Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter
reuters.comI knew some people that were initially very optimistic, and I tried to keep an open mind when DOGE got started despite the outlandish claims that they would be able to cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget, but it's apparent at this point that the project has been an extreme failure. It'll probably take a few years to really sort out their damage and overall impact though.
It's also imperative to mention in every DOGE-related discussion and conversation that the funding freeze to USAID is directly responsible for killing thousands of people [0]. Most of the damage done by DOGE can probably be reversed, but the thousands of death as a direct result of actions taken by the richest man in the world should not be forgotten. (Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
I work @ the nih, formerly at the cdc... can I politely ask why they were optimistic? When I first started seeing rumblings about this a year ago, my first thought was "the deficit is entitlement spending; this is a political problem, not a bureaucratic one".
Anyways, like you, I genuinely wish the DOGEsters would have asked us what we thought was inefficient about gov work. I have been in many meetings where 90% of it was spent complaining about compliance. I personally hate the USAJOBS system. Like any big company, there's a lot that can be improved.
Instead, they went scorched-Earth and assumed we were all deep state leeches. Elon acted like he had just done a leveraged buyout of the US government. For me, he remains the most embarrassing man on Earth.
Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense. Touching anything else is just tinkering at edges.
Social Security comes from its own budget paid by a separate tax. When its savings (accrued by that same dedicated tax) runs dry it has to cut spending. It will not, under current law, deficit spend. The only problem to solve there is whether we want to adjust its funding so benefit levels don’t drop in the nearish future.
People bringing it up in discussions of the general budget usually either don’t understand how it’s funded, or are presenting it inaccurately because they want to end it.
This is part of what I meant by "political problem". People see the mainline deficit number without thinking about the underlying stocks/flows of the system. There are feedback loops embedded in this that are unavoidably political (nobody wants to take grandma's retirement money). There's no "founder's mentality" that can avoid this basic fact.
Except you blamed “entitlement spending” for the deficit, which the comment above clearly disproves.
I “blame” it only in the sense that it’s part of the negative cash flow, even if it has its own dedicated pool of cash. I don’t use the term “entitlement” pejoratively.
But I am not a “panic about the deficit” guy. There’s a lot of trivial things we could do: rethink fee for service, negotiate more w/ providers, raise taxes, etc
> Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense.
It's almost a trope/meme to label the US government as "an insurance company with an army":
> Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a sideline business in national defense and homeland security), which does its accounting on a cash basis, only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door. An insurance company with cash accounting . . . is an accident waiting to happen.
* Peter Fisher, 2003, Bust Treasury official; https://nsjonline.com/article/2017/08/hill-the-insurance-com...
I struggle to understand the metaphor. From link:
Voters think they've saved: "I paid my taxes all my life".The U.S. federal budget is now 50 percent consumed by spending for Social Security, a social insurance program; Medicare and Medicaid, two of the largest health insurance programs in the country; and various other social safety net programs which act as insurance plans as well. Except for one thing. None of these federal insurance programs operate as licensed sanctioned insurance plans as we see in the private sector where money is collected from the individual and invested or managed in a fiduciary manner to build assets to pay for claims in the future.But what would it mean for a government to save money over decades?
How else can a government run except on a cash basis?
Aside: I belong to a non-profit health insurance co-op and a non-profit car insurance - they run by matching payouts to premiums and limiting what they cover (e.g. Southern Cross Healthcare is extra healthcare on top of what the NZ government provides). Edit: ooops, I've just noticed my car insurer AMI Insurance which was a mutual insurance company before the Canterbury earthquakes went bust and the government sold it (now part of IAG).
> But what would it mean for a government to save money over decades?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund
The SSA had actually been collecting 'extra' money (from Baby Boomers) for awhile now and putting off to the side, but that extra income stopped a while ago, and the trust fund where it was stored was being tapped to keep benefits up.
The "shortage" in Social Security that is sometimes in the US news is the estimated time when the 'extra' funds run out, and benefits will only be covered in cashflows.
And this is not sudden thing: many government pension systems in the world are facing similar situations. The politicians in the US have not done anything about (for decades), whereas Canada did decide to change their system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor...
Other countries are facing debates (France, Denmark, etc).
> when the 'extra' funds run out, and benefits will only be covered in cashflows
The issue is that the necessary delivered services is a kinda fixed amount that the economy should deliver. The economy can't really "save" money. A government can choose to change taxes, change benefits, sell assets (to who?), or burden the next generation with debts (e.g. via mortgages).
Talking about money between generations is often just fictional accounting.
The US has done something about it, they raised the retirement age to 67. But that was more of a band aid.
The real solution is to raise the maximum SSA payment or eliminate it all together.
