DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency
wired.com
wired.com
Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.
When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)
To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.
But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
oh wait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
Those 'costs' to society are 'profits' to the banks. You don't get to have a choice about it. Elon is in charge and he's going with the banks.
We have, in no particular order:
- The FDIC
- The SEC
- The Federal Reserve Board
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
Those agencies regulate banking. Then we can go further and we have:
- The National Credit Union Organization
- The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)
- The Financial Insurance Office (part of Treasury)
- The Office of Foreign Assets Control
- The Securities Investor Protection Corp.
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission
- EBISA, ERISA, PBGC for retirement plans...
And we need an additional agency because...?
We don't need the CFPB.
Until someone can answer me that question with a link to a form I can fill out with an agency that has a track record of actually fixing these problems, you've made no progress on convincing me we don't need the CFPB.
It's not obvious to me that some other agency will pick up the same responsibilities. If it happens without a budget change elsewhere then obviously DOGE would be right in cutting this particular agency.
For a recap: https://youtu.be/ovcno7tiZas
He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.
Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.
Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.
Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.
"Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.
Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
> Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
It matters a little bit what he originally meant, but not a whole lot. What we mean with the fence is simply that you should do a bit of due diligence before making changes. That applies to all sorts of systems, government or IT, or anything else.
There is no mystery why these institutions that are 30 years old exist, we have the documents and probably the people that formed them still around. We know what they got paid for and what they did. It's a very different thing if we have some cultural historical tradition (say gender roles, alcohol, only males voting, the stuff Chesterton actually talked that were actually issues at the time) that has persisted for centuries or thousands of years being upended because "i don't like it" without understanding it's actual structure.
Here's another good quote (the book is free to read, quotes are no way for actual human beings to think https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html#c... ) >Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
And before people think "Oh yeah this applies to USAID" this is specifically in the context of people upending historically common beliefs Chesterton viewed himself as a great defender of. If you don't think morality and truthe are real and goodness is a part of nature you are still living in violation of that and that's probably why you have a hard time understanding why people are against things like USAID. Chesterton would be disgusted to be used in such a manner.
You're suggesting the DOGE folks actually read these documents and talked to the people?
> If you don't think morality and truthe[sic] are real and goodness is a part of nature you are still living in violation of that and that's probably why you have a hard time understanding why people are against things like USAID.
I believe morality and truth are real, and that both good and evil are part of human nature, but I still don't understand why people have it in for USAID. Well, I understand why the radical Left has traditionally disliked it, because they see it as advancing US "imperialism", but I reject that rationale. I don't get why American conservatives, who claim to believe in morality and truth (which include principles like "help your neighbor"), and also advancing American interests in the world want to destroy an agency that combines both.
Note: this is separate from the question of whether any particular aid project is worthwhile. I'm sure many aren't, and those should be shut down through the regular political process. This isn't what's happening right now.
I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.
That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.
EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.
One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.
I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
And so the poor get viewed as lazy grifters, while the billionaires are the piously hard-working...
It is pretty obvious that real goal here is to cause maximal harm and destruction. Fascists do better in destroyed countries, Musk does not need consumer protection or functional FBI, he wants them corrupt and weak. Just as he made x weaker.
I am aware that pro-Musk people do not care about ethics, harm, morals or legality. Harm to other people is feature to people like you, I get it.
A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.
The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*
We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.
* https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-02-13/hate-speech...
You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.
A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
There’s two extra nuances too. First, what’s been the corresponding capability growth; and second, what’s been the growth in population served.
It may be that, controlling for these factors, things are more efficient than back then. And to go back would require removing capability that would be missed by some - or be critical due to today’s more complex world.
And they are doing it again. The latest budget proposal involves ~4 trillion in tax cuts and ~2 trillion in spending cuts. Wild for a group that a few months ago was panicking at how much debt we have.
Knowing Bob put up the fence is not the same as knowing WHY Bob put up the fence. You've answered the who, not the why.
That depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people out there who think that since social security goes to people who aren't economically productive that it's not a thing that matters. I disagree with those people, but defining what matters is critical, and for Musk & co "what matters" is only anything that enriches Musk & co.
Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office.
Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.
Seems like a forced meta critique.
They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies.
Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.
It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.
Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.
Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.
The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.
The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.
I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.
That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.
At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.
