I knew some people that were initially very optimistic, and I tried to keep an open mind when DOGE got started despite the outlandish claims that they would be able to cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget, but it's apparent at this point that the project has been an extreme failure. It'll probably take a few years to really sort out their damage and overall impact though.
It's also imperative to mention in every DOGE-related discussion and conversation that the funding freeze to USAID is directly responsible for killing thousands of people [0]. Most of the damage done by DOGE can probably be reversed, but the thousands of death as a direct result of actions taken by the richest man in the world should not be forgotten. (Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)
I work @ the nih, formerly at the cdc... can I politely ask why they were optimistic? When I first started seeing rumblings about this a year ago, my first thought was "the deficit is entitlement spending; this is a political problem, not a bureaucratic one".
Anyways, like you, I genuinely wish the DOGEsters would have asked us what we thought was inefficient about gov work. I have been in many meetings where 90% of it was spent complaining about compliance. I personally hate the USAJOBS system. Like any big company, there's a lot that can be improved.
Instead, they went scorched-Earth and assumed we were all deep state leeches. Elon acted like he had just done a leveraged buyout of the US government. For me, he remains the most embarrassing man on Earth.
Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense. Touching anything else is just tinkering at edges.
Social Security comes from its own budget paid by a separate tax. When its savings (accrued by that same dedicated tax) runs dry it has to cut spending. It will not, under current law, deficit spend. The only problem to solve there is whether we want to adjust its funding so benefit levels don’t drop in the nearish future.
People bringing it up in discussions of the general budget usually either don’t understand how it’s funded, or are presenting it inaccurately because they want to end it.
This is part of what I meant by "political problem". People see the mainline deficit number without thinking about the underlying stocks/flows of the system. There are feedback loops embedded in this that are unavoidably political (nobody wants to take grandma's retirement money). There's no "founder's mentality" that can avoid this basic fact.
Any “we’re going to fix waste in the government and reduce the deficit” project that doesn’t lead with “… so first we’re going to review the last twenty years of recommendations from the CBO and GAO and start implementing what they say or imply we should do to meet those goals” is almost certainly bullshit.
Being optimistic about this one was one of those “having a mind so open your brain falls out” sorts of things.
Yep. There’s an entire catalog already built of deeply researched inefficiencies in the government.
What a shame that DOGE burned a huge portion of this generation’s willingness to take a bold approach to said inefficiencies. Similar efforts will be tainted for years.
It is not remotely a failure. As a vessel for achieving project 2025 goals, the clear purpose of DOGE, it was successful. It's just that the successes it achieved are reprehensible.
That was not the clear purpose of DOGE. The Trump campaign deliberately distanced itself from Project 2025. If they had been honest about their intent to enact Project 2025 to voters, they would have lost.
Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.
People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.
All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.
Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.
All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.
The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.
I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.
It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.
Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.
I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).
The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.
In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.
They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.
That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.
It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
I think you're being too harsh. "Dense motherfuckers"?
My own sense is that these people are willfully ignorant. That is, they seek to find confirmation of what they already believe. Kind of human nature, really. It's sad that there is a complete infrastructure that spouts what these people want to hear, make lots of money doing so.
"the funding freeze to USAID is DIRECTLY responsible for killing thousands of people" - emphasis mine
"(Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)"
> Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. 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.
Which links to Impact Counter [0], if you want to read more on how they reached those figures.
I think it's fair to say with absolute certainty that thousands of people have died as a direct result of dismantling USAID, but that we aren't certain of the exact magnitude. One model estimated it's around 600 thousand, but we don't have exact figures because of the disruptions.
Do you think there's a way this could be communicated more clearly? I'm not trying to be deceptive in how I present this information, and I could be persuaded to re-evaluate the exact figure if presented with a better analysis.