That said, even if the government does nothing, it's not as if SSA goes away. Instead, the payments are reduced (Last I saw, it was around 75% of current payments). That'd suck, for sure, but it's not the all or nothing framing.
> But what would it mean for a government to save money over decades?
Sovereign wealth fund.
> Defense
American soldiers I've met overseas seemed to think the defense department is mainly a social healthcare/education/jobs program. Perhaps these need to be split from the defense budget, and applied to the entire population.
The United States government is an insurance company with an army.
> "the deficit is entitlement spending; this is a political problem, not a bureaucratic one".
Sort of? Medicare is about a trillion dollars, but what percentage of that is actually helping people and how much is going to unnecessary tests or fraud or overpaying for things? If e.g. HHS issues some bad rules that increase healthcare costs, that increases the cost of Medicare and Medicaid and the VA, but if you're doing it properly you're not ignoring that part of HHS just because its regulatory budget is comparatively smaller when it's doing things that incur billions in indirect costs.
Moreover, you can't find a trillion dollars in a program that costs a million dollars, but if it costs a million dollars and isn't worth a million dollars then that's not a reason to keep it.
And nobody can claim with a straight face that the military budget contains no inefficiencies, but that's not entitlement spending.
> Instead, they went scorched-Earth and assumed we were all deep state leeches.
The general problem is that nobody wants their thing to be the thing that gets cut even when it's the thing that ought to be, and then how do you tell if something is actually important when somebody will claim that everything is? It's legitimately a hard problem and DOGE did not succeed in solving it, but that means we need a solution that actually works or people are going to keep coming at you with knives drawn because the status quo is untenable.
Any serious attempt at reducing the deficit would mean confronting one of the largest sectors of the American economy. All of the stuff you mentioned - pointless tests, upcoding fraud, etc - is part of that.
It is not irrational to cut millions in wasteful spending. It is irrational for a department of government efficiency to spend all of its energy cutting random million dollar contracts instead of figuring out how to plan the attack for the confrontation above.
DOGE did not fail because its a hard problem. They failed because they thought it was easy. Taking over a company with a thousand employees is categorically different than revamping the spending of the United States.
DOGE "failed" because cutting the budget wasn't their real goal.
Here are a few outcomes they were able to achieve: (1) Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk. (2) Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them. (3) Copying information from multiple government databases.
(1) had immediate benefits to Musk. (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service. (3) provides numerous long term benefits to Musk and anyone else with access to that data.
> Cutting funding for agencies and organizations that were investigating companies run by Elon Musk.
Which doesn't make any sense because you don't need to cut their funding when it's your buddies in office. They just don't investigate you anymore regardless of their funding level.
> Cutting funding for organizations, like NOAA, that have high economic returns for every dollar the government spent on them.
It's obvious why fossil fuel companies (and therefore Trump) would want to do this, but Musk is the guy who does electric cars and grid storage batteries. His financial incentive would be to play up the dangers of climate change.
And this is the same as the first one. If your guy is in office then you don't need to cut the funding of some agency under your own control, you just have them stop doing whatever it is you don't want them to do anymore.
> Copying information from multiple government databases.
The only reason DOGE could copy them to begin with is that they were already in control of the government and therefore already had access to the databases. If you want to complain about something, how about why does the government keep all of this sensitive information instead of encouraging systems that use decentralized identity or don't imply or require mass surveillance in order to operate? Every administration has access to that when they get elected, including the ones you don't like, so let's not have it to begin with.
> (2) leaves openings for someone with enough capital to fill in the gaps left behind and make a profit charging for what used to be a government service.
If this was actually a profitable market then there would be no reason for it to be a government service to begin with. But it isn't, because collecting the data is expensive and there aren't a lot of buyers. If anything getting rid of NOAA would cost SpaceX money because NOAA pays SpaceX to launch satellites, and nobody else is going to do it.
Republicans want to cut NOAA because they publish climate data and the fossil fuel industry is a Republican constituency. But you don't need DOGE for that when the Republicans control Congress.
They were completely feckless at finding the right things to cut but this stuff is conspiracy theories.
> Any serious attempt at reducing the deficit would mean confronting one of the largest sectors of the American economy. All of the stuff you mentioned - pointless tests, upcoding fraud, etc - is part of that.
Which is exactly what they should have been doing. It's blatantly obvious that they failed -- federal spending went up year over year.
But that means the problem remains and someone's going to have to take another go at it.
Doge never had any power to even change government spending. The budget is determined by congress.
The budget is determined by what's written on a piece of paper that Congress eventually passes. You don't have to be a member of Congress to be the one drafting it or making recommendations.
Why were congressionally appropriated funds impounded by Doge?
