DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

https://www.ms.now/opinion/doge-government-efficiency-records-job-cuts-elon-musk-foia

by ndsipa_pomu • 9 days ago

342 271 9 days ago

throw0101d3• 9 days ago

Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou...

May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...

dgellow4• 9 days ago

Perhaps the current government shouldn’t be in power and everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption

mcmcmc• 9 days ago

Perhaps that’s what the 2nd Amendment is for

georgemcbay2• 9 days ago

everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption

This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.

And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).

BurningFrog2• 9 days ago

Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.

shevy-java• 9 days ago

This government is criminal. Why?

In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.

brnt• 9 days ago

It _is_ criminal and illegal. It's how authoritarian coups of democracy works: move fast and break things. It looks like America needs to find out the hard way how much worth breaking it actually accumulated.

asveikau3• 9 days ago

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

hnuser123456• 9 days ago

The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.

daheza• 9 days ago

They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives.

https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...

dfee• 9 days ago

this is non sequitor.

why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it.

well, no. there is pork.

a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker

jchw2• 9 days ago

Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it.

I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.

izend• 9 days ago

Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?

yoyohello132• 9 days ago

His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.

asveikau3• 9 days ago

Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.

lesuorac3• 9 days ago

Clinton benefited from an era where if a voter was going to hear how bad your idea was then he got a chance to defend it.

Jtsummers3• 9 days ago

There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.

TitaRusell5• 9 days ago

None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.

Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.

asveikau3• 9 days ago

I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea.

Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.

ajmurmann2• 9 days ago

You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.

kridsdale12• 9 days ago

Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.

sedawkgrep4• 9 days ago

My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.

boscillator2• 9 days ago

Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

SubiculumCode2• 9 days ago

That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.

Spooky23• 9 days ago

You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.

The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing.

IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses.

DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.

devin• 9 days ago

There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.

TSiege• 9 days ago

The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not

tancop• 9 days ago

there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals.

the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.

gruez5• 9 days ago

and for-profit hospitals.

but only 36% are for-profit?

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership

johnrgrace• 9 days ago

The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.

tvh56r• 9 days ago

Depends on your definition of wasteful. Americans expect their government to be able to waves hands DO SOMEthing about various things in the world. Maintaining that capability is expensive.

I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.

Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.

watwut4• 9 days ago

playing world police

The most expensive are purely for oil, for hawks feeling manly bullshit wars.

nananana9• 9 days ago

There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients.

You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1?

It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.

ivraatiems3• 9 days ago

The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.

Aurornis• 9 days ago

You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare

You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.

There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.

jmull• 9 days ago

Isn’t healthcare is the prime example of government run programs being much more efficient and efficacious than privatized ones?

The US has a massive tangled hodgepodge of private companies, having poor coverage, very high prices, and quite poor outcomes. Meanwhile there are numerous European countries with public healthcare systems that are far cheaper and provide much better outcomes.

Here’s one of a million sources:

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...

tyjen• 9 days ago

"There isn't really much waste in federal spending."

That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste!

I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.

lenerdenator2• 9 days ago

At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues.

It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle.

People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done.

[0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...

rlt• 9 days ago

“Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons“

It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”

TheAceOfHearts• 9 days ago

It all started off as obvious bullshit: in 2024 Elon Musk was claiming that he could cut $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. He then walked that back to $1 trillion in cuts, but he didn't even get close.

WalterBright7• 9 days ago

The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.

jayGlow5• 9 days ago

test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.

great_tankard• 9 days ago

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all?

"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

retornam5• 9 days ago

The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which administers research grants, is a division of the Department of Education. Given your point, how much of this funding was dedicated to research? Even if $500 million (its much more, but I digress) has been invested in research since 1980, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?

Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.

throwawaypath• 9 days ago

There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons.

"[Pushing MAGA initiatives] is important to somebody for good reasons." Yes, zealots love pushing their ideology.

In about 15 seconds I found the following:

Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology

Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology

An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching

These are pure waste pushed by religious zealots.

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...

WalterBright7• 9 days ago

There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.

Jtsummers3• 9 days ago

And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts.

So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.

baby• 9 days ago

You’re wrong. The execution failed because it was backed by (white supremacist) ideology. COGE is a new attempt at the idea taking place in New York, and much better orchestrated.

lacy_tinpot• 9 days ago

There isn't really much waste in federal spending

What makes the federal any different than any other organization?

dennis_jeeves2• 9 days ago

When you actually cut, nobody likes it.

