more staff..every..single..time. No money was left for the homeless or whatever cause it was supposed to serve. I think we’ll be shocked once more comes to light. I honestly don’t care if their site is not up to snuff, I don’t care about the nice wrapper, quite the opposite after years of having the govt pulling wool over everyone’s eyes with fancy signage, custom messaging and fake brochures.
I can understand the sentiment but at the moment we have receipts for about $6 billion in savings, meanwhile the president increased the deficit by $9 trillion in his first term.
IMO DOGE is good at making a big show and captivating the hopes and dreams of the public, but I expect the deficit to be larger than it is now this time next year, particularly if Trump goes ahead with tax reduction plans.
> we have receipts
No, we have what DOGE says are receipts, and the “receipts” are for spending that in their judgement is wasteful. There’s no reason to accept either claim. They keep yammering “audit,” but nothing like a real audit is being done.
Because I’m Lambert the Cautious, I give even Ukrainian Nazis the benefit of the doubt, so when the “Ghost of Kiev” story came out, I dug into it; it was false. IIRC, then came “Russian Warships F*ck Off,” and the Battle of Snake Island. They were false, too. So after than I wrote the entire Ukrainian enterprise off as completely untrustworthy. It’s absolutely the same with DOGE and in particular Musk. Don’t believe a word they say.
Thanks for the correction Lambert. I figured their claim of “$1 billion a day” was pure promotional bull, but that they had actually been confirmed to have cut $6 billion between the NIH grant changes and other interventions.
Funny that it may in fact be less than $6b, which itself is barely a drop in the deficit budget.
> I’d rather have them purge too much than too little, it is easier to go back and rectify mistakes
What makes you think that? Have you never seen a company that some private equity looter wrecked, and that never came back?
Now as for the NGOs, there I agree with you completely. I don’t mind wrecking them because I think the whole sector is an abomination. (I would exempt NGOs that are stewards for public infrastructure, like parks, museums, or libraries, that should be passed along to future generations.)
On the website… If you find a roach in the soup, do you say “I’m not worrying about the wrapper” and go on with your meal? That website is public-facing, amd so the sloppiness expresses their view of the public.
As far as purging too much, investigating or “auditing”, I’m waiting for this DOGE group to hit the Pentagon. Their claims of Billions saved or at least, waste and fraud found so , is sofa change compared to what must be going on in the DoD.
And it is too bad for society that some of the good things some of these Federal agencies do will be wrecked beyond repair.
There is zero evidence they will ever hit the Pentagon.
I should have made it clear in my comment so I wasn’t wasting your time, I’m not intending to hold my breath. It’s all a racket…
Thank you again for allowing comments.
Their tactic seems to be to go into an agency and fire people straight across the board. But then if things start to blow up in their faces in that agency and actual economic damage occurs like has happened, then they go to hire those people back again because they now know that they are needed. If they can contact them. If they haven’t quit or retired. If those people can be bothered going back to a government that treats them like second-hand toilet paper. Prediction time here. In the upcoming Pandemic, America will be going into it blind because Musk and his goons have sacked people because they could not be bothered to learn what their actual job was.
I think the private equity example is a red herring because PE currently focuses on maximising short term financial payback, including a minimum profit target based on calculations of opportunity cost, and sod the damage done to employees, customers, creditors and the broader society, ie, PE is essentially about trading. However, having spent a part of my life merging and re-organising businesses making and marketing non-financial products, including education and training, there is a very strong argument for redesigning any productive institution, whether public or private, by isolating and removing inefficiencies, and then building effectiveness, usually in the form of redundancy in specific areas, on the foundations of operational efficiency.
DOGE is more akin to PE slash and burn tactics because it is indeed about short term payoff. That is why you see people comparing this to Musk’s unplugging servers at Twitter to see what they do – longer term impacts aren’t visible, but also won’t be a problem for Musk or Trump.
The redesign/reorganization you are talking about happened under the Clinton administration, but it took years because they studied how government processes were working and how they could be made more efficient, and because they worked through Congress to reduce positions instead of firing everyone they could reach.
There are good arguments against examining organisational procedures as a means of improving efficiency ranging from the time consuming, cost, habituation, and the defensiveness of employees and managers fearing change.
An alternative and more effective approach is to relate organisational objectives to current costs and then use a simple input-output black box within which you design an ideal system to design backwards from outputs to inputs and then analysing possible contingencies to establish appropriate redundancies.