I believe their argument was that the Impoundment Act is unconstitutional because Congress can appropriate money for something, and the executive branch can't take that and use it for something else, but Congress doesn't have the power to make them do something with it instead of just not spending it at all. It's basically a checks and balances argument; to get the government to do something you need Congress to appropriate money for it and the President to implement it and if either of them says no then it's not happening.
The executive can't unilaterally declare something is unconstitutional. The impoundment act was passed to prevent exactly this because that's exactly what Nixon did. The executive doesn't make the laws and congress literally already litigated this. If you want it to be unconstitutional then take it up with the supreme court, otherwise you're just indulging in lawlessness. This is a ridiculous argument.
> The executive can't unilaterally declare something is unconstitutional.
Any of the branches can do that. The courts don't need the permission of Congress or the President to strike down a law. Congress doesn't need anyone's permission to refuse to pass something because they think it's unconstitutional.
Consider what prosecutorial discretion is.
> The impoundment act was passed to prevent exactly this because that's exactly what Nixon did.
Congress passed it, but Congress frequently does unconstitutional things and then one of the other branches has to put a stop to it because that's how checks and balances work.
What do you suppose would happen if Congress passed a First Amendment-violating censorship law, the courts struck it down and then Congress passed a second law saying the courts have to uphold the first one?
I've followed DOGE closely and haven't heard anything that would indicate they were even trying to reduce unnecessary medicare spending. Where I have heard that they've tried to touch healthcare spending, they've made a huge mess. For instance, they cancelled a lot of support contracts at the VA, but many of those contracts did necessary things, like maintaining complex machinery. If you read ProPublica's article on DOGE at the VA, it's pretty clear that this was done incredibly quickly by a guy with zero healthcare knowledge using a minimal prompt and wasn't even directing the AI to read the most important parts of the contract. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-veterans-affai...
There seems to be some indication that they hired some incompetent people and/or were prohibited from cutting some of the things that ought to be cut. And I don't think there is any question that the deadline they set for themselves was unrealistically aggressive.
Which means we need someone to go back and do it properly, not that it doesn't need to be done.
I think everyone would agree that we should reduce fraud and waste in healthcare spending. I don't think DOGE was making a serious attempt to do that.
What Doge was trying to do cannot be done legally.
Sure it can, by the atorneys general. A core part of their job is identifying, stopping, and prosecuting fraud and waste spending in the government.
Doge was never legal, but there were agencies that had the statutory power to do what doge wanted. However, they also could investigate things like emoluments violations which is precisely why they were some of the first to be fired.
Are you under the impression that CMS doesn’t address fraud and overpayments with extremely harsh penalties, every single time they’re found?
Do you think CMS just shrugs and oks every single test?
I don’t understand the basis for your complaints, here.
There are two big issues with CMS costs, and you’ve identified 10% of one of them.
They could just go after Medicare fraud (committed largely by extremely wealthy corporations in extremely detectable ways), get an easy $100B or so under their belt, then reconvene on next steps.
That'd require them to be willing to go after their grifter buddies, and to understand anything about our institutions other than what they read on Twitter.
> The general problem is that nobody wants their thing to be the thing that gets cut even when it's the thing that ought to be, and then how do you tell if something is actually important when somebody will claim that everything is?
We have a process for this. It's called appropriations. It happens in Congress.
> They could just go after Medicare fraud (committed largely by extremely wealthy corporations in extremely detectable ways), get an easy $100B or so under their belt
My impression of the 2025 feud between Musk and Trump is that Musk actually wanted to do stuff like that and Trump wouldn't do it.
And they should do it, but this year's deficit is ~$1.8T despite federal receipts pushing the record high in real dollars per capita (as usual) and consistent with historical norms as a percent of GDP.
So what about the other $1.7T?
> We have a process for this. It's called appropriations. It happens in Congress.
We also have some strong empirical evidence that the outcome of that process is huge deficits, so something has to change if it's not to stay the same.
This is a biased source but is the first I could find- https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primar...
But we were set to pay off the nation debt by 2013 before Bush tax cuts. Bush’s tarp, Trump tax cuts plus Covid were the other nails in the coffin of debt reduction.
Starve the beast has been an official Republican strategy for 40 years.
Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
It went way, way up during WWII and hasn't changed much since. And that's relative to GDP over a period that real GDP per capita increased significantly, i.e. government revenue in real dollars per capita is through the roof.
The US tax system has an evolved defect where the tax brackets are set in nominal dollars and then as inflation pushes everyone into the next highest bracket Congress periodically gets to claim credit for passing a "tax cut" without actually reducing the level of real government revenue -- indeed it has been going up enough to keep up with real GDP growth. And if you confuse that with an actual tax cut then you can write articles where "without the tax cut" there would be more revenue, but only because there is an implicit continuous tax increase baked into the tax code to allow Congress to repeatedly tell everyone that up is down.
