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DOGE: Chaos, Damage, Drama Not Enough to Cover the Stench of Corruption

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Because DOGE is slashing its way through so many government agencies in a non-transparent way, and is sometimes forced to reverse course due to unacceptable levels of damage (and this is a very harm-tolerant bunch), trying to get a handle on what is happening is a bit of a blind-men-trying-to-describe-an-elephant level exercise.

Media coverage has tended to focus on the big controversies, such as the court battles to rein in DOGE, human interest aspects (unfair and arbitrary firings, particularly of employees with important skills and good reviews; damage to programs that are popular or clearly valuable), and sizable haircuts to many of DOGE’s claims about how much it is saving. Precisely because DOGE so far has successfully blitzed any opposition (admittedly Democratic abject incompetence and laziness are big aids), its many many victims and probable future casualties look shell shocked and disorganized. But as we’ll show below, that may be changing too, and in a not pretty way.

But others are starting to echo our view from the get-go: the only way DOGE makes sense is as the major element of an engineering of a Russia-in-the-1990s level collapse. That enabled well placed people to turn modest amounts of money into billions by buying assets at distressed prices (see Len Blavatnik as the poster child). See the embedded article at the end, Death of a Nation, for how that turned out. Note that Trump is advocating another rollback to the Gilded Age, that of subsistence farming as a mainstream way of life. If we are lucky, that might become his “Let them eat cake” moment.1

But with so many squillionaires already at the Trump feeding trough, it’s unlikely that those of lesser means, even the well-connected, will make out spectacularly, but they can hope to be comfortable and perhaps even a bit flush.

At the end, we’ll discuss the evidence of unprecedented levels of corruption in DOGE. If you are in TL;DR mode, scroll to the last section and watch the tweet of a 25 minute presentation (which plays well at 1.5X) by Senator Chris Murphy. Since DOGE is still successfully creating what Lambert called an overly dynamic situation, we’ll limit ourselves to current themes.

DOGE Does Damage

Fresh sightings on the DOGE induced harm front include the VA, where further ravaging is expected. From the Washington Post in Chaos at the V.A.: Inside the DOGE Cuts Disrupting the Veterans Agency:

Clinical trials have been delayed, contracts canceled and support staff fired. With deeper cuts coming, some are warning of potential harms to veterans…

They have disrupted studies involving patients awaiting experimental treatments, forced some facilities to fire support staff and created uncertainty amid the mass cancellation, and partial reinstatement, of hundreds of contracts targeted by Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency…

Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint assembled by Trump allies, said the V.A. had transformed into “one of the most respected U.S. agencies.”

The V.A. is also one of the most politically sensitive departments in the government, serving a constituency courted heavily by Republicans, including Mr. Trump, who has made overhauling the agency a talking point since his 2016 campaign.

Now, with V.A. Secretary Doug Collins vowing a much deeper round of cuts — eliminating some 80,000 jobs and reviewing tens of thousands of contracts — some Republican lawmakers are warning that the tumultuous process risks undoing recent progress.

From Reuters, DOGE job cuts bring pain to Trump heartland:

Jennifer Piggott proudly hung a red-and-blue Trump campaign flag outside her one-story home during the November election race…

Piggott is among more than 125 people dismissed in February from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service in Parkersburg, West Virginia, unsettling a community that voted overwhelmingly for Republican President Donald Trump.

“Nobody that I’ve talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives,” Piggott, 47, told Reuters in an interview, saying she would not have supported Trump if she knew then what she knows now….

In interviews with three dozen workers, business owners and politicians in Parkersburg, which sits at the convergence of two rivers including the mighty Ohio, nearly all said Trump’s focus on cutting government spending was a worthy goal. But most said they knew BFS employees to be hard-working and didn’t see them as the right target if the aim was to eliminate waste.

Scot Heckert, a Republican who represents parts of Parkersburg in the West Virginia state legislature, said he was worried that layoffs at BFS, which employs about 2,200 workers in Parkersburg, would “devastate” the local economy because the workers earned higher-than-average salaries, and because of the looming prospect of another round of cuts.

