Versus whatever the media is reporting
Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a real problem for people - people have complained for years about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely like government by whim.
And if they really think there are great people in these departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work, and many of them are going to have to make these huge life changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes, disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies that did RTO gave much more notice.
The sudden closure of USAID is probably the best example. You have an organization of thousands of people that operates worldwide. It does a lot of things that save lives - deliver food to starving people, provide HIV medications, etc. If all of a sudden you tell all the grantees that you're shutting everything down, they won't get any more money or support, they need to stop the work they're doing, maybe they can get an exception but nobody is going to be answering the phone when they call to ask how because the staff are all on administrative leave - that has huge consequences. For instance, it meant stopping clinical trials in the middle. So there were women with devices implanted in their bodies with no ability to get support.
There are all sorts of other effects. We provide aid to allies all over the world. All of a sudden, we pull out the rug from under them with no notice. What are the short term and long term consequences of doing that? What would be the consequences to the stability of Jordan of pulling aid - the King has been our ally but it's a tenuous situation. What about Lebanon? Now that Israel has beaten up Hezbollah, we want to use the opportunity to strengthen the Lebanese state. What happens when we suddenly pull funding? There are dozens of different countries that are affected and each of them is a very complicated situation. It's not something that people with no domain expertise are going to figure out in a few days.
The way these guys are acting - it's complete madness.
It's not like they're saying "in the past we've played chess using only king's pawn openings and now we're going to switch to using queen's pawns openings", it's "we don't like this game so we're going to kick over the table and stomp off".
Where? The lack of transparency from DOGE has been a pain point even for advocates. I haven’t seen anything more than generic “we’re doing good work, trust us” PR
The media is reporting the history of some of these people and their actual actions. Of course these people aren’t going to discuss their past membership in script kiddie DDoS groups or their highly racist Twitter rants.
"It hasn't been enough time to produce thoughtful communication" cannot possible coexist with "it has been enough time to justify shuttering entire organizations, firing shitloads of workers, calling people back from overseas, and telling the entire government to take voluntary layoffs."
I'd say that writing up some clear communication is considerably easier than distinguishing useful and efficient government organizations from overstaffed organizations or organizations that are operating outside of their mission.
Unfortunately, from what we know of the people they've hired, they have little to no experience in doing that. They're not being transparent, we have no idea what metrics they're using, etc.
If the team was meant to actually do what you claim, it would look very different in terms of its hiring, and there's no reason it would have to be operating so secretively.
But what you're saying is totally incompatible with closing USAID and the indiscriminate buyout package offered to employees that are of critical importance.
You're not providing any actual evidence, meanwhile the actions we know are actually taking place are totally contrary to the kind of careful thoughtfulness you're describing.
What does that mean?
From what I’ve heard.
Do we believe that six weeks of ordinary work is sufficient to make the claims that Musk is making and take the actions that Musk is taking? "We are working really hard" doesn't give me any more confidence in the speed that things are happening.
Heck, being absolutely exhausted sounds like a great way of making mistakes. If I heard that the team designing and building a bridge I use to commute was work 18 hour days in order to move fast I'd be quite a bit more concerned about that bridge.
Don't they feel any moral compunction to say publicly, actually that is a complete misrepresentation of what we've found?
First, if you go to any department and find N different leaders/managers/etc. and ask them to pick what projects to cut...you'll get a whole range of different answers. There's a lot of bias involved, and a lot of internal politics going on. There's always internal fights for the resources.
Second, if these kids are actually executing orders - meaning that they'll have the authority to do recommendations (based on their interviews with the people mentioned above), how would they even know if the recommendations are sound? It can take years for managers to become knowledgeable enough with the ongoing project and products.
If you were DOGE, and wanted to "game" this process, you could really just: Identify the most critical voices in some organization, preferably those on the way out, and ignore the rest. Then you give these 18-year olds the mandate to recommend cuts based on those talks. And tell them that the ones that can cut most "fat" wins.
And there's just no way they would have given Big Balls a clearance through the regular process.
To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration.
She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined.
They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people.
Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does.
FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.
Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46
They listen to orders from many parts of the government, some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time. Their money comes from who again?
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1298330380232200198
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1109221983907184641
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1179134071374598145
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1011667756209573888
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1331037375179452416
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1557806801491578886
https://x.com/SenMarcoRubio/status/1222876152131457025
Once those orders were ignored, the administration had to take more drastic steps (as SOS Rubio pointed out).
They're also not "pausing" shit, they're cancelling contracts effective immediately & locking up the buildings. Elon tweeted a picture of the sign being removed from the front of the building. You're being dishonest about what is going on.
Very vague. Wonder what they were really doing?
I worked for a USAID funded company once. On the surface they were doing satellite imagery analysis for agriculture. Want to know what they were really doing? Identifying prime agricultural land in Kenya to help the Kenyan government seize it from poor farmers.
I am not sure if NGOs are businesses. Aren't they typically some form of charity?
1. What is the metric these folks are using to identify fraud, waste, and abuse?
2. Given that we have had independent OIGs for ages, why was fraud, waste, and abuse not previously reported?
3. Given that Congress folks are running every 2-6 years and shine like a shiny button (and get a lot of political cred) when championing substantive removal of fraud, waste, and abuse, why have no Congress people similarly exercised their Constitutional role of oversight for any of these agencies for decades?
4. Why do the agencies targeted tend to have overlap with investigations into or run-ins with Elon Musk's companies?
5. Why do forensic accountants take a long time to flag and identify fraud, waste, and abuse, even when working with compliant insiders, versus Musk's DOGE taking minutes to hours to identify fraud, waste, and abuse?
6. How is labeling groups with different ideas, such as Lutheran Family Services in the service of immigrants and refugees as terrorists, conducive to the identification of fraud, waste, and abuse? Which law enforcement office led the review of this group in particular to make this designation, which Mr. Musk and others decided to (potentially libelously) use to inflame public opinion against them?
I have no doubt that DOGE folks probably feel pretty proud of the work they are doing. That doesn't mean they are actually having the outcomes they are commissioned for -- improving efficiency. Having worked some within government support, process bottlenecks are regulatory or otherwise required by statute. People spend time really considering the decisions and improving them incrementally.
I see. And you know these people? Where are you hearing these "stories"?
Without evidence, yoh are normalizing what has been a shocking and unconstitutional approach to auditing that has very little resemblance to how actual auditing is done.
Perhaps the hostility comes from the combination of unconstitutionality, unaccountability, unelected nature of Mr. Musk, and your "trust me, i know a guy" claims.