That's risky in politics because that will be used and abused against you.
So the worst case scenario that anyone can imagine numbers for is that this department gets hit with 10% layoffs. That's not fun for anyone involved, but it's also not exactly crisis mode yet, and it seems like there are bigger things that this administration is doing to focus our pitchforks on?
There's a very real risk of burning out people's ability to be indignant if we get up in arms about every obscure department that suffers moderate layoffs. Let's save our outrage for the really important things.
I don't like Trump any more than you do, but mischaracterizing what is happening isn't helping the situation. The people who are pro-Trump or in the middle see through it, and the people who are already anti-Trump already agree with you.
This is not correct. Normally civil servants need to be fired "with cause," as called for by statute. Larger scale Reductions in Force (RIFs) -- which EOs say are coming -- must be approved by Congress, again according to law. The President does not have supreme authority in these matters, at least not on paper. We are about to find out what that paper's worth.
If fired, they can appeal to the MSPB and then file lawsuits, as a manager, it's not worth it spending all your time trying to get rid of one underperformer. It's free taxpayer money after all and not like your company will become uncompetitive or bankrupt if it has hundreds of thousands of underperformers.
At the same time, a large number of people who voted also opposed this. So its both people kinda doing their thing? People who arent in power discussing their fears online. People in power doing their thing.
That sounds fair right?
As far as I can tell, the first mention of a "Department of Government Efficiency" came from a Musk tweet a few weeks before the election. And Trump announced he would implement the idea during an announcement in early September (https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elon-musk-government...).
Hardly a key pillar of Trump's campaign.
In fact, I can't find anything specifically related to government efficiency in any of the decisive reasons as to why people voted for Trump (https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...). Ironically, one of the listed reasons was that people believed he would "fight for and protect Medicare and Social Security, with no cuts."
He also talked about it at the Economic Club of NY in September:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leomt_FY_zw
I never claimed it was the main reason people voted for him, that's your straw man argument.
I never said you claimed that either. But if "people voted for it" (with the "it" being DOGE or whatever it was called at the time of announcement) then you would expect that topic to be listed within the 20 top items people cited as their reason for voting.
If you're now trying to equate electoral victory with blanket policy approval then I don't know what to tell you.
So billions are going to be wasted with nothing to show for it in the end.
I looked on their website and it says they do digital.gov, and on that site there is stuff like
>An introduction to digital governance. Understand how and why to implement digital governance
>Case study At the General Services Administration (GSA), we operate a Digital Experience Executive Board, supported by an agency-wide Digital Council. The Board is composed of senior executives who provide high-level direction, and Council members coordinate implementation of digital initiatives within their business line. We also have an Enterprise Digital Experience team to coordinate enterprise improvements to our agency’s digital experience. Read more about digital governance at GSA.
>We also defined the work of a website manager and identified one website manager for each digital property at GSA. Then, we updated their position descriptions... https://digital.gov/resources/an-introduction-to-digital-gov...
It doesn't sound that lean and mean.
The really scary thing is FedRAMP is part of the TTS (the affected agency).
FedRAMP is the program used to procure Cloud and Cybersecurity services for federal agencies.
With TTS in flux, that means FedRAMP is in flux as well - which means tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in Cloud and Cybersecurity spend is on the line.
I have significant qualms about FedRAMP, but it was at least better than nothing.
FedRAMP was also one of the last tethers for the Cloud and Cybersecurity industry to remain in the US. Otherwise, the entire center of gravity is in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (as I have mentioned multiple times).
"For most of the country’s history, state and lo- cal usury laws imposed modest consumer protec- tions by setting caps on interest rates and fees. But in 1978, a federal statute was used to bypass these laws. Creditors quickly rewrote the rules, issuing un- intelligible contracts that increased fees, penal- ties, and interest rates. The fragmented financial regulatory bodies that remain have operated as if their main goal were lender profitability."
[...]
"The ever-widening information imbalance between consumers and creditors has only made borrowers easier marks. In a Federal Trade Commission study conducted last year, for instance, nine in ten mort- gage customers examining relatively straightforward fixed-rate loan agreements could not figure out the up-front costs on the loan; half could not iden- tify the loan amount. Of all the borrowers who were sold subprime mortgages in the past five years, nearly 60 percent would have qualified for prime mortgages if brokers had offered them; the sub- prime mortgages carried so many rate escalators, prepayment penalties, and other traps that even would-be prime borrowers defaulted."