From the Washington Post, DOGE’s $1 spending card limit touches everything from military research to trash pickup describes that these transactions were already reasonably to well monitored:

As a result of the move, government scientists who study food safety say they are running out of cleaning fluid for their labs; federal aviation workers report cuts to travel for urgent work; and contractors who help identify U.S. soldiers killed in combat were told to pause their efforts, said three forensic genealogists who, like other workers interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution…

The card purchases accounted for roughly $40 billion in the last budget year, according to the General Services Administration, which oversees the program. And while independent watchdogs such as the Government Accountability Office have for years scrutinized government card purchases — and uncovered transactions that violated strict rules or lacked documentation — the challenges amount to a fraction of overall spending.

And in the “stupidly predictable” category, from Gizmodo, DOGE Is Replacing Fired Workers With a Chatbot:

According to Wired, DOGE has given about 1,500 employees at the US General Services Administration, the agency that manages federal real estate and oversees most government contracts, access to a proprietary chatbot called GSAi. That’s right, the agency that has already lost hundreds of employees to termination or resignation, including basically everyone working at its extremely efficient tech hub known as 18F, is getting ChatGPT in a suit that matches federal dress code to make up for all that lost labor.

GSAi, which was apparently rushed out the door by DOGE with the intention of deploying it across the entire agency, is supposed to support staff with “general” tasks. In an internal memo obtained by Wired, GSA employees were told that when it comes to what they can use GSAi for, “the options are endless.” It then offered a list of tasks that, frankly, ended very quickly: “You can: draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.”

Those chatbots had not been deployed on account of being “janky,” per one employee. So, of course, DOGE just went ahead and rolled that thing out to people. Also, it seemed like the intention of those projects were to build a tool that could help facilitate employee work, not replace thousands of staff who were abruptly cut. In the case of the GSA, it’s likely that at least some of the people let go are the very ones who were building the GSAi tool that is now being deployed in their wake. Something tells me their skills are more useful than a chatbot that can draft an email.

Administration Infighting Over DOGE Authority Grab

Trump has backed off a bit from his full-throated support for Musk’s conduct. Given how Trump regards being inconsistent as a useful tactic, it’s not clear that a Musk versus Rubio row that was leaked to the press, and Trump mildly siding with Cabinet members over Musk will have any impact. But it’s worth watching if there are more frontal or rearguard actions from inside the Administration to take Musk down a peg or two. From The Hill in Trump shifts tone on Musk as tensions rise with Cabinet:

Trump’s shift in tone emerged this week when he stressed that his Cabinet secretaries take the lead on staffing choices, insisting that cuts be made with a “scalpel” instead of a “hatchet.”

That came after a contentious meeting Thursday attended by Trump, Cabinet secretaries and Musk at the White House, which was followed by an explosive report in the New York Times about clashes between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump blew off a question about friction between Musk and Rubio when a reporter asked him to weigh in from the Oval Office after the Times report published.

But his response earlier this week stressing that his Cabinet secretaries take the lead in making what he deems appropriate cuts to federal agencies signals some potential pushback from his secretaries as to how Musk has been handling things.

And a more recent account from The Hill, Senate Republican says Musk ‘does not have the power to fire people’. This looks like an attempt to ‘splain the Musk-Rubio spat that is backfiring. It depicts Musk as acknowledging that he is subordinate to agency heads when the New York Times account showed the reverse, that Musk was browbeating Cabinet members for not having bent to DOGE directives, as in he was demanding that they account to him:

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said Sunday that tech billionaire Elon Musk “does not have the power to fire people.”

“Elon Musk does not have the power to fire people. The president of the United States is Donald Trump, and the agency heads are the ones who manage each of their departments, so they’ve got the — they’ve got the decision, that’s what Elon Musk has told me time and time again,” Scott said on CNN’s “State of the Union” to anchor Jake Tapper.

Mind you, these rows at the top are coming as Republican leaders have effectively told Congresscritters to hide from their constituencies, presumably out of fear of generating viral video clips critical of the Trump Administration, paraticularly DOGE. From the Guardian:

After Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, was hounded out of his own town hall event last week, Republican party leaders had had enough. Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, and Richard Hudson, the chair of the GOP’s fundraising body, decided the embarrassment had to end, and they told Republicans to stop holding the public events….

Johnson and Hudson’s edict came after several Republican town halls were interrupted in recent weeks. Scott Fitzgerald, a four-year congressman, faced an angry crowd at an event in West Bend, Wisconsin, in late February. Fitzgerald was repeatedly booed as he defended the role of Elon Musk, in particular.

