This is coming out the same day two DOJ cases led by a US attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience were unceremoniously tossed out. DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology while cutting entire groups of experienced technologists like 18F. To say nothing of the CDC, whose communications are starting to look like a bad, late-night infomercials.
I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.
Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.
The "idea" was an ideological purge dressed up as something everyone can get behind. Given the outstanding success in bamboozling idiots, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
Yeah, I still can't understand how people don't get it yet. They never wanted to reduce the deficit whatsoever, they just wanted to cut spending on things they didn't personally like.
The point was never to "save money" for the United States. They might as well have said the point was to save puppies -- it's just a framing they adopted so people would say "I agree with it in spirit". Instead of focusing on and pointing out the corrupt intent, you say you actually agree with their intent. Diabolical really.
Come to think of it, they did it with immigration to. DOGE was going to get rid of waste fraud and abuse. ICE was going to get rid of rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. Who can disagree wit that goal? You don't support MURDER do you?!
But just as DOGE didn't live up to their promise, ICE went after landscapers, builders, and farmers and people are surprised Pikachu over it. "But I thought he said just the violent criminals..."
It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are.
The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
> Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash.
The idea was trash, too.
The idea wasn't actually make "a more efficient government with less corruption," it was "let Elon Musk and a bunch lackeys literally just move fast and break things."
Nope, can't all agree. DOGE was great and you should expect to see a lot more of it in future, even more systematized.
Look at it like this:
> About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.”
So of the employees the government actually wanted back, there were maybe 10,000 - according to Ars which is an enemy of DOGE and Musk. Probably far fewer in reality.
But this was always the plan, it's what worked at Twitter too. The theory is that you can't easily know if you can cut more until you start finding that you needed people. And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
As always, 60% of government spending is in 3 categories. Anyone who is touting a ned to balance the budget and is not taking moves to hit on these 3 (Medicare, Social Security, National Defesnse) is not seriously interested in balancing the budget.
- SS is political suicide and no one is even fancying touching it (and to be fair, it's hard to touch). Just kicking it down the road until it's too late. Ideally we remove the contribution caps from this so we can keep it funded, but alas.
- Medicare is the health plan for the old people, so it's equally risky to touch that
politically. Any backlash seen from making healtchare cuts this year would be 10-fold if they touch medicare
- So then there's national defense. Not as unpopular to touch, but instead we keep pouring more money into it.
So no. Playing penny slots with all this turmoil isn't helping the budget. Pretty sure the ICE funding boost alone cancelled out even the most optimistic reports of DOGE savings.
The problem with DOGE savings is that they had the typical Musk promise progression:
October 2024: Musk: “at least $2 trillion” promise.
January 20 2025: DOGE officially established by executive order.
February/March 2025: Revised target up to $1 trillion.
10 April 2025: $150 billion savings expectation announced.
By April 2025: Claim of ~$160 billion saved.
23 November 2025: Reuters reports DOGE disbanded ahead of schedule.
Independent reports of the actual result ... well claim negative savings. Musk increased spending instead of decreasing it:
A analysis by CBS News reports DOGE claims to have saved US$ 160 billion, but estimates that the cuts may instead cost taxpayers around US$ 135 billion.
The Washington Post showed that many of the announced savings were inflated: for example, of 1,125 contracts listed as cancelled, only ~US$ 7.2 billion in savings could be verified; many reflected zero savings.
There was just the longest federal shutdown in history exactly because the Republicans were trying to control healthcare spending. You can't claim they aren't trying to touch the big ticket items.
They theorize that the ICE funding will be net revenue positive in the end.
They've also done big tax rises (tariffs), again, partly to try and get the debt under control.
You can't claim DOGE is somehow inconsistent or they're chickening out of fights over spending. They are doing what they can within the party allocations the voters gave them.
