By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
“You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?” –Ursula LeGuin, Wizard of Earthsea
“Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” –Sam Rayburn
DOGE has become a sprawling story. In this round-up, I’ll look at how the DOGEbags butchered their own website, and this week’s assault on government agencies. I’ll conclude with a brief look at the sociology of DOGE. This week, I won’t be tracking court cases, or Democrat counter-measures to DOGE (readers, if you locate any, do feel free to leave a link in comments).[1]
The DOGEbags Still Butchering Their Own Website
The last time we posted on DOGE, we pointed that that its website was, basically, a placeholder (this after Elon boasted how transparent DOGE was). As if in answer, DOGE brain geniuses threw together a website hosted on CloudFlare the very next day, but left it open for anyone to edit, so it was promply hacked and defaced, but that was three days ago, and the story is now forgotten.
The site looks a bit more normal now, despite the (still) missing American flag. The home page (“Latest work”) purports to be an X feed — the squillionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, also runs DOGE as a “special government employee,” no conflict there — but in fact the posts shown on X don’t match those shown on DOGE’s home page. Here is the top “Latest Work” post there:
And here (to be fair, there’s a clickthrough) is the original:
Why on earth does DOGE remove the link in the original that supports their claim? And why remove the dates? So now, every time I look at “Latest Work” in the DOGE page, I have to check it against the original to make sure DOGE hasn’t edited taken anything out of context or omitted important data. Make it make sense. (Here is the story about classified information on the DOGE site to which Kaine via Rupar allludes; I haven’t much sympathy for squawking about classified material, but I’ve got to say that HuffPo’s sourcing is better than DOGE’s, which in the post was a Link, and on the DOGE site was nothing at all.)
Next, we have the Savings page. It reads in its entirety: “Receipts coming over the weekend!” Not, apparently, this weekend, although to be fair, the DOGEbags could be taking the Federal Holiday, President’s Day, off.
Next. we have the Workforce page. This in essence an org chart of the government, which is interesting, I suppose, if you believe that government should be run like a business, but it omits the White House, even though the chart is based on Office of Personnel Management data, which includes the White House. You will recall from last week that DOGE is setting up an entirely parallel government, with commissars in every agency, and so the omission of this parallel government is highly deceptive.
So much for the state of doge.gov this week. Perhaps next week they will improve it!
DOGEbaggery of the Week
Now let’s look at DOGE’s latest thuggery at the agencies (USAID[2] being so last week).
Centers for Disease Control. CDC’s “disease detectives” halved as part of DOGE cuts at health agencies (CBS):
Half of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — a group known as the CDC’s “disease detectives” — were among the cuts made Friday by the Trump administration, multiple health officials tell CBS News.
The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service or EIS officers are hired in annual classes through a competitive process.
As part of the fellowship, they serve for two years around the CDC or deployed to health departments across the country, often on the front lines of public health responses. Many go on to rise through the ranks at the agency after being selected for the program.
“The country is less safe. These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a former top-ranking CDC official and alumna of the program, in a message.
As readers know, I hold no brief for CDC’s performance on Covid, and they’ve been awful on bird flu. Still, it’s not like we’ve got any [cough] pandemics going on, or new ones [cough cough] on the horizon. What could go wrong?
Department of Energy. Trump administration tries to bring back fired nuclear weapons workers in DOGE reversal (Associated Press):
One of the hardest hit offices was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, which saw about 30% of the cuts. Those employees work on reassembling warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise, with the highest levels of clearance.
“The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, referencing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. “They don’t seem to realize that it’s actually the department of nuclear weapons more than it is the Department of Energy.”
While some of the Energy Department employees who were fired dealt with energy efficiency and the effects of climate change, issues not seen as priorities by the Trump administration, many others dealt with nuclear issues, even if they didn’t directly work on weapons programs. This included managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn’t further contaminate nearby communities. The NNSA staff who had been reinstated could not all be reached after they were fired, and some were reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE.
While I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for the atomic establishment, I don’t want to hear “Whoopsie!” come from the Pantex plant, either.
Federal Aviation Administration. Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash (Associated Press):
The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The firings hit the FAA when it faces a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.
Impacts, eh?
Internal Revenue Service. Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS (WaPo):
Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to three people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.
According to a draft of the memorandum obtained by The Washington Post, DOGE software engineer Gavin Kliger is set to work at the IRS for 120 days, though the tax agency and the White House can renew his deployment for the same duration. His primary goal at the IRS is to provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.
After Treasury, they’re doubling down? More on Kliger here and here; he was at DataBricks, now marketing itself as an AI firm. I don’t think 120 days will be enough even to make an assessment of whether IDRS can be ported to DataBricks (though that would certainly help DataBricks in its competition with OpenAI). And with that, let’s turn to AI.