For one thing maybe they could try being honest. Looking at the methodology it seems like the calculation here is a completely unrealistic absolute upper bound of how many lives could have been saved:
> Based on the budget for the 2024 financial year, USAID's nutrition program was allocated $168 million dollars [3]:. It is estimated that the cost of treating a child for severe malnutrition, while varied by context, is between $100-$200 [4]:. Assuming: a similar budget of $160 million dollars in 2025, that this budget is utilized for treatment of severe acute malnutrition in children and that on average treatment per child costs $150 (midpoint of range), approximately 1.12 million children with severe malnutrition would remain untreated as a result of USAID funding freeze and discontinuation in 2025.
> This would result in approximately 168,000 (112,000 – 224,000) annual deaths in children under 5. Additionally, children who survive but do not receive treatment will love with long-term morbidity. One element of this is compromised immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to other infections like diarrheal disease and pneumonia. These estimates do not capture that morbidity.
The implication is that the death toll is under-reported due to the disruption of the means by which those deaths would be reported and logged. In other words, those thousands of deaths are just the ones we know about.
I’m not totally sure what point you’re making, but I don’t see an inconsistency between the two portions of comment that you quoted here.
“Thousands of people” covers at least 3 orders of magnitude, depending how loose you get with the language… I don’t see the contradiction in “the error bands are wider without the high-fidelity surveillance, but even from fuzzier sources, the absolute minimum is definitely in the thousands.”
These people stole all the DBs and stored them on insecure systems and in the cloud. I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President. A lot of people need to serve long prison sentences and these guys are prime candidates.
> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President.
Democrats broadly lack the spine necessary for this. But regardless, this is also illegal. Despite the actions of the current administration, an EO to snatch people off the street and jail them would violate the 4th amendment.
> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President
I am not expecting the Democrats, at least as they are now, to pursue justice regarding the schemers and criminals in this administration. They are far more interested in preserving power structures and the tiered justice system than even the easy political win inherent in holding their enemies to account. Expect the rhetoric to rapidly shift to "moving forward" and "Trump was an exception, other Republicans are totally reasonable coworkers."
You give them too much credit if you even suspect them of doing the right thing. You can't expect them to just give up an avenue to such an unfair advantage, no matter how illegal it is. Their wealth and power is incompatible with ethics and legality. I mean, what else do you expect from a guy who so insensitivity mocked and laughed on TV at the misery and suffering that he inflicted on the ordinary people? Besides, who is gatekeping their access to the federal systems now? They fired everybody who tried to resist.
Let me get into a conspiratorial territory now. I have a feeling that the access to those systems are not limited to just this wannabe-Nazi and his minions. I suspect that some very hostile and clandestine elements like Palantir might have integrated into it. I don't have serious evidences to back up any of these. But a lot of people are discussing this now. These aren't even secret plots. These tech bro billionaires have been publicly expressing their contempt and disdain for ordinary people and democracy for nearly two decades now. They had been publicly endorsing and promiting tech authoritarianism. Much like the Project 2025, they had been outlining their plans too (though less publicized), that they're following to the dot now. Crimes come with a user manual these days, it seems! They salivate over a tech dystopia like in the Dredd comics. What lends credibility to this is their publicly conspicuous cooperation, that's less likely under normal circumstances.
All these are why I always say that 'I have nothing to hide' is a terrible argument against personal privacy. Anyways, just assume that your past and future confidential information is entirely compromised by some very nefarious elements that are openly hostile at you.
The more distressing part of this obvious policy mistake is that if any remaining journalist attempts to take the administration to task on this failure, they’ll just be called a disgusting piggy and scolded for having the gall to bring it up.
It's likely that DOGE was just a facade for a clandestine infiltration plan. They let that facade crumble when they finally had the deep data compromise that they craved. But they still invoke that name whenever they want to do something while hiding their identity.
This was all incredibly illegal and anyone involved in this should see the inside of a cell for a very long time.
E: if you disagree with me, you need to familiarize yourself with congressional budget allocation, the impoundment act, and federal data privacy laws. DOGE did not have the unilateral authority to do basically anything it tried to do and we have yet to hold anyone accountable for trying to subvert the will of the people.