When I was trained in work study techniques in the 1960s, the standard example used to demonstrate the weakness of examining existing procedures and then attempting to make them more efficient rather than re-designing the process from scratch is the following – possibly apocryphal – story passed down by Russell Currie, who established work study at ICI after the Second War, is repeated in a mid-sessional test at the University of Michigan, date unknown:
“During World War II, British engineers analyzed films of artillery crews to help make the crews more efficient. The films revealed that artillery commanders raised their right arms, clenched their fists, and pulled forward just prior to giving the firing order. Baffled, the engineers questioned the officers about the purpose of this seemingly superfluous action. None of the officers could give a cogent explanation. Probing further, the engineers showed the films to artillery instructors. Immediately, a veteran instructor figured out the significance of the raised arm. “They are holding the horses,” he said, meaning that in the days when horses pulled artillery pieces, crew commanders would grab the reins to prevent the horses from running away when a gun fired”.
In my experience, the tale offers an important truth: look at what should rather than simply attempt to reform what is, and pulling the plug, as the governmentally inexperienced (which I see as an advantage) DOGE kiddies have done, is an effective means to determine whether any process is actually necessary or not in the system and, if it is, you can the determine the forms it might take, make a decision and then take action.
>There are good arguments against examining organisational procedures as a means of improving efficiency ranging from the time consuming, cost, habituation, and the defensiveness of employees and managers fearing change.
I have some professional experience in this field, and I do not tend to agree. Improving efficiency without understanding procedures and the environment is incredibly unlikely.
>An alternative and more effective approach is to relate organisational objectives to current costs and then use a simple input-output black box within which you design an ideal system to design backwards from outputs to inputs and then analysing possible contingencies to establish appropriate redundancies.
This technique works *following* an indepth study of the problem, the people, and the history. I have suffered under leaders in the military who come in and try that without a good understanding – very often it doesn’t work out.
Your artillery anecdote falls more into what happened under the Clinton administration rather than the Musk boys halting every grant and firing the majority of employees that they legally can, with little review or understanding.
This implies it’s appropriate to analyze every institution as if it were a start-up. Very Silcon Valley….
I see DOGE itself as the startup, one in which the kiddies work out who does what and why, learn to use their individual talents as a team, establish the skills and competence levels of each member, engage replacements for the weaker members, determine which approaches work and the ones which don’t, and develop protocols which will be amended on a rolling basis as DOGE teams move from one assignment to to another.
I spent time assisting companies to merge, usually but not always following a hostile takeover where prior information was lacking and the black box approach made it possible to develop an organisational plan in advance relating structure to objectives which could be amended and implemented pretty quickly. In practice we emphasised effectiveness at the expense of efficiency in the short term and concentrated on eliminating duplicate activities and positions.
In the medium term, ie, 6-13 weeks after the takeover, we would look at ways of improving efficiency levels and make recommendations to senior management and the various management teams in the merged operation based on our analysis, making sure that we didn’t fall down the rabbit hole and navel gazing of indepth analysis (very much the Carter/Clinton mode), simply because most task structures are generic and there are very few unique roles in any organisation, whether or not it is an organisation with an established culture or a merger of organisations with very different cultures – a situation in which the dominant party needs to cascade its culture down and across the merged organisation asap.
In the longer term, ie, during the first year, much obviously depends on the individuals who are appointed to positions of authority and who take day-to-day responsibility for managing their teams, complying with any agreements made with trades unions (very sensitive in the 1970s-early1980s UK), and meeting targets within budgetary constraints. The ideal within the first year is to have tightly controlled rolling budgets so that future periodic budgets are based on practical experience.
I think in respect of the military, you start out fighting the last war because you have planned on that basis, and then you get the proverbial punch in the face and your plan goes out of the window. That’s the point the Britsh Cabinet understood when they put Montgomery in command of the Desert War, and LBJ and MacNamarra failed to grasp when they chose not to replace Westmoreland.
In terms of corporate mangement, managers recruited from outside the organisation brings new insights and new approaches to established practices simply because they ask pretty obvious questions about processes and purposes which the current management take for granted and bring these issues to the table and may well be able to effect changes which improve both efficiency and effectiveness.
See Rev Kev’s post just before yours. Does that look like efficiency is their goal?
So I think right now a lot of people take DOGE at its face value that it is “cutting waste” and “auditing”.
It is not. If you were auditing, you would bring accountants instead of the Musk-Jugend, who are very young hackers with unsavory prior associations. So far I have not seen any actual examples of waste or fraud, just Musk’s tweets about things he misunderstood.