Lordie. So now is everyone a fragile flower? If you are in office, part of the job is talking to citizens, particularly unhappy ones.

Violent Opposition to Musk and Tesla

Americans, particularly those who consider themselves middle class, take a dim view of destruction of property. See for instance the criticism of George Floyd protestors, the overwhelming majority of whom were non-violent. So the attacks against Tesla dealerships and vehicles may be more significant than the raw level suggests. It may portend a change in the zeitgeist.

Mind you, I have no idea how significant this activity is. Twitter would of course favor reports that the attacks on Tesla dealership are the work of evil leftie Soros-paid goons. And the press might under-report so as not to encourage imitators. But the fact that this is happening at even a modest scale seems noteworthy.

Some of the anger is well warranted and not (despite what follows shortly) all or possibly even primarily “left wing”:

Not a large protest, but not shabby either:

Now to the more aggressive action:

Bob Lefsetx at Big Picture, who is not a hair-on-fire sort, sees this trend as having the potential to escalate:

And now people are attacking Tesla cars and dealerships and…

We can’t say exactly how many people are responsible, but one thing is for sure, they’re tapping into an anger that permeates the left, if not some of the right too.

We could make this about Musk. Prognosticators believe it’s only a matter of time before he’s excised, that’s Trump’s style, but really this is about frustration with the direction of the country under Trump’s rule. The Democrats keep telling constituents to believe in the system. Meanwhile, Mike Johnson tells his minions to stop holding town halls.

In other words, the government may be losing control of the public, and that’s never a good sign. Trump’s approval ratings are dismal. And when people feel powerless…some take action. And just like with UnitedHealthcare, their behavior is endorsed by the general public and chaos rules.

AND ELON MUSK IS TAKING TONS OF PEOPLE’S JOBS!

Now what. Most people don’t have deep pockets like Elon. We keep reading how close everyone is to being broke, with only a few weeks’ money in the bank. You fire these people and they’re just going to shrug their shoulders and get on the bread line?

NO, THEY’RE GOING TO GET ANGRY!

This is what happens when you’re rich, both Trump and Elon, you’re out of touch with the public. Yes, yes, yes, Trump channeled the dissatisfaction of the blue collar workers and underclass, but don’t think he really knows anything about their lives. Do you know anybody rich? Especially those who grew up rich? Their experiences, their perspective is different. They don’t know what they don’t know.

As for Elon… He was squeezed out of PayPal for being an a**hole. His Teslas are responsible for more accidents per vehicle than any other brand because the self-driving software doesn’t work and sure, he blasted off a few rockets, but a bunch blew up too. And Canada just canceled its Starlink order. I mean why in the hell is this guy a hero? Not to mention he fires people willy-nilly.

The Stench of Corruption

The level of learned passivity over the Trump Administration corruption is shocking. Yes, Americans have been conditioned to it via the failures to hold anyone at the top meaningfully accountable, from banksters over the financial crisis to the Sacklers for Harry-Lime-level murderous drug maladministration for profit to Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading profits.

Trump launching his own coin, an immediate personal monetization of his coming back into office, was nevertheless a stunning new low in conduct. And it’s not often enough noted that the coin would allow for direct payment of bribes.

But for now, we’ll focus on Musk and DOGE.

To keep this post to a reasonable length, we’ll conclude with this must-watch presentation by Senator Chris Murphy. He takes pains to point out that he has limited himself to what he thinks are the 20 most corrupt actions since the Trump Administration took office. By my count, half have Musk as the lead or significant beneficiaries.

Keep in mind Senator Murphy’s opening observation: that this stunning new level of corruption is being done in the open to normalize it. And that strategy in particular is working very well.

___

1 Yes, we do know there is no contemporaneous evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said that. But there are plenty of modern analogues to that way of thinking, such as “Learn to code”.

00 Death of a Nation
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20 comments

    1. Mikel

      More consideration and attention should be given to much of the crew front and center (and their associates) at the inauguration.

      Reply ↓
    2. ChrisFromGA

      That’s a great question. I get the sense that Musk is very popular on the right, and with some independents. I suspect that Trump’s popularity would take a dive if there were a fallout between Trump and Elon.