It's not a revenue problem. Revenue is up. It's a spending problem.
> We also have some strong empirical evidence that the outcome of that process is huge deficits, so something has to change if it's not to stay the same.
Get on the barricades and start the revolution then.
Not true. Musk wanted to go after Medicare benefits.
He said "Entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid need to be eliminated."
Don't sanewash here. Musk has no clue what he's doing.
> He said "Entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid need to be eliminated."
The only thing on the internet that search engines turn up for that exact quote is your post. Here's the actual quote:
> “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that’s the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe six, 700 billion,” Musk said on Monday in an interview with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow. Musk’s comments came in response to a question from Kudlow about whether there would be a report on targeting waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending.
Medicare is around a trillion dollars by itself, so those numbers don't make any sense as the removal of entire programs, but total entitlement spending is several trillion in total and a reduction in those amounts would make sense in the context of targeting waste, fraud and abuse in entitlement spending, which is the thing he was being asked about.
Exactly. It's the job of the atorneys general to investigate and prosecute fraud. Trump fired them almost day 1.
If they wanted to actually address that, then they should have put all of the doge employees to work for the AG.
CMS itself could also do a lot of work, especially the OIGs
Unfortunately: also fired day (week?) one.
> unnecessary tests or fraud or overpaying for things?
Glad you ask. That was the job of the Attorneys general to figure out. A core part of their task was finding and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
They were fired almost day one of the Trump admin. DOGE's notion that the actual gov spending was in the employees was laughable. If we actually wanted to eliminate waste then we should have put more employees in the AG and IRS, not done mass firings from those agencies.
The other part to mention is that Medicare Part C, putting public dollars into private insurers, has lead to a huge amount of the fraud. Those useless tests have often been done by these private insurance agencies because they can easily bill the government for them.
Eliminating that public/private partnership is exactly what will save money. Our inefficiencies are largely due to our reliance on the private sector to backfill what the government isn't doing.
> They were fired almost day one of the Trump admin.
And then they hired different ones. Which in and of itself has nothing to do with it.
> The other part to mention is that Medicare Part C, putting public dollars into private insurers, has lead to a huge amount of the fraud. Those useless tests have often been done by these private insurance agencies because they can easily bill the government for them.
That's not the half of it though. The entire US healthcare industry is full of corruption and inefficiency. In general it's the providers who want the unnecessary tests, not the insurance companies.
> Our inefficiencies are largely due to our reliance on the private sector to backfill what the government isn't doing.
I feel like this is why we never solve it. The Democrats insist that the only solution is for the government take the whole thing over, the Republicans point to people in France waiting a year for an appointment and then nothing changes because they're both taking money from the industry so neither of them are trying to fix the real problem.
Because what you need is to set up non-emergency care to have actual competition. If you need an X-ray some time in the next month, a computer gives you a list of every office with an open appointment, their price and their distance from you. The providers charge between $50 and $200 but some are closer to you or have sooner appointments, the insurance pays $50 no matter where you go and then you get to pick but you pay the difference.
You need the patient to have the ability to say "you know what, the one that's 10 minutes closer isn't worth $120 extra" and pick the less expensive one, because then they actually have the incentive to get prices under control, instead of the current insanity where just getting them to tell you how much something is going to cost is like pulling teeth and the government subsidizes getting your health insurance through your employer in the tax code to keep it that way.
Because I think everyone agrees there is extreme amounts of waste in government spending and budgets. I was hopeful when they announced DOGE but imo they went about it entirely wrong.
> the project has been an extreme failure.
It has been a rousing success, if by success you mean Musk stealing a boatload of information he had absolutely no right to have.
Any “we’re going to fix waste in the government and reduce the deficit” project that doesn’t lead with “… so first we’re going to review the last twenty years of recommendations from the CBO and GAO and start implementing what they say or imply we should do to meet those goals” is almost certainly bullshit.
Being optimistic about this one was one of those “having a mind so open your brain falls out” sorts of things.
Yep. There’s an entire catalog already built of deeply researched inefficiencies in the government.
What a shame that DOGE burned a huge portion of this generation’s willingness to take a bold approach to said inefficiencies. Similar efforts will be tainted for years.
It is not remotely a failure. As a vessel for achieving project 2025 goals, the clear purpose of DOGE, it was successful. It's just that the successes it achieved are reprehensible.
For those less informed, such as myself. Could you provide a quick summary of those project 2025 successes achieved by DOGE?