One of the random 19-year-olds they hired (whose nickname is "BigBalls") previously worked selling VPN services to a cybercriminal group ("the Com") whose activities involved extorting children for CSAM and then blackmailing them into committing suicide on livestream.
Tagging on I really recommend everyone read up on groups like the Com, 764, or O9A. It's impossible to describe these groups without sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist and yet they're all real.
FDR threatened to do this, but in fact Congress gave him everything he wanted. Not even “gave” as in “didn’t stop him” (like the current one). They wrote and passed the policy he requested.
I know that it was somewhat illegal, but nothing to do with the details of how the massive government bureaucracy functions or the rules it follows are anything to do with what you might call the "will of the people." It's the kind of thing you don't even know without hiring a lawyer that specifically specializes in it.
The shitty lesson here is that this crime will never be remembered as a crime, but as a missed opportunity. This will mean it will happen again. The people that perpetrated this will learn they can attempt more of this without consequence, and then slither back to silicon valley and be high-fived by the meritocracy bros. Oh, the irony.
I reckon liberal democracy on the US was toast when a losing presidential candidate attempted three routes to a coup and wasn’t in jail awaiting trial for any of them a year after it happened.
You can’t give authoritarians do-overs. If they don’t do it, the next one, emboldened by the total lack of consequences, will.
DOGE represents all the worst aspects of startup culture.
These guys saw all the existing expertise in the federal government as lazy, stupid, old-fashioned, and wasteful, and they thought that they were basically supermen - smarter, harder working, infused with AI superpowers. So they ripped up institutions that have been built at great public cost over generations. These institutions deal with incredibly complex real-world problems. But the DOGE people thought that with AI they could make better decisions in a few seconds than people with decades of experience.
The results were pretty much what you would expect. Much of what they trashed was valuable, even lifesaving. (USAID is the prime example). Destroying it saved the US government a relative pittance (the US government spent more money in 2025 than 2024) but the human cost was enormous.
Imagine being a young political leader in a developing country. You've grown up thinking favorably about the US because of the positive engagement we've made with your country - not just humanitarian aid, but also elites in your country have gone to school in the US and felt welcomed here. Now, you've just seen that the US will abandon all its promises to you in a heartbeat and leave your country with a humanitarian catastrophe. Why would you ever see the US favorably?
Or imagine that you're a small business owner who provided some valuable product or service to the US government. You've made business plans based on the understanding that the US government is a reliable customer. Then an AI told a 23 year old with no experience in your field that your contract was wasteful.
The DOGE guys will move on to other cushy startup jobs. They'll make a ton of money in their careers. The rest of us will be left to deal with the fallout.
This has been everyone else's experience of the Trump regime, as well.
Here in Australia we've been "America's Poodle" for generations, enthusiastically joined in on every war and bizarre colonial adventure that the USA has started. And then we get slapped with tariffs and insulted by the President. Our politicians are slowly grappling with the new reality that the USA is not our friend and ally any more.
Europe has a similar experience. No longer is the West "shoulder to shoulder" fighting the authoritarian regimes and defending shared values. Suddenly Europe is not an ally, possibly an economic enemy, and is being insulted by the President.
The damage that the last 9 months have done to the USA's standing with the rest of the world is unbelievable. As has been said before; Trump may not be a Russian agent, but it's hard to see what a Russian agent would have done differently.
And that includes DOGE - ripping up government institutions that have taken decades to build is not a productive measure, it's destructive. It's what the USA's enemies would do to it if they could.
The halfway competent folks in the US realize that this has happened, and that the repercussions will last for a decade or more. Regaining international trust, and all the privileges that came with it, will not be easy or pleasant. I fear that it may not be possible, if China steps up too quickly.
Many people make an analogy to Brexit, where a democracy intentionally commits economic and political suicide. I fear the impact on the US will be far worse than Brexit's impact on the UK.