Musk/DOGE started out by claiming they could save $2 trillion of the federal budget. They quickly backpedaled to $1 trillion and kept downscaling it, until now they're claiming less than $160 billion. Independent reports claim it is closer to MINUS $200 to $300 billion (as in Musk/DOGE increased federal spending rather than save anything at all).
I would call this a pretty fucking big inconsistency. If you backpedal on your promises 100% I would call that inconsistent. Musk/DOGE backpedaled on their promise 92%, and according to independent observers 115%.
Whichever of those 2 figures is true, I would call it pretty damn fucking inconsistent ...
When "your household" is a metaphor for "a government", the obvious other things they can do include:
• Just directly ordering itself more income (taxes)
• Literally printing more money to reducing the burden of existing interest payments that are 4 times what DOGE claims to have saved
• Increasing the pension age, broadening the tax base and reducing the expense for whatever the USA's federal pension is. Every year of increase to the federal pension age makes about as much difference as DOGE claims to have made.
• In the USA's case sorting out the mess that is how Medicare (12.7% of federal spending) and Medicaid (9% of federal spending) spend more per person than the UK spends on the NHS despite Medicare and Medicaid being in addition to all that private healthcare and also despite the combination of public and private American health spending giving worse average life expectancy. This would free up by far the largest amount of money in the overall economy, but you may have to pretend in this already hypothetical scenario that the federal government first nationalised all the insurance payments before you see it impact the combined budget of taxes-and-insurance.
• Even just shrink the armed forces (12.5% of federal spending) from "biggest by a large margin" to "biggest by a smaller margin".
• Encouraging as many working-age foreigners as possible to come and do work while being registered as taxpayers.
AI told me 7 of 9 CVEs were exploited in the wild. Copilot gave me a different 7 than ChatGPT. Both were wrong about at least one.
My intern, a goofy 20 year old EE student, got different results too, but he at least was able to tell me "i'm not sure" and give me real links to where he looked.
Synthetic 20-somethings that cost a few bucks per megatoken may technically be different from flesh 20-somethings working for free for the exposure or whatever it was, but it's not an important distinction.
Much as I find LLMs useful, even today I'd only rate their competence in any given domain like a 21 or 22 year old in that domain. The Penguin Island* tariffs comes to mind as an example of probably-AI; I can think of a few mistakes of this level before the days of AI, the only one I'd like to mention is having had to explain to a real human that someone saying they're in "London" doesn't automatically mean they're in the UK.
And that's if I'm being generous and assuming Musk's statements on this topic were based in reality — given Musk also asserted that savings of 1-2 trillion dollars were possible when this was not only beyond the powers of the executive, but obviously so with minimal research, I don't trust his word.
Nothing wrong with being 20 somethings in itself regardless of the rest. Average age for the Manhattan project was 25-27. We can focus on the merits or mistakes no need to focus on age.
Did the DOGE 20-somethings also have the benefits of supervision from PhDs in various specialties? It's not the age alone, but the age in combination with other factors that make it concerning.
I’m ok with age being used as a partial proxy for experience when we’re talking about highly specialized roles with massive implications like the ones that DOGE staffers were dropped into.
> $191k USAGM broadcasting contract for “broadcast operations and maintenance in Ethiopia, Africa”
USAGM's mission is to promote the USA's diplomatic interests in parts of the world with little or no press freedom. Whole thing was cut by executive order of Trump to the maximum extent possible.
Because of that order, it's not even a "not specialised" role, it's not a role.
If USAGM should be cut or not, should have been the choice of congress rather than the executive, but that's a different question entirely.
> Botswana MI curriculum
What's "MI"? Mission-Influenced? That sounds like a plausible amount to spend on a curriculum about Botswana for the benefit of the State Department, let alone in Botswana on anything.
And if it is in Botswana, you have to then actually ask "what is this mission, and is this in the interests of the USA taxpayer?", which needs specialists.
> And if it is in Botswana, you have to then actually ask "what is this mission, and is this in the interests of the USA taxpayer?", which needs specialists.