Conclusion
What social structure does DOGE have? Leaving aside its extraordarily hazy place in the governement org chart, how has it come together as a social entity, at the (fluid) boundary between state and civil society? Josh Marshall writes:
First of all, there’s DOGE proper. The White House took the U.S. Digital Service, an organization which grew out of the botched launch of the Obamacare exchange system in 2014, and rebranded it as the U.S. DOGE Service. Get it? They keep the same initials, USDS. That gave DOGE a ready-made administrative shell, based out of the White House, to operate from. [Second, there are] a number of people who are part of the same operation have gotten appointments at various agencies around the executive branch. They’re not formally part of the rebranded USDS. But they’re part of the same operation, the same group of Musk operatives carrying out Musk’s plans across the federal government. On it’s face it might seem like the centrality of what we might call the feral/incel group was overplayed, or that as events have proceeded they’ve been joined by a more established group. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Each time we hear of DOGE showing up at a new federal agency it usually or perhaps always includes a member of that original feral/incel group in the lead. So for instance, when DOGE showed up at the IRS on Thursday that group was lead by Gavin Kliger, 25, part of the original group who said Matt Gaetz had been a victim of the “Deep State” when he was forced to withdraw his nomination to serve as Attorney General. He also played a lead role in the dismantlement of USAID. I could speculate as to why this is the case. But for whatever reason Musk seems to place especial trust in that group of seven or eight young men.
Sounds rather like a FlexNet to me. To these two elements — (1) feral/incel (harsh, but fair) + (2) “older heads” — I would add Elon’s (3) squillionaire associates, like Peter Thiel and (now) AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia. Interestingly, Trump relates to this entire network only through Elon (at least so far). Note also that older (RINO?) organizations have no place in this FlexNet whatever[3]..
I have written previously that the dominant drive behind DOGE — besides money, of course — is party power: Power for the Republican party, and more precisely for the DOGE faction within that party (and not particularly for MAGA, as shown by the whipping MAGA took from the Silicon Valley boys on H1B). As Madison writes, all factions represent property interests: In DOGE’s case, I would urge that the unifying property interests across the DOGE Flexnet include the symbolic capital of technical “genius” (as Trump has it), the social capital of AI skills, and the economic capital of Silicon Valley (whether as an owner like Thiel or a contractor like Kliger). For all three factions, the destruction of government is seen not only as a source of all three forms of capital — though it turns out that replacing everything with AI wasn’t as easy as imagined[4] — but a moral act. Ed Kilgore writes:
So don’t be too fooled by the smoke and mirrors of DOGE technological virtuosity in doing its job. At bottom, it’s the same approach to the federal budget that knuckle-dragging conservative ideologues have adopted at least since the Reagan administration. Like his low-tech predecessors, Musk regards even good government as inherently wasteful, which in turn makes efforts to improve what taxpayers get for their money a waste of time. What DOGE is doing could in theory be good, bad or just mindless. But it’s mostly a blast from the past rather than any sort of cutting-edge “reform.”
I am not a believer in DOGE’s technological virtuosity. It ought to be possible for an organization full of technical virtuosos to produce a decent website, especially given all the money in the world. I am a believer in DOGE’s political virtuosity: Going for the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management was brilliant; like Trump, DOGE is very good at sensing weakness. However, if that parallel governement of DOGE commissars is going to be tasked with installing AI in every corner of every agency, there’s going to be a lot of wreckage. Of course, I say “wreckage” like that’s a bad thing.
NOTES
[1] I had to leave the most interesting ideas on the cutting room floor: Due to the proliferation of AI tools, this generation of coders doesn’t actually know how to translate business logic into programming logic. That will be a problem when dealing with Treasury, the IRS, etc., etc., with miles and acres of COBOL crafted to express business logic in a language and using concepts they don’t understand, and at a scale where they have never performed.
[2] To my jaundiced eye, these supposedly humanitarian efforts, with their tiny budgets, are transparently cover stories for spookdom:
But perhaps I’m too cynical, and people with actual knowledge can comment.
[3] It is a truism in blue circles that DOGE is simply implementing Project 2025. I doubt that very much. Here is what Project 2025 has to say on USAID, in a lengthy part of a very lengthy chapter:
Branding. A deeply embedded culture within the foreign aid bureaucracy views public recognition of U.S. assistance as secondary to a larger philanthropic mission and is embarrassed by the American flag. Citing vaguely defined security concerns, USAID’s implementers—U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and contractors—often fail to credit the American people for the billions of dollars in assistance they provide the rest of the world even as they engage in self-promoting public relations to raise other donor funds. This approach has negative foreign policy implications as China relentlessly promotes its own self-serving efforts to gain influence and resources. Worst of all, malign actors sometimes appropriate credit for unbranded U.S. assistance: Houthi terrorists, for example, claim to provide for the people under their occupation with anonymous U.S. humanitarian aid. The United States is in a struggle for influence with China, Russia, and other competitors, and American generosity must not go unacknowledged. The next conservative Administration should build on the Trump Administration’s branding policy, which revamped ADS Chapter 320, to force the aid bureaucracy to fully credit the American people for the aid they are providing. The Senior Advisor for Brand Management in the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA) (discussed infra) should be a political appointee who is responsible for maximizing the visibility of U.S. assistance by enforcing branding policy on every grant, cooperative agreement, and contract. The LPA should liaise with counterparts at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to ensure local media pickup of these activities.
Nothing about gutting USAID whatever. In fact, Heritage wanted to give USAID more prominence.
[4] I was going to write a much longer section on Doge’s push for AI. The stories were ubiquitous in early February. But then they stopped. DOGE is almost completely opaque, but I would guess that “AI everywhere” turned out to be a lot harder than the feral/incel team thought it would be. After all, they don’t understand government, how could they scope anything? Hence, perhaps, the 120-day contract at IRS, as a test site (gawd help us). And of course the Hoovering up of useful data.