      I also get the sense that Musk could care less about a few quarters of depressed sales. He’s not your typical sales-driven lemming, looking at next quarter’s numbers and no further.

      Therefore, the two may be joined together for the next four years.

      Reply ↓
    3. bob

      In military/ship management, there is an XO. The captain is the head of the ship. The XO, the captain’s second in charge, is in charge of people/operations. He’s the jerk no one likes. dogboy is the jerk.

      Reply ↓
  2. ocypode

    Thanks for the great piece. Hard to accompany what’s going on given the industrial pace of the destruction of the government (no wonder there are memes floating around calling Trump a Maoist, given how much he seems to inadvertently be doing to dismantle the US empire), and it’s brutal reading the stories from the people being fired for no reason.

    There’s a commentator on Twitter who said something that has been stuck inside my head for a few days. He was in Washington, and noted the strange mood in there, as well as noticing how there seems to be a certain glee in seeing people suffer that is being generalized throughout society:

    There is a real “Lord of the flies” logic being entrenched here. If the lord of the flies chooses you as the sacrifice, that means you deserve it. The VA EMT? The Trump voter losing his family farm thanks to Elon Musk? The act of being punished is taken as a confession of guilt. […]

    You can gut the VA, because many vets who use the VA will now accept seeing VA personnel suffer as an acceptable substitute to getting decent VA service. And by the end of that suffering, they’ll get nothing. Nothing, except a promise of seeing some other group suffer even more. […]

    The mood in parts of America is starting to resemble that of Paris in 1790-1791. The end point of that is gonna be August 10th and the September massacres. That’s where the logic leads to. And you are an idiot if you celebrate this.

    Which is to say, the very fabric of society, that element which can only be described as ‘Hobbesian’ in nature, seems to be fraying. How long until actual bloodshed starts? And once stasis has been established, then it’s hard to imagine things getting better for a long time.

    Reply ↓
    1. mrsyk

      IMO, not long before it’s anarchy for the masses, while the elite retreat to their Guelph-Ghibelline towers and watch the city burn.
      Mind you, this is driven before the three horsemen of the apocalypse, Pandemics, Nukes, and runaway global temperatures. Consider the behavior of any animal faced with imminent death.
      The crazy is in the water. Few, if any, are immune.

      Reply ↓
  3. Zagonostra

    Poor Robert Reich, he can’t seem to take off the partisan glasses, always attacking Republicans and muted on Democrat corruption. 100’s of billion to Ukraine and the Dems stopped an auditor to review the distributed of funding. Can there be more malfeasance than that, knowing the history of corruption in Ukraine?

    Until DOGE/Trump goes after some big fish, and puts them on public display/trial, this seems theatrical, theatrical but real in that people, the small fish, are losing their jobs and the big fish continue to ply the oceans looking for another meal.

    Reply ↓
    2. Carolinian

      Those glasses are widely distributed and make some of us suspicious of almost any Trump reporting coming out of the MSM.

      But I know someone under threat of DOGE and who may even have become ill from worrying about it. To be sure a lot of that worry has to do with the Dem megaphone but there really is no excuse for the Musk branch of this new administration. As he showed with his rockets and then his Tesla manufacturing Musk is a trial and error guy. And such an approach is inappropriate when applied to what is, for better or worse, our govt “commons.”

      For one thing rockets and cars don’t get to complain so it is politically foolish. But also our nation shouldn’t be run to the tune of Elon’s learning curve. No doubt our amateur president finds Musk sympathetic and for sure corrupt insiders–anything but amateur at their manipulations–are a bad thing. But open cruelty is a bad tactic.

      Reply ↓
  4. pdb

    Wow, thanks Yves, for all the red meat. There’s a lot to digest in this one. I always felt that one of the few things that the USA really excels at is its ability to coverup the rampant corruption that exists from top to bottom.