Yep, the section of people that lose out will make a noise.

There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

With *cumulative taxation (state+ fed) being in the region of 60% or about 2/3 of one's income where do I even start to untangle the huge mess of govt spending - waste or otherwise?

Cumulative= income tax Fed + State, inflation, payroll tax, Regulatory burden, Capital gains tax, tarrifs, sales tax, property tax, city tax, school tax etc.

esalman• 9 days ago

I think flying apache helicopters to salute a musician at his home or beachgoers on 4th of July counts as waste, and are not really important to anybody. So are the remodeling of reflecting pool and ballroom construction.

IshKebab• 9 days ago

There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

I don't know much about US spending but if it's anything like the UK I doubt that. There's plenty of waste. People only end up thinking there isn't, because it's extremely difficult to cut just the waste, so cuts are usually equally to waste and useful functions.

But that doesn't mean there's no waste! The problem is to cut the waste you pretty much have to spend a ton of money hiring highly skilled and motivated employees, and then fight decades of accumulation of cultural acceptance of the waste. Basically impossible.

breakwaterlabs2• 9 days ago

There isn't really much waste in federal spending

I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.

As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.

Rapzid4• 6 days ago

The entire administration is. It's the most overtly wasteful and fraudulent admin of my lifetime anyway(so going back to Reagan).

They disgraced the People's House. Gilded it so the POTUS could feel like a king/emperor/tzar.

Destroyed the East Wing to build a ball room. Initially said it would be privately funded (which is itself a hugely corrupt act having individuals and corporations directly fund hundreds of millions to a vanity project for the POTUS). But then tried to raid the public coffers for it to the tune of over a billion dollars.

Accepted a plane from Qatar and spent millions rebuilding it. Now saying they are going to donate it to the Trump library(aka steal from the public).

All the contracts going to family and friends? The overt pay-to-play politics?

Yeah, of course DOGE was BS.

stephc_int13• 9 days ago

I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing.

I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could.

That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation.

I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.

sedawkgrep4• 9 days ago

We had a significant reduction in government workforce during the Clinton administration.

The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this.

One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out.

Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.

Rapzid4• 6 days ago

Yeah, you want to identify and maintain service levels when reducing force. Or establish new service levels.

This takes research, coordination, and planning. But the administration fired the people who could have helped with that too.

HiPhish• 9 days ago

Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

rawgabbit• 9 days ago

I believe the current administration is a ploy to dismantle and destroy the government from within. There was no serious plan to address any of our problems. They are ideologues waving their little MAGA books and threatening anyone perceived as reactionary by weaponizing the Justice Department. Their only answer to any issue is that we simply didn’t believe in the Leader hard enough.

q8zd3• 9 days ago

I guess you could say....

They doged the bullet.

michelb• 9 days ago

In part because of the destruction DOGE has caused any future democratic ruler will have a very tough time. It’s already neigh impossible to undo most of the damage the Trump party has caused, but it’s absolutely impossible to fix what DOGE destroyed, particularly without the evidence.

A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.

Sohcahtoa82• 9 days ago

A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.

And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it.

If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...

bs7280• 9 days ago

One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.

I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.

asdff• 9 days ago

The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.

tremon3• 9 days ago

People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.

j2kun2• 9 days ago

People do this all the time

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up...

https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html

j2kun2• 9 days ago

There is also Michael Lewis's book "Who Is Government?" if you want more meaningful stories.

estearum3• 9 days ago

Also: https://sam.gov/

felixgallo• 9 days ago

Do you mean something like the longstanding Government Accountability Office, which was formed by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921?

estearum3• 9 days ago

no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed

kristjansson• 9 days ago

massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.

That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!

yardie• 9 days ago

We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.

jimt12343• 9 days ago

Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.

bikezen2• 9 days ago

Good thing trumps on that fraud by bolstering the IGs and not just gutting them across all agencies...

estearum3• 9 days ago

www.sam.gov

knock yourself out

ThinkingGuy2• 9 days ago

You might be interested in this:

"So you want to reform democracy" - Joshua Tauberer https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...

dgellow4• 9 days ago

The general public has no idea how to evaluate government spending, and because of this people are incredibly susceptible to being manipulated and lied to. That’s what we’ve seen with DOGE, people who have no idea how scientific research work cancelling funding based on vibes. It turns out the shrimp treadmills that do sound ridiculous at first glance are in fact made for a very good reason

butlike• 9 days ago

To what end? Won't a dataset with no actionable items just be a sensationalist headline generator? What if someone did find something funny with the money? What's the process for acting on it? Do they go to the press? What about all the false positive of people who interpret the data incorrectly, then fire off (essentially spam) to the news outlets?