They were taking up way too much attention and drama. Trump doesn't like that. Also politics got in the way of making any real savings.
It's main legacy will be of dismantling much of the progressive infrastructure of the federal government. It's a pity because the deficit is very high. The current rationalisation is that tarriffs and a 2% yearly growth will cut the deficit to zero by the 2030s. That prediction is.... very optimistic.
Let's not get cute when we're describing an organization that violated the impoundment act and data privacy laws to such an extreme degree, in addition to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people due to the impoundment of USAID resources. While Elon was waving a chainsaw around, children were starving while the food meant for them rotted in a pallet.
It’ll be very surprising if DOGE per se didn’t cost money, rather than save it, by the time lawsuits and extra costs incurred by their interrupting things that shouldn’t have been interrupted are accounted for.
I knew some people that were initially very optimistic, and I tried to keep an open mind when DOGE got started despite the outlandish claims that they would be able to cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget, but it's apparent at this point that the project has been an extreme failure. It'll probably take a few years to really sort out their damage and overall impact though.
It's also imperative to mention in every DOGE-related discussion and conversation that the funding freeze to USAID is directly responsible for killing thousands of people [0]. Most of the damage done by DOGE can probably be reversed, but the thousands of death as a direct result of actions taken by the richest man in the world should not be forgotten. (Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
I work @ the nih, formerly at the cdc... can I politely ask why they were optimistic? When I first started seeing rumblings about this a year ago, my first thought was "the deficit is entitlement spending; this is a political problem, not a bureaucratic one".
Anyways, like you, I genuinely wish the DOGEsters would have asked us what we thought was inefficient about gov work. I have been in many meetings where 90% of it was spent complaining about compliance. I personally hate the USAJOBS system. Like any big company, there's a lot that can be improved.
Instead, they went scorched-Earth and assumed we were all deep state leeches. Elon acted like he had just done a leveraged buyout of the US government. For me, he remains the most embarrassing man on Earth.
Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense. Touching anything else is just tinkering at edges.
Social Security comes from its own budget paid by a separate tax. When its savings (accrued by that same dedicated tax) runs dry it has to cut spending. It will not, under current law, deficit spend. The only problem to solve there is whether we want to adjust its funding so benefit levels don’t drop in the nearish future.
People bringing it up in discussions of the general budget usually either don’t understand how it’s funded, or are presenting it inaccurately because they want to end it.
This is part of what I meant by "political problem". People see the mainline deficit number without thinking about the underlying stocks/flows of the system. There are feedback loops embedded in this that are unavoidably political (nobody wants to take grandma's retirement money). There's no "founder's mentality" that can avoid this basic fact.
The United States government is an insurance company with an army.
Any “we’re going to fix waste in the government and reduce the deficit” project that doesn’t lead with “… so first we’re going to review the last twenty years of recommendations from the CBO and GAO and start implementing what they say or imply we should do to meet those goals” is almost certainly bullshit.
Being optimistic about this one was one of those “having a mind so open your brain falls out” sorts of things.
Yep. There’s an entire catalog already built of deeply researched inefficiencies in the government.
What a shame that DOGE burned a huge portion of this generation’s willingness to take a bold approach to said inefficiencies. Similar efforts will be tainted for years.
It is not remotely a failure. As a vessel for achieving project 2025 goals, the clear purpose of DOGE, it was successful. It's just that the successes it achieved are reprehensible.
For those less informed, such as myself. Could you provide a quick summary of those project 2025 successes achieved by DOGE?
That was not the clear purpose of DOGE. The Trump campaign deliberately distanced itself from Project 2025. If they had been honest about their intent to enact Project 2025 to voters, they would have lost.
It was the clear purpose. It just wasn't the openly described purpose.
Agreed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knew this was the plan all along. It's not like it was hard to find people saying this before the election.
No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax.
To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.
Ignorant voters do not excuse the actions of elected officials
I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.
People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.
All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.
> Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid.