Elizabeth Warren back in this era was also famous for talking about the twin-income trap, here's a 2004 talk about 'The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&feature=youtu.be
The alternative offered was Kamala Harris. Thanks DNC.
First-past-the-post voting practically guarantees a two party system emerges over time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
The US gov has been worn way at for decades by unscrupulous people seeking power and made so unpleasant to work in that few young people want to go into political leadership - and those that do don’t get far enough to have impact (eg. Buttigieg).. hence, old ass presidents.
Truly impactful movers and shakers have easy access to capital in the US, can keep their companies and lives private, and achieve a very comfortable life. Why would anyone choose politics over that?
Finally, the US gov system of checks and balances was designed assuming it could be perfected incrementally, but long-lived systems also need cycles of renewal - think of a forest. That design flaw is showing up now as key systems are getting cracked open by opportunists.
She did very little to separate herself from Biden and alienated her base trying too hard to appeal to the right. She wouldn't even take a stance against genocide.
One of the biggest dysfunctions (possibly intentional) in America's two party system is that the "left" isn't really leftist. Both parties are pro police, pro military, pro American imperialism, pro oligarchy and anti labor, and the politics of both drift to the right. The red team just happens to be far more right than the blue team.
And Kamala Harris didn't prove an exception to the rule. Voters didn't want to vote for the status quo, no one really liked Biden, he was just the only option besides Trump. But that's all she represented. Just "not Trump."
Bernie lost the popular vote within the Democratic party by a comfortable double digit margin. Consider that before stating without evidence that a more leftist candidate could win the general election.
The evidence is in the margins. 49.8% to 48.32% does not demonstrate that "being less like Trump is a losing proposition." Millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after all, and she still lost. Winning by about 1% of votes cast or winning despite losing the popular vote doesn't point to some general cultural bias for Trump, or repudiation of the Democrats except by the left, who tend to sit out the vote or vote third party more than the right.
If the just move more left strat worked, I would expect to see an AOC style candidate in at least one red state. But the truth is that style of politics isn't popular outside of a few very blue districts.
Dan Osborn gave of a glimpse of what a left populist campaign in a red state might look like but he still lost. And half of his positions would get you cancelled by the AOCs of the world. The reality is a 2012 Obama platform is about as far left as you can go and hope to win a nationwide general election in the current US political climate.
Bernie Sanders is, of course, the quintessential example, as he polled better against Trump than all 3 of Trump's eventual Democratic opponents. Katie Porter flipped a red district and was well known for taking corporate stooges to task; the DNC undermined her latest election, and now she's out of politics, IIRC.
Then there's the case in Kentucky, where Charles Booker had a real chance to unseat Mitch McConnell in 2020; he was exceptionally charismatic and had poll numbers that were rising terrifically fast because he was home-grown and made a point of trying to unite people through shared interest. The DNC shoveled millions into primary opponent Amy McGrath's campaign, and even locked black Kentuckians out of their sole voting center in Louisville, suppressing the vote; right-of-center McGrath won, but it's hard to overstate by how narrowly.
She was trounced in the general, and it's important to point out why: because she represented too little difference from McConnell. She was never going to peel voters off the real thing with a milquetoast knock-off. Booker growth in the polls before it was cut short was so pronounced becaus he offered a real choice to Kentuckians. But the problem, for the DNC, isn't that far-left policies aren't popular (they are, wildly, and particularly among the demos that stay home if not activated with a promise of positive change); it's that those policies are anathema to the elite within the party and party donors.
That's the actual reality. Which is sobering, because it means that the left's best chance to make real progress would be when an economic reckoning robs that elite of the funding to buy their preferred candidates.
Everything else you said was hypotheticals and wish casting. The DNC cleared the way for Dan Osborn and he still lost. I'm sorry that the state senator you like got beat in the primary. That's politics. Leftist got beat in SF in 2025. If you can't win SF I don't think there is hope for Kentucky.
These are realities that the DNC won't face because it threatens their donors. SF is a bad example as a region on a neoliberal stranglehold that is only nominally leftist, but much more concerned with money. The political machine there is adept at crushing upstarts. Nancy Pelosi had a serious challenger several years ago; she refused to debate him, and bad actors with Pelosi connections torpedoed his efforts with specious harrasment campaigns.