Specialists in what? Asking whether something is in the interests of the taxpayer? Data analysis? If so, then such specialists would have to be found in an independent organization without conflicts of interest for any specific mission, aligned with the interests of the taxpayer, and they would need to be recruited from the part of the political spectrum that cares about waste in government. In other words, you'd need a group that looks like DOGE.
> Asking whether something is in the interests of the taxpayer?
Yes.
Because they need to:
(1) understand the answer, and not mistake terms of art for things they sound like to normal people. For example, to use Musk's ideology, this would be things like mistaking a study in "transgenic rats" or "trans fatty acids" to be anything about gender.
In the case of `$1.3M State Dept. education contract for “Botswana MI curriculum”`, you've still not said if you recon this is in or about Botswana, and you've still not said what "MI" is, you've taken something that you think "obviously" sounds bad (or why else would you have quoted it?) without having thought too hard. I tried searching, the sidebar was an AI summary of (and linking to) this thread that made claims not supported by anything anyone here has actually said, and only one of the four(!) real links even got me a page with the string "Botswana MI curriculum" on them, which linked to X.com which also didn't explain what that was.
What you've done here is treat it as an applause light, not considered anything about taxpayer interests. Applause lights can be done by an AI, taxpayer interests cannot.
(2) for all items including those that sound good when you do know what they mean, be able to tell if they actually did what they said they did rather than pocket the money.
(3) even when they did the thing, determine if they're any good at doing the thing or if they're a bunch of well-meaning idiots.
For (2) and (3), I'm mainly thinking of the UK with this, with PPE bought for the pandemic that wasn't fit for purpose.
(4) have security clearance to know about clandestine missions, so that you don't cut the expenses which are deliberately faked by the government on purpose with a bland an/or politically correct title so nobody complains about the clandestine mission, despite the money being spend on absolutely nothing at all like whatever the line-item says it was, once what is and isn't "politically correct" gets inverted.
> In other words, you'd need a group that looks like DOGE.
No, you'd get something a lot more competent. And boring.
If you look at those titles and assume that they could be cut, without any more information, you are not a serious person and do not deserve to have any budgetary authority anywhere.
At least bother to come up with some reason they should be cut. But you can't even seem to put that into words.
Apparently "not a serious person" is the new insult of choice with you guys, huh. What a ridiculous reply.
Of course they should be cut. The slogan of the winning party for the last decade was America First. They ran on that platform. Broadcasting and teaching on a different continent isn't putting America First. There's your reason.
The insistence on not understanding obvious stuff is such a tiresome attribute.
> Broadcasting and teaching on a different continent isn't putting America First. There's your reason.
You think advertising doesn't work?
$191k/year to promote American interests in Ethiopia may or may not be value for money to the American taxpayer (I honestly don't care because I'm not one), but to think it can't be value for money is to claim that the primary business model of half the American tech giants — and also the business model of X.com, which isn't a giant but is the property of DOGE's most famous figure-head — is fake.
The US diplomatic agencies, which include USAGM which ran this station, have the business of promoting American interests across the world.
It sells (advertises) the USA's preferences to Ethiopia. Preferences such as "do not interfere with shipping things up the Red Sea or we'll do to you what we did to the Houthis in Yemen". Or preferences like "open your markets to what our businesses want to sell to you". Or, historically, "human rights are in everyone's best interest, you should do more of that because it will make you rich and then you can afford more of our stuff".
Stuff like that.
But to repeat: As I neither know nor care about the national interests of the USA in Ethiopia, I do not say this should or should not be funded — all I say is that this kind of thing *must be considered when deciding if it is or isn't good value, you cannot possibly know a priori just from the title alone*.
The willingness to think you understand and can have an informed opinion on something neither you nor I nor a twentysomething engineer from Tesla know anything about is just as tiresome.
I’m only arguing that there are complex reasons why some of these programs exist and it requires experience and perspective to uncover that and make informed decisions.