Maybe or maybe not. What I do know is that they are large in number and a political opponent should realize this and strategize accordingly.
Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.
All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.
The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.
I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.
It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.
Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.
I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).
The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.
In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.
They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.
That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.
It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
I think you're being too harsh. "Dense motherfuckers"?
My own sense is that these people are willfully ignorant. That is, they seek to find confirmation of what they already believe. Kind of human nature, really. It's sad that there is a complete infrastructure that spouts what these people want to hear, make lots of money doing so.
The east wing and the shutdown aren't remotely on the same level, though. I barely knew it existed before the whole controversy.
I think you're missing the point: it was the purpose all along, they just didn't state that.
"Several Trump voters"? And, and not just Trump voters - the most common search phrase on Google on 11/20/2024?
"Did Biden drop out?"
You have far more faith in an educated electorate than I.
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"the funding freeze to USAID is DIRECTLY responsible for killing thousands of people" - emphasis mine
"(Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.)"
Come on man...
From the article I linked:
> Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. 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.
Which links to Impact Counter [0], if you want to read more on how they reached those figures.
I think it's fair to say with absolute certainty that thousands of people have died as a direct result of dismantling USAID, but that we aren't certain of the exact magnitude. One model estimated it's around 600 thousand, but we don't have exact figures because of the disruptions.
Do you think there's a way this could be communicated more clearly? I'm not trying to be deceptive in how I present this information, and I could be persuaded to re-evaluate the exact figure if presented with a better analysis.
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...
For one thing maybe they could try being honest. Looking at the methodology it seems like the calculation here is a completely unrealistic absolute upper bound of how many lives could have been saved:
> Based on the budget for the 2024 financial year, USAID's nutrition program was allocated $168 million dollars [3]:. It is estimated that the cost of treating a child for severe malnutrition, while varied by context, is between $100-$200 [4]:. Assuming: a similar budget of $160 million dollars in 2025, that this budget is utilized for treatment of severe acute malnutrition in children and that on average treatment per child costs $150 (midpoint of range), approximately 1.12 million children with severe malnutrition would remain untreated as a result of USAID funding freeze and discontinuation in 2025.
> This would result in approximately 168,000 (112,000 – 224,000) annual deaths in children under 5. Additionally, children who survive but do not receive treatment will love with long-term morbidity. One element of this is compromised immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to other infections like diarrheal disease and pneumonia. These estimates do not capture that morbidity.
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The implication is that the death toll is under-reported due to the disruption of the means by which those deaths would be reported and logged. In other words, those thousands of deaths are just the ones we know about.
I’m not totally sure what point you’re making, but I don’t see an inconsistency between the two portions of comment that you quoted here.
“Thousands of people” covers at least 3 orders of magnitude, depending how loose you get with the language… I don’t see the contradiction in “the error bands are wider without the high-fidelity surveillance, but even from fuzzier sources, the absolute minimum is definitely in the thousands.”
[ETA: A June study in the Lancet estimates the cuts to USAID (if sustained) will result in 14 million deaths by 2030: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... ]
That's what honest discourse looks like.
These people stole all the DBs and stored them on insecure systems and in the cloud. I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President. A lot of people need to serve long prison sentences and these guys are prime candidates.
> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President.
Democrats broadly lack the spine necessary for this. But regardless, this is also illegal. Despite the actions of the current administration, an EO to snatch people off the street and jail them would violate the 4th amendment.
Eh, the EO would just have to direct the justice department to look into pursuing criminal charges against the people.
“Investigate criminal activity” is a very different EO than “immediately seize and jail”.
> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President
I am not expecting the Democrats, at least as they are now, to pursue justice regarding the schemers and criminals in this administration. They are far more interested in preserving power structures and the tiered justice system than even the easy political win inherent in holding their enemies to account. Expect the rhetoric to rapidly shift to "moving forward" and "Trump was an exception, other Republicans are totally reasonable coworkers."