I'm struggling to see an upside to that one (but I'd like to).

Ferret7446• 7 days ago

This was discussed pretty widely back when this all started. Creating a new department has a ton of overhead (government inefficiency) so they wanted to sidestep the process. The common narrative is that Trump didn't get anything done in his first term because he was hamstrung by all of the bureaucracy, hence why he is aggressively "shortcircuiting" things now, e.g. through executive orders.

ck2• 9 days ago

Needless to mention it was 100% theater and absolute destruction of government was simply the point

US Treasury is borrowing $155 billion every month is now paying $24 billion a week in interest

* https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-bill...

And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization

* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

freejazz• 9 days ago

Doge was a scam, of course.

t1234s• 9 days ago

Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?

colonelspace• 9 days ago

I don't know. Did they?

firefoxd• 9 days ago

In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere.

So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.

SirFatty• 9 days ago

Until the last two words, I assumed you posted in the wrong story :-D

shagie• 9 days ago

Also in the 90s...

I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.

One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.

    find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \;

... or something to that effect. It worked.

So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.

... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?

Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.

Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.

(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)

seanhunter• 9 days ago

With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.

CableNinja• 9 days ago

Replace ini with himem.sys

"That takes up so much space!"

Worked until reboot. And thats the start of my dive into IT

madhacker• 9 days ago

After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.

gruez5• 9 days ago

How exactly did "looting" take place? The trump administration did a bunch of cuts and he personally benefited from being in office, but that's not the same as looting, which implies embezzlement of government funds.

fzeroracer• 9 days ago

Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...

iAMkenough• 9 days ago

I read "looting" as installing a non-controlled StarLink terminal to silently pilfer protected data about Americans without going through existing infrastructure and leaving an audit trail.

lenerdenator2• 9 days ago

Given that DOGE was itself illegal, my guess is that the records were illegally disposed of.

This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.

t0mpr1c3• 9 days ago

Oh no. Now we will never identify those millions of dead people that DOGE claimed were receiving social security.

At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.

mannanj• 9 days ago

Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs?

It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.

sp1nningaway• 9 days ago

Is DOGE gone though? https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154

I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term.

It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.

SubiculumCode2• 9 days ago

DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff.

Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis.

To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH.

DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).

flockonus• 9 days ago

DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government

Wish we could see the evidence for that.

vel0city• 9 days ago

Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.

moomin• 9 days ago

A weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.

jasonlotito• 9 days ago

DOGE's record.

tadfisher• 9 days ago

What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

hilariously• 9 days ago

There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.

sjsdaiuasgdia2• 9 days ago

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover...

"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."

retornam5• 9 days ago

What's the evidence for that?

If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?

Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?

Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.

This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI

JKCalhoun• 9 days ago

"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…"

Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

maximilianburke• 9 days ago

Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).

slopinthebag3• 9 days ago

DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government

Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?

well_ackshually• 9 days ago

They're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient.

Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.

alwa• 9 days ago

Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.

So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.

What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?

paul7986• 9 days ago

DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later.

Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026).

Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.

jknoepfler• 9 days ago

Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.

BatteryMountain• 9 days ago

And who does this ultimately benefit?...

ndsipa_pomu• 9 days ago

The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.

tetris11• 9 days ago

What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish.

Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through.

The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through

aeternum2• 9 days ago

DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government

For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true.

It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar"

Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.

sagarm• 9 days ago

And yet well known grift like corn-derived ethanol continue. Looking forward to cutting some welfare queens loose next go around!

And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.

intended• 9 days ago

You responded to a detailed/narrow example flagged as an example, with a reiteration of the rule.

Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient.

This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.

wnevets3• 9 days ago

I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID!

Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it!

[1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

archagon3• 9 days ago

Death and suffering on an unfathomable scale will be the ultimate legacy of these people. I wish they would be confronted with their crimes in front of a tribunal, but they’ll probably get away with what they did, at least in a legal sense.

doom2• 9 days ago

It should also be the legacy of voters that chose this and I don't think I'll soon forget or forgive it.