They want to to shut down large portions of the government. For example, they want to completely eliminate all public education, not make it more efficient.
https://www.project2025.observer/en
DOGE was the bludgeon that crippled most of the targets on this list. Not the only one, but a major player.
That was not the clear purpose of DOGE. The Trump campaign deliberately distanced itself from Project 2025. If they had been honest about their intent to enact Project 2025 to voters, they would have lost.
It was the clear purpose. It just wasn't the openly described purpose.
Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax.
To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.
Ignorant voters do not excuse the actions of elected officials
I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.
People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.
I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.
It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.
Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.
All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.
> Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid.
Maybe or maybe not. What I do know is that they are large in number and a political opponent should realize this and strategize accordingly.
Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.
All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.
The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.
> would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE
Ramaswamy is a useless idiot. He wasn’t useful in getting DOGE to exist. (He rallied voters in states Trump couldn’t or otherwise would have won. It’s why he was easily cast aside–he didn’t bring anything to the table.)
I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).
The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.
In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.
They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.
That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.
It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
The east wing and the shutdown aren't remotely on the same level, though. I barely knew it existed before the whole controversy.
I think you're being too harsh. "Dense motherfuckers"?
My own sense is that these people are willfully ignorant. That is, they seek to find confirmation of what they already believe. Kind of human nature, really. It's sad that there is a complete infrastructure that spouts what these people want to hear, make lots of money doing so.
I’m done with treating willful morons nicely. The last year has turned me from a Vonnegut to a Twain, if you will. A good chunk of My Fellow Americans are just awful, and after 25ish years of serious political awareness & attention and watching what’s happened over that time my benefit-of-the-doubt tanks are dry, having been siphoned at high rates continuously that entire time. Probably I was myself stupid ever to have thought better of these dangerous dipshits. It’s not like I wasn’t pretty familiar with history, but somehow, it took watching people be extremely dumb and never learn over a long period to break through what I suppose was some kind of savior-complex ego thing that made me want to be the kind of person who believed people were mostly pretty good. How embarrassing.
They’re dense motherfuckers, and that’s the generous take. They’re a black hole of stupid. That’s the level of density we’re dealing with. And that’s just the America I’ll be living with until I die. One that’s been trashed so thoroughly by the idiot brigade that hope for actual improvement is gone for, best case, several more decades, which will amount to the rest of my life.
They’ve wrecked shit out beyond the horizon of my plausible lifespan, in all likelihood. They’ve been continuously working toward doing this my whole life. No, I’m absolutely not being too harsh.
>No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax.
>To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.
Many, many folks were out there long before the election saying (both as promises -- from the Trumpers and warnings -- from pretty much everyone else) that Project 2025 would be the blueprint for a new Trump administration.
That some folks either ignored or disbelieved it doesn't make it "unclear." Rather, it means that a lot of people believed the lies. Which says more about those who believed such lies than it does about everyone else.
And to put a fine point on it, what more could others have done to disabuse those folks of the lies told them by the Trump campaign? Seriously.
I think you're missing the point: it was the purpose all along, they just didn't state that.
"Several Trump voters"? And, and not just Trump voters - the most common search phrase on Google on 11/20/2024?
"Did Biden drop out?"
You have far more faith in an educated electorate than I.
> The Trump campaign deliberately distanced itself from Project 2025.
The Trump campaign lied. Just like Trump mostly lies any time his lips move.
I think this article is correct in spirit but a little disingenuous in parts. Would it not be more fair to blame Russia as the primary cause for the deaths in Ukraine due to the collapsing health care system rather than USAID subsequently intervening to stop easily preventable deaths.
I say this not to defend DOGE but rather to emphasize that we should always make abundantly clear the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine lies solely with Putin
We should also not ignore the fact that USAID was responsible for many hundreds of millions (if not more) in fraudulently directed contracts and spending [1].
[1] https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/usaid-...
And that makes those deaths fine and dandy, or what do you mean now? When I go to the hospital I don't expect to be killed to fix my cancer, even though it would indeed make me cancer free.
These people stole all the DBs and stored them on insecure systems and in the cloud. I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President. A lot of people need to serve long prison sentences and these guys are prime candidates.
> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President.
Democrats broadly lack the spine necessary for this. But regardless, this is also illegal. Despite the actions of the current administration, an EO to snatch people off the street and jail them would violate the 4th amendment.
That would be for a court to decide later. Meanwhile, they'll languish in a hot and humid prison somewhere. Preferably Alligator Alcatraz. Even if some court decided then it would immediately be appealed and precedent from the current Executive Branch shows that court orders don't need to necessarily be obeyed anytime soon.