Did they revoke credentials on their way out the door, or is there now just a squadron of elon’s minions who have keys to federal gov systems?
Whether they revoked the credentials or not there are certainly unauthorized copies on usb drives and cloud servers.
You give them too much credit if you even suspect them of doing the right thing. You can't expect them to just give up an avenue to such an unfair advantage, no matter how illegal it is. Their wealth and power is incompatible with ethics and legality. I mean, what else do you expect from a guy who so insensitivity mocked and laughed on TV at the misery and suffering that he inflicted on the ordinary people? Besides, who is gatekeping their access to the federal systems now? They fired everybody who tried to resist.
Let me get into a conspiratorial territory now. I have a feeling that the access to those systems are not limited to just this wannabe-Nazi and his minions. I suspect that some very hostile and clandestine elements like Palantir might have integrated into it. I don't have serious evidences to back up any of these. But a lot of people are discussing this now. These aren't even secret plots. These tech bro billionaires have been publicly expressing their contempt and disdain for ordinary people and democracy for nearly two decades now. They had been publicly endorsing and promiting tech authoritarianism. Much like the Project 2025, they had been outlining their plans too (though less publicized), that they're following to the dot now. Crimes come with a user manual these days, it seems! They salivate over a tech dystopia like in the Dredd comics. What lends credibility to this is their publicly conspicuous cooperation, that's less likely under normal circumstances.
All these are why I always say that 'I have nothing to hide' is a terrible argument against personal privacy. Anyways, just assume that your past and future confidential information is entirely compromised by some very nefarious elements that are openly hostile at you.
The more distressing part of this obvious policy mistake is that if any remaining journalist attempts to take the administration to task on this failure, they’ll just be called a disgusting piggy and scolded for having the gall to bring it up.
A friend who works for a three letter agency said that they received orders from DOGE literally today so I’m not sure I believe this Reuters story.
It's likely that DOGE was just a facade for a clandestine infiltration plan. They let that facade crumble when they finally had the deep data compromise that they craved. But they still invoke that name whenever they want to do something while hiding their identity.
Was the order just a poop emoji by chance?
This was all incredibly illegal and anyone involved in this should see the inside of a cell for a very long time.
E: if you disagree with me, you need to familiarize yourself with congressional budget allocation, the impoundment act, and federal data privacy laws. DOGE did not have the unilateral authority to do basically anything it tried to do and we have yet to hold anyone accountable for trying to subvert the will of the people.
One of the random 19-year-olds they hired (whose nickname is "BigBalls") previously worked selling VPN services to a cybercriminal group ("the Com") whose activities involved extorting children for CSAM and then blackmailing them into committing suicide on livestream.
So, there's more to go after if anyone cares to.
Tagging on I really recommend everyone read up on groups like the Com, 764, or O9A. It's impossible to describe these groups without sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist and yet they're all real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
That’s effectively the entire executive branch in this administration: take illegal actions until the courts stop us, and then do it some more.
It’s a reverse FDR with waaaaaay less public support.
FDR threatened to do this, but in fact Congress gave him everything he wanted. Not even “gave” as in “didn’t stop him” (like the current one). They wrote and passed the policy he requested.
Yeah, the “crazy-high popularity” thing enables that.
Failing to even win a majority of voters… less so.
But yeah, FDR did a hell of a lot less actual law-breaking.
I know that it was somewhat illegal, but nothing to do with the details of how the massive government bureaucracy functions or the rules it follows are anything to do with what you might call the "will of the people." It's the kind of thing you don't even know without hiring a lawyer that specifically specializes in it.
The shitty lesson here is that this crime will never be remembered as a crime, but as a missed opportunity. This will mean it will happen again. The people that perpetrated this will learn they can attempt more of this without consequence, and then slither back to silicon valley and be high-fived by the meritocracy bros. Oh, the irony.
I reckon liberal democracy on the US was toast when a losing presidential candidate attempted three routes to a coup and wasn’t in jail awaiting trial for any of them a year after it happened.