Havoc• 9 days ago

oh it's much worse. Projections are around 14 million mark. i.e. something around the region of a 100 Hiroshimas

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o

93po• 9 days ago

It's horrible that there are 14 million children now in graves because of Elon Musk. He's literally worse than Hitler. I also don't understand how he spends all his time. SpaceX and Tesla are successful but Elon doesn't contribute to that at all, he's clearly not actually doing anything in those organizations. So where does his time go? I guess he's secretly just been doing actual work and actually contributing at DOGE this entire time, finding countries he doesn't like and murdering as many people as he possibly can. I bet he jokes about it with Trump while paying prostitutes to pee on Obama's bed.

jayGlow5• 9 days ago

why exactly is the US responsible for feeding people in random countries around the world? if the US is responsible for those deaths then surely every other county who didn't step up to feed them is equally responsible right?

tavavex• 9 days ago

Why am I responsible for this person's death? He had fallen on the subway tracks all on his own, it was his fault. All I did was extend a hand to him, let him climb halfway up, and then kick him in the face back down. So why is everyone looking at me now? The outcome is the same it would've been if no one jumped in to help. Why aren't you calling the bystanders murderers too?

stult• 9 days ago

Every other country is responsible. But in proportion to their wealth and power, and the US is far and away the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world so we bear an outsized share of the responsibility for keeping the world stable and safe. We built the international order around free trade to suit us, and it works exceptionally well to enrich us, so we have a strong motivation to ensure the stability of that international order by reducing the causes of international conflict and civil disorder like hunger or disease.

Regardless, even if your amoral nihilism were correct rather than the hallmark of a morally repulsive psychopath with the imaginative capacity of a tapeworm, there were two things DOGE did wrong. First, much of the actual damage they caused was not from the US cutting aid per se, but rather how quickly and with such little warning they cut aid. DOGE denied aid recipients that were relying on the US to keep people alive with life saving medicine and food a reasonable opportunity to make alternative arrangements. People are dying not because the rest of the world is incapable of supplying ARVs to HIV patients in Africa, but because we took those critical life saving drugs away in a manner that made it impossible for the people depending on us to adapt. We killed many those people. You can't just stop taking ARVs and be OK, and someone make a few hundred dollars per year in rural Africa is not well positioned to find alternative suppliers. Many thousands of HIV positive pregnant women who would otherwise have been able to give birth to a child without the child contracting HIV now have to figure out how to survive HIV themselves and how to care for a child needlessly infected with HIV. Many of these people are now dead because of our negligence, arrogance, and stupidity. Because of your negligence, arrogance, and stupidity.

And it didn't even save us any money to do it that way, it was nothing less than abject cruelty and racism. DOGE let perfectly good drugs and food we had already paid for go to waste in warehouses rather than allow it to be delivered. For literally no reason, it saved us not a single penny and instead deprived many innocent people.

Above all, cutting aid like this was unbelievably stupid and self-defeating. Because even if psychopaths like you are objectively correct about reality (you aren't), when the world's richest man and the world's richest country murder millions of the world's poorest people for literally no reason, that makes us look really bad to the rest of the world. And then they do not cooperate with us. See, e.g., Trump begging the Europeans he so frequently attempts to bully for help with Iran. Idiots like you and Musk have trashed America's hard-earned reputation as benevolent superpower. That will cost us trade deals. It will force our allies to hedge against us by making trade deals with China instead as a counterbalance, as Canada has begun to do. The US is so phenomenally wealthy we can afford to be sociopathic assholes to the rest of the world for a little while at least, but it is difficult to overstate just how naive, ignorant, and outright moronic you are if you think that doesn't come at a price to American interests that far outweighs the negligible amounts of foreign aid spending DOGE illegally cut.

And I won't even get into the illegality of an unelected jackass impounding congressionally authorized spending because you do not seem like the sort of person who has any concept whatsoever of the value or importance of the rule of law and respect for the constitutional order.

wnevets3• 9 days ago

Because feeding starving children is the right thing to do.

chasing3• 9 days ago

Because we're rich and powerful and we believe the world should be a better place.

It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.

archagon3• 9 days ago

A patient is in the middle of surgery. The surgeon is informed that the patient's insurance no longer covers the procedure. Should the surgeon leave the patient sliced open on the operating table, pull their tubes and IVs, and slam the door on the way out?

This is effectively what DOGE did by "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" rather than developing a plan to gradually taper aid. Thousands of people in the middle of medical treatment just died. Thousands of children relying on USAID food and supplies just died. There are plenty of articles with first-hand accounts of this.