Which is all to say that the DNC and its local arms go out of their way to actively scuttle anything that doesn't have their seal of approval. Hope in SF, Kentucky, and elsewhere is not a function of progressive electoral capability, but of establishment Democrats' willingness to play fair or dirty.
Not as consistently, not by the same margins, and with a large amount of ambivalence from swing voters. They liked Sanders in a way that Harris could never emulate. Every election over the last generation, save 2012, was determined by answering the question, "Are you sufficiently different from the last guy?" Obama, Trump, Biden, and, yes, Sanders were. McCain, Romney, Clinton, Trump (ironically), and Harris were not.
Sanders lost Democratic primaries (sometimes in dubious fashion), but kicked our milquetoast candidates' butts with swing voters in swing states, which I agree is what matters (other than not losing the progressive base, which is also something he was good at). He peeled off independents and Republicans who were fed up with Democratic centrism; as with Trump, ANY change would do for them, as long as it was unequivocal. And Sanders had the advantage of not having a history of raping women. Our loss, sabotogating his campaign (literally).
Getting donors isn't a virtue. Several successful Democratic candidates have run on eschewing the wrong kinds of donors. Regardless, she uses the smoke-filled rooms anyway. And then lies about basic stuff like, "This will be my last time running for office." It's no wonder that people on both sides of the aisle hate her. She represents many of the reasons Democrats lose, and only wins herself through momentum and subterfuge.
No, he lost convincingly in a landslide. There was nothing dubious about the primaries.
> but kicked our milquetoast candidates' butts with swing voters in swing states
In dubious caucuses. If these states had primaries, Sanders would have won even fewer states.
> only wins herself through momentum and subterfuge.
She wins because she drastically outspends her opponents. Your idea of how elections work is completely divorced from reality.
There's a growing list I don't have handy but easy to google
I get part of the strategy is exhaustion and make sure no-one wants to ever work for federal government again but what exactly happens when they run out of agencies to destroy and refuse court orders to restore?
But then again, maybe crashing the job market with masses of unemployed, which will drive down wages and labor bargaining power, is exactly their strategy.
If you wanna talk about it, please make this list.
Unless your theory of compliance via exhaustion applies to you too.
And in that case they won. And we're all going to lose.
They will destroy him. (There's a reason Bannon is egging him on to do it.)
And if they don't... well, Pentagon is one agency where we know the financial inefficiency is legendary.
It's difficult to tell what their strategy is. There's so much chaos going on that it's impossible to say for sure what the end game is. But we can make some guesses.
They could be assuming the supreme court overturns the lower courts, allowing them to do everything unopposed. They may be trying to overwhelm the system, allowing at least some stuff to get through. They may be trying to drive out federal employees, weakening the federal bureaucracy. Or they might just be idiots who are moving fast without stopping to consider the consequences of their actions.
Ultimately, regardless of their specific end goal, the best course to stop them is to try and slow them down at every opportunity. We may not be able to fully stop them, but the more we can slow them down, the more we can minimize the damage.
Yes, but weaken the appearance of legality may make it difficult for them to continue to secure compliance with their dictates.
> The only remedy will be impeachment.
The only remaining legal remedy will be impeachment, but as long as he can secure compliance, a conviction and order removing him by the Senate is no different than an order to stop a particular action from a court. However, eroding the cultural relevance of the principal of legality makes it increasingly likely that the there will be resort to extralegal (whether expressly illegal or in a deep grey zone law does not address because it is impossible for the situation it concerns to exist while the law is functioning in any meaningful way) remedies at some point.
The Judiciary does not have the constitutional authority to compel the Executive to do, or stop doing, anything. They are simply going to ignore SCOTUS and, since SCOTUS has zero enforcement mechanism, there is nothing SCOTUS can do about it.
PS US Marshals are part of the Executive Branch.
(also they're foxes too).
Musk could say "the sky is green" and millions of people would support it.
There is nothing about the American government that is serious anymore. The US is not a serious country run by serious people, it's a clownshow and a kleptocracy.
I kind of wish people would pronounce it dee oh gee ee instead of doge just to piss of musk and ruin his pathetic joke