'Suddenly exposed' DOGE employees fear prosecution after Musk abandoned them
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024983
Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter
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.
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 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.
Elon Musk claims that the vast majority of decisions were made by AI modeling.
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.
* Heard and McDonald Islands, IIRC
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
Anyway, if you're dunking on DOGE in your mind, be careful - this stat in particular is not proof they were dumb or didn't implement their objectives.
No argument on that point: their objectives were always graft, mixed with a sprinkling of revenge and self-promotion.
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.
LunicLynx•1h ago
Jtsummers•1h ago
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.
ikrenji•31m ago
benzible•29m ago
> 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.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
mullingitover•27m ago
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.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/opinion/532455/elon-musk-gaming-pc-d...