You can’t give authoritarians do-overs. If they don’t do it, the next one, emboldened by the total lack of consequences, will.
DOGE represents all the worst aspects of startup culture.
These guys saw all the existing expertise in the federal government as lazy, stupid, old-fashioned, and wasteful, and they thought that they were basically supermen - smarter, harder working, infused with AI superpowers. So they ripped up institutions that have been built at great public cost over generations. These institutions deal with incredibly complex real-world problems. But the DOGE people thought that with AI they could make better decisions in a few seconds than people with decades of experience.
The results were pretty much what you would expect. Much of what they trashed was valuable, even lifesaving. (USAID is the prime example). Destroying it saved the US government a relative pittance (the US government spent more money in 2025 than 2024) but the human cost was enormous.
Imagine being a young political leader in a developing country. You've grown up thinking favorably about the US because of the positive engagement we've made with your country - not just humanitarian aid, but also elites in your country have gone to school in the US and felt welcomed here. Now, you've just seen that the US will abandon all its promises to you in a heartbeat and leave your country with a humanitarian catastrophe. Why would you ever see the US favorably?
Or imagine that you're a small business owner who provided some valuable product or service to the US government. You've made business plans based on the understanding that the US government is a reliable customer. Then an AI told a 23 year old with no experience in your field that your contract was wasteful.
The DOGE guys will move on to other cushy startup jobs. They'll make a ton of money in their careers. The rest of us will be left to deal with the fallout.
This has been everyone else's experience of the Trump regime, as well.
Here in Australia we've been "America's Poodle" for generations, enthusiastically joined in on every war and bizarre colonial adventure that the USA has started. And then we get slapped with tariffs and insulted by the President. Our politicians are slowly grappling with the new reality that the USA is not our friend and ally any more.
Europe has a similar experience. No longer is the West "shoulder to shoulder" fighting the authoritarian regimes and defending shared values. Suddenly Europe is not an ally, possibly an economic enemy, and is being insulted by the President.
The damage that the last 9 months have done to the USA's standing with the rest of the world is unbelievable. As has been said before; Trump may not be a Russian agent, but it's hard to see what a Russian agent would have done differently.
And that includes DOGE - ripping up government institutions that have taken decades to build is not a productive measure, it's destructive. It's what the USA's enemies would do to it if they could.
The halfway competent folks in the US realize that this has happened, and that the repercussions will last for a decade or more. Regaining international trust, and all the privileges that came with it, will not be easy or pleasant. I fear that it may not be possible, if China steps up too quickly.
Many people make an analogy to Brexit, where a democracy intentionally commits economic and political suicide. I fear the impact on the US will be far worse than Brexit's impact on the UK.
Which is why we need to get a list of names of all the DOGE guys. There wasn't many of them.
They were taking up way too much attention and drama. Trump doesn't like that. Also politics got in the way of making any real savings.
It's main legacy will be of dismantling much of the progressive infrastructure of the federal government. It's a pity because the deficit is very high. The current rationalisation is that tarriffs and a 2% yearly growth will cut the deficit to zero by the 2030s. That prediction is.... very optimistic.
TSLA stock looking good again today. That's all I'll say about last June.
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Isn't it the ultimate task for any good efficiency routine to delete itself?
Considering what it accomplished, it would have been even more efficient if it had never happened.
It's just a shame it wasn't the first line of code.
Let's not get cute when we're describing an organization that violated the impoundment act and data privacy laws to such an extreme degree, in addition to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people due to the impoundment of USAID resources. While Elon was waving a chainsaw around, children were starving while the food meant for them rotted in a pallet.
Wouldn't it need to actually accomplish something first?
And yet the USG has spent $400B more since DOGE, not $2T less. How's that "efficient"?
It’ll be very surprising if DOGE per se didn’t cost money, rather than save it, by the time lawsuits and extra costs incurred by their interrupting things that shouldn’t have been interrupted are accounted for.