Worst part is, Musk and his boys did it this way for shits and giggles, or maybe for the adrenaline rush. Monsters.

soundworlds• 9 days ago

It is the abrupt cancellation of such enormous funds and projects that caused the most damage. If DOGE / Trump had taken his 4 years to "slowly" cancel, far fewer people would have died.

(though still far too many)

UncleMeat• 9 days ago

We are all humans sharing one planet.

lesostep• 9 days ago

> why exactly is the US responsible for feeding people in random countries around the world

they are responsible because they took that responsibility. If I say to someone that I will sponsor them through collage, and than drop sponsorship without warning – I'll be an asshole too.

Also, everyone knows that USAid was a bargaining chip that bought USA ability to build military bases on a foreign land. It's not like USA just did it because they were great of heart.

thrance• 9 days ago

Because the American Empire is extracting massive amounts of wealth from these places. Feeding the children there is the barest of decencies. Even from a purely strategic POV, it makes these places more likely to turn away from the US and toward others, more reliable "partners".

bean469• 7 days ago

why exactly is the US responsible for feeding people in random countries around the world?

It was not as in not responsible, since international agreements between countries are de facto non-enforceable. Such programs though did help the US in gaining influence and soft power in those parts of the world

lenkite• 9 days ago

As a non-American, USAID was an agency heavily used by American 3-letter agencies to influence domestic matters of other nations. They should have probably been been gentler in sifting through the programs and shutting down intel operations, but they just took a big hammer to the whole agency.

ajmurmann2• 9 days ago

One of the big issues - assuming good intent - was the dismissing of existing expertise on where the issues really are and jumping to the assumption that everyone in the system is corrupt and ripping off the tax payer. A simplistic model that can feel satisfying to promote on social media but is obviously naive. Jennifer Pahlka has worked on making our government more efficient and gives a much more educated view on what the real issues are. It's always baffling to me how Musk has all the resources one could imaging but loves to talk out of his ass instead of getting himself the maximum-validated information available to argue anyone. https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-mor...

gsky• 9 days ago

This American administration is full of criminals

baggachipz• 9 days ago

I can't think of one person in this administration who is not a criminal.

markhahn2• 9 days ago

first, eliminate record-keepers.

jauntywundrkind2• 9 days ago

The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America.

The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)

0xy3• 9 days ago

The Biden administration authorized use of Signal, so I'm not sure how you think this is any kind of 'gotcha'.

Both sides routinely use Signal and encourage its use. CISA said in December 2024 that Signal "better protected [government] officials".

javagram• 9 days ago

The use of Signal or other disappearing message apps for government communications violates records keeping laws (that date from the age of memos) unless the user diligently screenshots and archives all messages.

All written communication for government business is supposed to be saved.

The CISA document you referenced doesn't seem to be clear on this point, although it is marked as not applying to sensitive communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...

It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.

tokai• 9 days ago

Wonder if the remember to delete all the public data they pilfered.

xg15• 9 days ago

Bold of them to assume they kept records (aside from random Signal chats) in the first place...

chadd• 9 days ago

The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy.

Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it.

Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.

msie• 9 days ago

So, is there a blacklist out there of all the DOGE goons? I remember a picture of a couple of grinning DOGE goons at a California facility trying to unleash a lot of water to help with the California fires except that it wouldn't help at all. Ah, found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

yalogin• 9 days ago

Some folks I know in academia have their funding cut and so a good stream of research is stopped. Wonder how prevalent it is across academia.

bcjdjsndon2• 9 days ago

Thinkudur chiddrun

bcjdjsndon2• 8 days ago

Thinkudur chiddrun

elAhmo• 9 days ago

Yet there are people still giving money to Musk, using X, Grok and other products which are run by a guy who decided to kill millions of kids worldwide.

I know your acquaintances are on X and it is 'ecosystem that is hard to leave', but sometimes it takes a bit of courage to stop contributing to vicious people. And by using his platforms, you are directly doing that.

sharts• 9 days ago

Queue the Elon fambois

thewileyone• 9 days ago

Property of Elon Musk

insane_dreamer2• 8 days ago

DOGE is one of the worst shitshows to happen to the US Gov in a long time (ever?), and in the end, there was zero accountability

(it was also possibly a very cleverly executed shitshow for the purpose of stealing a bunch of gov data)

DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

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