You are right — I shouldn't have been dismissive about the age, but rather the complete lack of experience around governance, why some of these rules exist, and why some of the technology is the way it is.
I think this misses a point.. hiring adolescent hacks with after-midnight chops and thrill-trophies on the walls IS part of the selling point of the DOGE raids. It was a raiding party. That is as old as pre-history, in itself. But the playing fields are terminals and web browsers. Age is a "partial maybe just a little bit proxy for experience" no it is judgement and some healthy understanding of the weight of historic events, and the financial weight of some of the systems.
All that said there is another side of the coin. That is that there were under-the-radar payment systems and not quite audited channels of money in those systems. Built with care, you bet. Essentially diagramming the tech stacks, documenting admin systems, getting and using root and root equivalent at all times possible.. those were the scalps taken, and the targets were actually rotten in some ways in some places. /rant
An ability to execute well requires a focus on task and purpose, and an organization given set up & leeway to iterate and improve.
DOGE just seemed completely uninterested in doing real work. They fired whomever was possible to fire wherever they could (and especially in places with more expertise / Blueness), while calling it reducing "Waste Fraud and Abuse" (without presenting any evidence).
Some of these folks are now embedded in agencies, some even doing actual work to try to improve these systems in some way. There's very little clarity or transparency to it all though: part of the Trump/DoGE takeover has always been being accountable to no one, presenting no real evidence, but lots and lots of sound and thunder.
Doge cut muscle sure. They cut the bones too. They sold one of our kidneys on the black market. And then jabbed us in the eyes 3 Stooges style for good measure so we couldn't even see how bad it really was.
We went in for liposuction and buccal fat removal surgery and came out the other side severely disfigured with Maralago face and a hunchback.
That's so generous it's past inaccurate. If they genuinely wanted a liposuction they wouldn't have hired their local pedophile rapist grifter to do it.
This is one of many frequent reminders: In some environments, how you brand and market your work (Mush with a chainsaw cutting spending comes to mind) is often more important than the work you do. Most wont bother to look at the actual results of your work.
I'm a massive weirdo, what I like and dislike is almost anti-correlated with public success, or at least success in American markets.
You should therefore be unsurprised to learn that I laughed about the sink and had a completely neutral reaction to the chainsaw (other than who it was in support of). I should have noticed in advance that my reactions were warning signs. Unfortunately, I can also add the visual design of Cybertruck to that list — not that I'd want it on the road, obvious safety hazard from the shape, but I liked the look of it.
I think rather he's saying that Musk loudly declared he was slashing government waste and firing do-nothing bureaucrats, and the people who supported him never really bothered to see if that was the case or not.
branding works as long as you let the actual people behind the curtain do the work (even if results are nowhere near the hype). DOGE actively kicked out those people (the USDS) and started pushing buttons everywhere. Your brand fails if it ends up doing the exact opposite of what you say to the point where people feel it in their day-to-day.
Anyone who has even more delays when working with government stuff has DOGE in part to thank. Be it healthcare, social security, taxes, etc. We will all feel this for years to come.
At the risk of stretching the metaphor - fat is useful, too. In animals, a layer of fat will help you withstand 'lean times' of less nutrition or higher work. Run the body too hard without fat, and you burn muscle for short-term gain, or worse, die.
Similarly, in organizations, 'fat' helps out when the workload increases or productivity decreases. Run an organization too lean, and when you need to respond to a new situation, you burn out your muscle (workers) and/or go broke. This is similar to the concept of "slack."
The metaphor extension is valid. If they had succeeded in just cutting fat, it might have been merely a mistake -- failing to understand how redundancy works in an organization.
Instead, they cut without regard to fat content. Many of the organizations were already operating on a shoestring. We didn't have an abundance of park rangers. It wasn't "merely" a mistake. It was the application of ideology, without regard to either the principles of good governance or the law.
Its one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; ideology isn't greater than experience.