“I don’t care about the law as long as the lawbreakers are on my side.”
We’ve already crossed this bridge. Unilaterally disarming doesn’t make sense if the next MAGA President just chips away at the system again.
Sorry, does “disarming” here mean “not engaging in illegal authoritarian action”?
I’m not sure what system is being protected in the scenario where everyone is openly and illegally authoritarian. I hope that if Democrats get back into power they will invest in stabilizing democracy and the rule of law, not just attempting to run the same authoritarian playbook for their own benefit.
> does “disarming” here mean “not engaging in illegal authoritarian action”?
Nothing discussed is black-and-white illegal. SCOTUS has made that clear.
> hope that if Democrats get back into power they will invest in stabilizing democracy and the rule of law
Me too. The first step in that has to be setting the precedent that if you side with an autocrat, you lose your wealth and freedom.
Just to emphasize what the sibling comment said:
You call the described actions "illegal", but under the law of the land as it stands today, nothing the President does is illegal if he can make even a vague claim to be doing it as an official act of the Office of President.
To be clear, this is wrong, terrifying, and needs to be overturned, but it is the law of the land, since the SCOTUS decision that made it so.
Assuming we can get to a place where Democrats hold power in our government once again, until we can get the absolute mess that the Republicans have made cleaned up in its entirety, it would be not merely irresponsible, but catastrophic for the Democrats to fail to use every tool at their disposal, including things that are only legal because the Republicans thought they would never have to give up power, in order to achieve that end.
The alternative is to fall back into fascism, which should be seen as unacceptable by absolutely anyone with a conscience.
Alternatively, the US could look at a new, stronger constitution. Like, presumably no-one really _intended_ that the US constitution would make the president an unaccountable dictator; if the Supreme Court has done that under the auspices of the constitution, it's clearly not fit for purpose and should be amended or replaced.
Other countries do this _all the time_. Ireland had amended its constitution more times in a century than the US has in 250 years (and even then, the US ones are pretty front loaded). France is on its fifth republic.
This is not possible without first doing the things that I describe. (Or something similar.)
Too many states are too heavily gerrymandered to disenfranchise minorities and other likely-Democratic voters for a Constitutional amendment that favors (small-d) democratic rule to pass. Same problem with a new Constitution.
To the sentiment more broadly, I tend to agree: we have given our original Constitution too much deference. It is flexible, yes, but not flexible enough to deal with all the changes that have arisen since, with one of the biggest problems being the much more rapid pace of life today. As for what specific measures are needed to fix it.....god, I don't know. I can come up with a few, but I don't for a second think they'd be comprehensive enough to prevent what happened over the past 40ish years to lead to this.
I agree with this. Though this would require getting a lot of people to stop imagining that the founding fathers created a perfect document. There’s a very weird belief that the founding documents (and the founding fathers) are essentially infallible and that governing in accordance with these is the best possible option. Of course this leads to “originalist” jurisprudence which seems to consist of finding ways to pretend that whatever the judge believes is exactly what the founding fathers intended.
Though even then, given the context, it's hard to imagine that they intended making the president an unaccountable dictator. Like, Trump's taking on more power than George III.
Eh, the EO would just have to direct the justice department to look into pursuing criminal charges against the people.
“Investigate criminal activity” is a very different EO than “immediately seize and jail”.
Jailing while completing an investigation is perfectly precedented for all sorts of crimes. To suggest these guys, in particular, aren’t a flight and destruction of evidence risk would take work.
Nothing is illegal if the prez can just tell you to execute someone. Then pardon you.
> Democrats broadly lack the spine
The party elites are complacent. That’s creating a political vacuum for someone who’s more aggressive.
> this is also illegal
An EO is. The President asking the FBI, DoJ and state AGs to prioritise the last administration’s lawbreakers—a thing Biden was elected to do and failed at—is just norms and conventions.
> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President
I am not expecting the Democrats, at least as they are now, to pursue justice regarding the schemers and criminals in this administration. They are far more interested in preserving power structures and the tiered justice system than even the easy political win inherent in holding their enemies to account. Expect the rhetoric to rapidly shift to "moving forward" and "Trump was an exception, other Republicans are totally reasonable coworkers."
I'm pretty sure this administration will just pardon them.
... I mean, the response to lawlessness is not more lawlessness. That's essentially a bill of attainder.
Did they revoke credentials on their way out the door, or is there now just a squadron of elon’s minions who have keys to federal gov systems?
Whether they revoked the credentials or not there are certainly unauthorized copies on usb drives and cloud servers.