Instead the firings and payment holds are an attempt to subjugate the federal government through terror, along with data extraction and control of money flows. This article in the Atlantic describes it well imho:
“Trump and Musk are pushing for regime change”
https://archive.ph/p0ugM
My apologies if that was already posted here.
Are they even hackers? Or are the DOGE boys just script kiddies?
My impression is that 90% of the proceeds from graft and corruption already go to the top 10% of property owners. So this whole thing a scam. They will find some but it will be minor relative to the total budget.
I am torn about the DOGE website. On the one hand I want to browse if to analyze their messaging and gawk at the blatant crypto promotion (IMO a rug pull in waiting), on the other hand I can only imagine the amount of malicious cookies and other spyware that is waiting for me if I click it. Glad Lambert spared me the trip haha
A PS to the FAA problems is given in 10 minute video here. Twas suggested on YT to me a couple of months ago so the usual echo chamber warnings apply but it seems to set out nicely the problems that pre-date DOGE and which are only going to get worse.
A point I’d make re DOGE and its assault on healthcare is (merely) an extension of the worries people like KLG have expressed. As KLG says, the problems are not the core departments (which are often the bedrock upon which all the other science is done). In the latter post 2009 part of my academic career I was glad to rely less and less upon “ancillary/add-on” industries (very heavily skewed towards private industry-funding that built up around NIH and other bodies. My research thankfully could draw upon multiple applied fields and I no longer felt so tethered to Health Services Research (HSR). HSR conferences no longer seemed focused on key topics like epidemiology, seeking to address issues like pandemics etc but were very corporate, with an air of extracting the last penny from funders under the guise of the best patient experience and cost-effectiveness.
A small group of companies completely controlled the software and survey apparatus used to administer the choice models used to quantify trade-offs patients are willing to make. These were very black-box in nature and this was one of the reasons we wrote our text-book – to try to democratise the stats so a reasonably proficient statistical bod could run these studies themselves. That went down about as well as you would expect. But when the Europeans had already explicitly and blatantly published peer-reviewed work expressing the idea that under the current stage of capitalism go die then I guess I should have known we were well into the exponential slide into a very bad place already.
I have been giving a great deal of thought to Yves Smith’s observation in the (required) post restoring comments and the rules for commenting. Yves Smith wrote about destruction of institutions. This is an important idea to keep in mind, because the U S of A, more than most countries, is a creation of its constitution. The U.S. Constitution was once thought to be very sturdy. Hmmm. Institutions, the delicacy thereof.
As to destruction of institutions, I suspect that USAID wasn’t so much public revenge as softening up the public. Aha! Condoms in Tanzania! Men wearing dresses in a theater in Bangladesh! Even the list provided as note 2 today has some programs that strike me as potentially important to the country that requested / contracted for the monies. And don’t forget that contracts had to be signed. Mozambique and male circumcision sounds like a typical public-health program in a country trying to keep down transmission of HIV and venereal disease. Given the back-of-the-hand that D.C. has given Serbia, the reform of public procurement may also be legit. Keep in mind that the bigger scandal about USAID may be moving an independent agency under the Department of State. The courts will figure that out.
Likewise, the FBI and CIA (and the other alphabet-soup of spy agencies) are a kind of softening up. My “minimal” position is that the FBI could likely be abolished. Same with the CIA.
After the distractions and amuse-gueule, we are now talking about the entrée. Social Security Administration? DOGE will engage in nothing but mischief there. Anyone who has dealt directly with SSA and its staff knows that the staffers are knowledge and helpful. The offices are severely bare-bones, and staff is minimal. No ping-pong tables! No sushi bars!
Similarly, Department of the Treasury, Department of Energy, and others highlighted today. Nothing but mischief and destruction.
FAA? Would that Reagan hadn’t busted the controllers’ union, eh, gang?
Finally, AirBnB knucklehead shows up? AirBnB, cause of tourism messes all over the world? Famous for unauthorized party rentals? AirBnB, the Uber of innkeeping?
In the case of New Mexico et al. v. Musk (where states are arguing that Musk’s position violates the Appointments Clause because it did not go through the Senate), the plaintiff’s filed this declaration yesterday stating that Musk is just a Senior Advisor to the President and neither officially in charge of nor or employed by DOGE.
The declaration was filed by someone in the administration.
Whoops. My bad (I was in a rush to get out the door this morning). Thank you for the correction.