One of the biggest lessons I learnt when I was a younger dev is a living allegory that my manager told me:
"one day the new boss came in to a budget meeting. The boss was out to make a good impression, and come out winning. The boss looked for any 'useless spend'.
Looking at the budget, the Boss saw how much was being spent on cleaner.
Looking around, the Boss boomed 'The place is spotless, why the fuck am I paying for cleaners. There's nothing to clean'
The underlings laughed and clapped. Oh how clever the Boss was, saving such a big amount at the first budget.
Needless to say the Boss was most put out when the invoice for pest removal, food standard violation and toilet cleaning landed in the next budget.
"
There's a reason why things are done that way. It might not be a good reason, but its still a reason. You need to find and evaluate the reason for something existing, before you fuck it up. Yes, before you ask, I did fuck up, more than once.
I'm sure every Cybersecurity firm has a story like this.
It's so weird because advertising has the opposite mentality. "Well we keep getting money so it has to be working right?" So no one ever considers testing a time where they do less ads and don't pay out billions to appear on billboards.
And those $5,000 DoGE checks the Republicans promised will be coming out any day now. Along with the healthcare plan Trump promised within a couple weeks in the beginning of his first term.
What I saw was that DOGE spent all their time chasing non-existent (or at most minor) problems imagined from the conspiracy theories they heard about in the media (e.g. woke contracts). They drank their own kool-aid and when they were actually given the keys they came up with nada. A total waste of everyone's time.
I would be interested in knowing what specific 'major waste' DOGE found in your agency. I would also be curious, given how much latitude they were given, how your management made sure they could now go any further. What I saw was senior managers escorted from the building by security and put on administrative leave if they offered anything other than complete cooperation.
That's what the supporters said. The problem was, and is, a complete lack of deliberation, which his process doesn't provide room for.
As mentioned in one of the linked discussions by ChrisArchitect, they didn't go out and actually talk to the groups they were cutting (or not cutting). The people in the field know where a lot of waste is, and having an organization, theoretically, at the level of DOGE take interest in it would have gotten things moving that just don't happen when you're 10-20 levels from those with actual authority to change policy.
The fallacy here is assuming Musk actually knows what he's doing (or even where he is) most of the time.
He is objectively, measurably spending the majority of his waking hours tweeting, not learning or performing work of any value. There was a whole project to install a bigass gaming rig in his government office dormitory[1], because the remaining time when he wasn't tweeting he needed to play video games.
Unfortunately, 600K people and counting are no longer in a condition to be restored...
> As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
Its one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; the bell is run, the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen. Then a country, or large organization, or a business is at the end of its ropes and hard decisions have to be made.
The bumbling idiots who lead us into the situation won't take the blame, the "mean guy" who makes the cuts to save the country does.
Was the USA failing before Trump took power? Most would say no. World's largest economy, and while it did have problems the nation was still an aspiration for many outside it.
Now it looks like the aspirations go elsewhere. And they do so because the cuts increased the problems, they did not save anything.
Core point aside, a nit to pick:
> the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen
If the canary is making a noise, the coal mine is safe. They get sick and die quickly in bad air.
60% of government spending is in 3 categories. Anyone who is touting a need to balance the budget and is not taking moves to hit on these 3 (Medicare, Social Security, National Defesnse) is not seriously interested in balancing the budget.
DOGE did try to "fix" Social Security and caused chaos instead (and a severe example of Chesterson's Fence). They didn't touch healtchare, and Musk instead bolstered more contracts from the IMC point of view.
Sure, that's what happened to greece too. basically most spending was in what we call like, nondiscretionary spending. They did hard cuts to retirements and other areas that people thought were off limits. But with the german bankers at their throats they had very little options.
Yeah we're quickly hitting that point ourselves. But no one's really making the hard calls that can help here. DOGE pretended to be that but was a wolf in... Well, wolf clothing. They weren't exactly good at hiding it.
I do wish we had an Admin that could take serious steps instead of accelerating the train off the tracks.
I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.
Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.
reply