You give them too much credit if you even suspect them of doing the right thing. You can't expect them to just give up an avenue to such an unfair advantage, no matter how illegal it is. Their wealth and power is incompatible with ethics and legality. I mean, what else do you expect from a guy who so insensitivity mocked and laughed on TV at the misery and suffering that he inflicted on the ordinary people? Besides, who is gatekeping their access to the federal systems now? They fired everybody who tried to resist.
Let me get into a conspiratorial territory now. I have a feeling that the access to those systems are not limited to just this wannabe-Nazi and his minions. I suspect that some very hostile and clandestine elements like Palantir might have integrated into it. I don't have serious evidences to back up any of these. But a lot of people are discussing this now. These aren't even secret plots. These tech bro billionaires have been publicly expressing their contempt and disdain for ordinary people and democracy for nearly two decades now. They had been publicly endorsing and promiting tech authoritarianism. Much like the Project 2025, they had been outlining their plans too (though less publicized), that they're following to the dot now. Crimes come with a user manual these days, it seems! They salivate over a tech dystopia like in the Dredd comics. What lends credibility to this is their publicly conspicuous cooperation, that's less likely under normal circumstances.
All these are why I always say that 'I have nothing to hide' is a terrible argument against personal privacy. Anyways, just assume that your past and future confidential information is entirely compromised by some very nefarious elements that are openly hostile at you.
Elon's legacy:
Destroyed a bunch of services to the American people in an extremely haphazard way with little thought to the consequences.
Destroyed morale in the Federal workforce through mass firings which caused hardship to thousands, with little thought to the consequences.
Literally killed thousands in Africa/Asia by removing aid with little thought to the consequences. (Even if USAID was a soft-power/CIA tool, the actual aid was real.)
Accomplished little to nothing.
I never again want to hear how "smart" Elon is.
What if those were exactly his goals?
Possibly it was, though I don't think Elon Musk is an ideologue in the Project2025 sense. Rather, he saw an opportunity to "solve government" and bought an election to do so, and then it didn't turn out the way things he wanted (turns out "solving government" is not a technical problem to be fixed by bringing in a bunch of Monster-fueled trigger-happy coders).
If it was his goal, it doesn't make much sense as to why -- it doesn't advance Elon's other stated goals in any way.
This was all incredibly illegal and anyone involved in this should see the inside of a cell for a very long time.
E: if you disagree with me, you need to familiarize yourself with congressional budget allocation, the impoundment act, and federal data privacy laws. DOGE did not have the unilateral authority to do basically anything it tried to do and we have yet to hold anyone accountable for trying to subvert the will of the people.
One of the random 19-year-olds they hired (whose nickname is "BigBalls") previously worked selling VPN services to a cybercriminal group ("the Com") whose activities involved extorting children for CSAM and then blackmailing them into committing suicide on livestream.
So, there's more to go after if anyone cares to.
Tagging on I really recommend everyone read up on groups like the Com, 764, or O9A. It's impossible to describe these groups without sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist and yet they're all real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
"The Com" is not a distinct entity as medias like to describe it. These days it generally just refers to the anglosphere cybercrime community at large.
That’s effectively the entire executive branch in this administration: take illegal actions until the courts stop us, and then do it some more.
It’s a reverse FDR with waaaaaay less public support.
FDR threatened to do this, but in fact Congress gave him everything he wanted. Not even “gave” as in “didn’t stop him” (like the current one). They wrote and passed the policy he requested.
Yeah, the “crazy-high popularity” thing enables that.
Failing to even win a majority of voters… less so.
But yeah, FDR did a hell of a lot less actual law-breaking.
The correct way.
I know that it was somewhat illegal, but nothing to do with the details of how the massive government bureaucracy functions or the rules it follows are anything to do with what you might call the "will of the people." It's the kind of thing you don't even know without hiring a lawyer that specifically specializes in it.
If you want to change that then you get a majority in congress. If you can't pass bills then it's not the will of the people. Simple as that.
A friend who works for a three letter agency said that they received orders from DOGE literally today so I’m not sure I believe this Reuters story.
It's likely that DOGE was just a facade for a clandestine infiltration plan. They let that facade crumble when they finally had the deep data compromise that they craved. But they still invoke that name whenever they want to do something while hiding their identity.
Was the order just a poop emoji by chance?
The more distressing part of this obvious policy mistake is that if any remaining journalist attempts to take the administration to task on this failure, they’ll just be called a disgusting piggy and scolded for having the gall to bring it up.
DOGE represents all the worst aspects of startup culture.
These guys saw all the existing expertise in the federal government as lazy, stupid, old-fashioned, and wasteful, and they thought that they were basically supermen - smarter, harder working, infused with AI superpowers. So they ripped up institutions that have been built at great public cost over generations. These institutions deal with incredibly complex real-world problems. But the DOGE people thought that with AI they could make better decisions in a few seconds than people with decades of experience.