Here’s the latest update: Judge Tanya S. Chutkan denied the temporary restraining order in this case today (citations removed below for ease of readability).
If you want to be a lawyer, you have to learn enough law to pass the bar. But if you want to be an amateurly-self-educated law-fan, you can learn “about” law on your own or with help.
Trump learned all “about” shyster-law from a Master Shyster named Roy Cohn. All of the Musk/(trump-vance) Administration’s actions in the various courtrooms are simply the creative use of Shyster Lawfare to buy enough time to make President Musk’s dismantlement of the ” Administrative State” too complete to reverse or repair. If they get government drowned in the bathtub within the next two years and then begin losing court cases after that, it won’t matter, because the government will already be drowned in the bathtub. They can then just laugh over their “lost” court cases.
If people for good governance want to derail the Musk train, they are going to have to figure out something faster and harder than court cases, although since law is the only thing that lawyers know how to do, there is no harm in letting the lawyers do their lawyer thing as long as nobody waits and hopes upon the outcome as if “winning” their “cases” will make any actual difference in the real world. Because it won’t. And anyway, the Roberts Supreme Opus Dei Court is there to make every decision go Musk/(trump-vance)’s way if the Roberts Supreme Opus Dei Court thinks it advances that Court’s own class and culture-dominance agenda.
The Norms Fairy has left the building. The Anything Goes Fairy has walked out onto the field.
Kliger does not have the necessary experience to do what it is he is tasked to do. With only 3 years of experience under his belt he hasn’t been exposed to enough environments to do his job. Unless, of course, the intent is something other than identifying possible efficiencies that could be implemented to reduce expenditures. More than likely, based on my 45 years in IT for insurance companies, Kliger and his team will be gathering data related to system functionality and processes with an eye towards privatization. They simply don’t have the time, expertise and resources to really dig into the systems and detail how these systems work.
Without the experience of being exposed to large and complex systems there is only so much one can do and from a very high level (think of the 30,000 feet view) at that. It should be noted that Musk had some dealings with PayPal and is probably well versed in payment processing technology so he probably doesn’t think he need’s any detailed system information just yet anyway.
Musk spent 250 million on Trumps election and I think he did that to be first in line to get the spoils and I think the Federal payment system is his primary target.
Can someone Please Explain this: under the US Constitution, how can an American President establish DOGE without the consent of Congress? We are confused.
FROM NBC:
“President-elect Trump has tapped Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to lead what he’s calling the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE”
.
“Still, only Congress can create a new federal agency”
SEE. There it is, in Black and White. “ONLY Congress can create a new federal agency.”
Question: Is Trump’s use of Doge going through the New Treasury Official. Could someone explain whether this is legal or illegal. Thank you.
DOGE is not really a department and never was. Trump slid it into a White House entity called the US Digital Service (inspired when some Silicon Valley programmers actually got the ObamaCare website running), renaming it the US DOGE Service. It is a so-called “temporary organization.” Running it out of the White House is good, since that makes it not subject to FOIA and other bothersome regulations. Consensus is that this is legal, a clever move.
Now today we discover there seems to be nobody in charge of DOGE at all, at least according to the White House, but who knows what that means!
It means that DOGE gets more time to keep DOGEing while the Obsolete Institutionalists ( lawyers and judges and such) try to figure that question out. And after they get it figured out, the Administration will file another Shyster Lawsuit or or release another Executive Order or close another Agency or Department to make the Obsolete Institutionalists figure that one out. And rinse and repeat over and over again.
That’s how Shyster Lawfare works when practiced by Master Shysters.
It reminds me of the quote attributed to Karl Rove. ” “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NYTimes Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004).”
The Musk/(trump-vance) Administration might paraphrase it this way: ” We’re a Regime Change operation now, and when we act, we create our own regime change. And while you’re suing over that regime change – legally-juridically, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new regime changes, which you can sue about too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re America’s regime changers . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just sue against what we do.”
Something faster and harder than counter-Shyster counter-Lawfare will be needed to save anything before everything is gone, gone, going fast, gone.
An anecdote I picked up out of a hiker forum here in the Pacific Northwest in relation to DOGE cuts in the Forest Service – that perennially short funded agency –
“Heard from my climbing ranger buddies in Leavenworth that all Okanogan-Wenatchee Wilderness Rangers were let go last Friday. Unless something changes, there will be no rangers in the Enchantments or other areas for waste removal, trail maintenance, permit enforcement, and other stewardship activities. It’s not looking good for Summer busy season here.”