    Reply ↓
  5. A. Martin

    It’s difficult to make sense out of chaos. Telling is that Musk apparently told Space X to fast track launches in order to stay on a timetable to reach Mars. This is much like Boeing which transformed it’s company mission to build the best airliners to one that seems to state “get them off the assembly line ASAP and deal with the lemons later.” Musk’s approach,with DOGE,, seems to be ” destroy the village, in order to save it.” Or maybe it’s an enlightened philospohical version of “creative destruction.” Trump can let Musk be his lightening rod up to a point. Trump rode a wave of voters, fustrated with Biden’s favoring international affairs over domestic concerns. Trump was the proverbial wrench thrown into the machinery of government. “Make America Great Again”, exactly what does that mean if the voter’s lives aren’t made better. And Vance will get his democratic ideals ,spoken to the Europeans, thrown back into his face, if the ‘people’ take to the streets in protest and Trump seizes an opportun ity to lay down martial law. These are troubling and potentially explosive times.

    Reply ↓
  7. Jason Boxman

    And Biden has shown the way with blanket pardons; It’s entirely possible that no one in Trump’s administration can ever be held to account in the courts.

    Funny, that.

    At least now America as an oligarchy is patently obvious; the mask has come off. Trump’s shatcoin stunt is a bell that cannot be un-rung, way beyond Clinton renting out the Whitehouse guest room or their foundation to pre-pay bribes for Hilary’s eventual (failed) presidential campaign.

    Reply ↓
  8. dsrcwt

    Personally, I don’t see the billionaire class having an interest in intentionally crashing a system that presently works for them, in the hopes that the chaos that follows results in a better system. The crash of the Soviet Union created new winners, destroyed some of the previous winners and destroyed the standard of living, plunging life expectancy to something like 55. The oligarchs who won were able to take their wealth to the west, and live in London, while profiting off the chaos back home. Where would our oligarchs go to sit out the chaos? Once you spin the roulette wheel, there is no knowing where it will land. Better to stick to the present rigged system.

    Reply ↓
    1. funemployed

      I think billionaires behavior is more easily explained with an addiction framework than a “rational economic actor” framework. They are addicts accustomed to living in an entire society of enablers, and so feel an extreme level of impunity as they chase bigger and bigger hits of acquisition and exercise of power.

      Does it make sense to sell your spouse’s car that she uses to get to the job that supplies your steady portion of drug money? Obviously not. Can you trust a severe addict not to do that exact thing, consequences be damned. Just as obviously, no.

      Reply ↓
      1. dsrcwt

        I may be mistaken, but my impression was that Yves was implying a rational intention on their part. If I am mistaken, I apologise. If they are not rational we are into monkey with a grenade territory.

        Reply ↓
        1. funemployed

          As per my metaphor, it’s not strictly “irrational” to sell your enabler’s vehicle to buy more drugs in the “monkey with grenade” sense. You can buy a lot of drugs with that cash. I believe Yves point is that engineering a financial crisis can be very profitable for some people in the short term. Look at how much wealthier and more powerful oligarchs are now than in even, say, 2007.

          My point is that scooping up more assets, gaining more institutional control, and even sticking it to the proles, are their addict compulsions. Addicts are typically extremely clever when it comes to getting the next hit or cash for the next bender. They usually even understand the long term consequences of their choices. They just don’t care enough or have the wherewithal to stop chasing the high.

          Reply ↓
    3. David in Friday Harbor

      Where would our oligarchs go to sit out the chaos?

      Jackson Hole. Taos. Martha’s Vineyard. Molokai and Lanai. Saint Thomas. The Cairngorms. Wanaka and Central Otago NZ. There’s a long list.

      I think that Yves’s post is spot-on. Trump’s mantra is Buy Low; Sell High. His real estate business was most recently focused on laundering money looted from the former USSR into American real property. This is the font of his admiration for Russia.

      This is also the wet dream of America’s oligarchs as they stand behind him. To bankrupt their competitors (including Canada and the EU) and to scoop up their assets on the cheap. Then drive the plebes off to go die — which might even solve human-induced climate change (they’re Bond villains after all, saving the world for themselves).

      The biggest difference between 2025 America and 1991 USSR is the Second Amendment and better weather (the dispossessed can’t simply pass out and freeze to death), so we’ll see how this works out…

      Reply ↓
  9. chuck roast

    McMurphy The Crime Dog certainly has a nose for Republican corruption. Somehow his olfactories fail him when snooping around the Ukrainian elites…arguably the most corrupt coterie on the planet. The $25.3B in defense spending in Connecticut in 2023 probably did a lot to spread pepper on this most obvious of trails.

    Reply ↓

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