The results were pretty much what you would expect. Much of what they trashed was valuable, even lifesaving. (USAID is the prime example). Destroying it saved the US government a relative pittance (the US government spent more money in 2025 than 2024) but the human cost was enormous.
Imagine being a young political leader in a developing country. You've grown up thinking favorably about the US because of the positive engagement we've made with your country - not just humanitarian aid, but also elites in your country have gone to school in the US and felt welcomed here. Now, you've just seen that the US will abandon all its promises to you in a heartbeat and leave your country with a humanitarian catastrophe. Why would you ever see the US favorably?
Or imagine that you're a small business owner who provided some valuable product or service to the US government. You've made business plans based on the understanding that the US government is a reliable customer. Then an AI told a 23 year old with no experience in your field that your contract was wasteful.
The DOGE guys will move on to other cushy startup jobs. They'll make a ton of money in their careers. The rest of us will be left to deal with the fallout.
Which is why we need to get a list of names of all the DOGE guys. There wasn't many of them.
These guys need to face the music imo. If people don't face prosecution it will be damaging.
Elon must needs to be investigated. All previous investigation need to be reviewed and if DOGE stopped or slowed any of them they need to be turned up to 10000000.
This has been everyone else's experience of the Trump regime, as well.
Here in Australia we've been "America's Poodle" for generations, enthusiastically joined in on every war and bizarre colonial adventure that the USA has started. And then we get slapped with tariffs and insulted by the President. Our politicians are slowly grappling with the new reality that the USA is not our friend and ally any more.
Europe has a similar experience. No longer is the West "shoulder to shoulder" fighting the authoritarian regimes and defending shared values. Suddenly Europe is not an ally, possibly an economic enemy, and is being insulted by the President.
The damage that the last 9 months have done to the USA's standing with the rest of the world is unbelievable. As has been said before; Trump may not be a Russian agent, but it's hard to see what a Russian agent would have done differently.
And that includes DOGE - ripping up government institutions that have taken decades to build is not a productive measure, it's destructive. It's what the USA's enemies would do to it if they could.
The halfway competent folks in the US realize that this has happened, and that the repercussions will last for a decade or more. Regaining international trust, and all the privileges that came with it, will not be easy or pleasant. I fear that it may not be possible, if China steps up too quickly.
Many people make an analogy to Brexit, where a democracy intentionally commits economic and political suicide. I fear the impact on the US will be far worse than Brexit's impact on the UK.
People bring up the foreign aid cuts due to DOGE but don’t understand that America is still the greatest contributor worldwide to foreign aid contributions. Meanwhile BRICS countries are no where contributing nearly as much but can afford to. Taking care of such places should be a shared responsibility.
Sure, that seems like a reasonable observation. But the answer to that is to ask the other nations to step up - not to step back and let people die hoping someone else will catch them
Europe spends way more than US.
They were taking up way too much attention and drama. Trump doesn't like that. Also politics got in the way of making any real savings.
It's main legacy will be of dismantling much of the progressive infrastructure of the federal government. It's a pity because the deficit is very high. The current rationalisation is that tarriffs and a 2% yearly growth will cut the deficit to zero by the 2030s. That prediction is.... very optimistic.
TSLA stock looking good again today. That's all I'll say about last June.
The shitty lesson here is that this crime will never be remembered as a crime, but as a missed opportunity. This will mean it will happen again. The people that perpetrated this will learn they can attempt more of this without consequence, and then slither back to silicon valley and be high-fived by the meritocracy bros. Oh, the irony.
I reckon liberal democracy on the US was toast when a losing presidential candidate attempted three routes to a coup and wasn’t in jail awaiting trial for any of them a year after it happened.
You can’t give authoritarians do-overs. If they don’t do it, the next one, emboldened by the total lack of consequences, will.
the largest PII breach in history, essentially.
Isn't it the ultimate task for any good efficiency routine to delete itself?
Considering what it accomplished, it would have been even more efficient if it had never happened.
It's just a shame it wasn't the first line of code.
Let's not get cute when we're describing an organization that violated the impoundment act and data privacy laws to such an extreme degree, in addition to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people due to the impoundment of USAID resources. While Elon was waving a chainsaw around, children were starving while the food meant for them rotted in a pallet.
And yet the USG has spent $400B more since DOGE, not $2T less. How's that "efficient"?
It’ll be very surprising if DOGE per se didn’t cost money, rather than save it, by the time lawsuits and extra costs incurred by their interrupting things that shouldn’t have been interrupted are accounted for.
Wouldn't it need to actually accomplish something first?