DOGE’s Plan for Slashing Government

Legions of unpaid drones . . . ? . . . budget cuts.

NYT reporters Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo take us “Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs.”

An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.

As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.

That sounds terrifying. And probably illegal.

After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.

This, on the other hand, sounds comical, in that two DOGE representatives inside an agency with tens of thousands, if not millions, of employees would just got lost. Most large government agencies have headquarters in the National Capitol Region but have vast operations across the country, if not the globe. But also scary, if the ruination of Twitter is to be the model.

This story is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations. They spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Because the essence of democratic accountability is secrecy.

On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

I am not a lawyer but this raises alarm bells. Government business, especially that which impacts policy and budgeting, is supposed to be conducted on secured government channels precisely so that it can be monitored, at least retroactively if there are questions. While I have technically conducted government business on Signal and WhatsApp, mostly because we have international officers and traditional texting can therefore be problematic, it’s for the most mundane coordination (late arrivals, after hours social events, and the like). This is clearly designed to avoid accountability.

Mr. Trump has said the effort would drive “drastic change,” and that the entity would provide outside advice on how to cut wasteful spending. DOGE itself will have no power to cut spending — that authority rests with Congress. Instead, it is expected to provide recommendations for programs and other areas to cut.

Amateurs providing advice to professionals is an odd concept. But, then again, major companies have been hiring 23-year-old kids out of the Ivies as executive consultants for decades.

But parts of the operation are becoming clear: Many of the executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Mr. Musk has said they will not be paid — a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives — and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks. 

This sounds just like Musk: a demand to work absurd hours for an extended period for no pay. Only wealthy fanatics—or someone subsidized by a wealthy fanatic—could possibly be attracted to the enterprise.

On the other hand, while my first instinct was that this has to be illegal, it’s apparently provided for in statute.

Some, including possibly Mr. Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.

Following the link, to a subpage on the National Institute of Health’s Ethics Program, it appears that this is mostly for things like boards and commissions. But DOGE appears at first blush to meet the intent:

SGEs provide temporary service to the Government (not to exceed 130 days during any period of 365 consecutive days with or without compensation). SGEs are often recruited because they provide outside expertise or perspectives that might be unavailable among an agency’s regular employees. SGEs are generally used as advisory committee members, individual experts or consultants.

As to the DOGE organization itself, it is very much what it seemed to be when the initial reports on it emerged: a non-department and, indeed, non-organization. It’s just Musk, Ramaswamy, and some acolytes.

The representatives will largely be stationed inside federal agencies. After some consideration by top officials, DOGE itself is now unlikely to incorporate as an organized outside entity or nonprofit. Instead, it is likely to exist as more of a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on joint group chats and share a loyalty to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy.

Which, to some, is a good thing:

“The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naïve billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation,” said Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration with associates who have considered joining DOGE.

“The friends I know have huge lives,” Mr. Traina said, “and they’re agreeing to work for free for six months, and leave their families and roll up their sleeves in an attempt to really turn things around. You can view it either way.”

I’m really tired of people who don’t understand that it’s not 1776, or even 1789, making government policy. The days of cabinet departments being the Secretary and a couple of assistants have been gone for a very long time.

Mr. Musk’s friends have been intimately involved in choosing people who are set to be deployed to various agencies. Those who have conducted interviews for DOGE include the Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen, Shaun Maguire, Baris Akis and others who have a personal connection to Mr. Musk. Some who have received the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious grant funded by Mr. Thiel given to those who promise to skip or drop out of college to become entrepreneurs, are involved with programming and operations for DOGE. Brokering an introduction to Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy, or their inner circles, has been a key way for leaders to be picked for deployment.

Personalistic politics begats personalistic politics. This is all just a terrible idea.

That is how the co-founder of Loom, Vinay Hiremath, said he became involved in DOGE in a rare public statement from someone who worked with the entity. In a post this month on his personal blog, Mr. Hiremath described the work that DOGE employees have been doing before he decided against moving to Washington to join the entity.

“After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work,” he wrote. “The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.”

So, over a matter of a month, a fellow with no government experience has been recruiting people to supervise the government while simultaneously working on various government projects that he’s not allowed to talk about, all the while self-teaching himself physics in the jungle? What could possibly go wrong?

The broader effort is being run by two people with starkly different backgrounds: One is Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and former top health official in Mr. Trump’s first White House who is close with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. Mr. Smith has effectively been running DOGE during the transition period, with a particular focus on recruiting, especially for the workers who will be embedded at the agencies.

Mr. Smith has been working closely with Steve Davis, a collaborator of Mr. Musk’s for two decades who is widely seen as working as Mr. Musk’s proxy on all things. Mr. Davis has joined Mr. Musk as he calls experts with questions about the federal budget, for instance.

Other people involved include Matt Luby, Mr. Ramaswamy’s chief of staff and childhood friend; Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign official; and Rachel Riley, a McKinsey partner who works closely with Mr. Smith.

Mr. Musk’s personal counsel — Chris Gober — and Mr. Ramaswamy’s personal lawyer — Steve Roberts — have been exploring various legal issues regarding the structure of DOGE. James Burnham, a former Justice Department official, is also helping DOGE with legal matters. Bill McGinley, Mr. Trump’s initial pick for White House counsel who was instead named as legal counsel for DOGE, has played a more minimal role.

“DOGE will be a cornerstone of the new administration, helping President Trump deliver his vision of a new golden era,” said James Fishback, the founder of Azoria, an investment firm, and confidant of Mr. Ramaswamy who will be providing outside advice for DOGE.

Despite my extreme skepticism of Trump, the cast of characters in charge of this project, and the manner in which the whole thing is structured, I’m not inherently opposed to the notion of a department-by-department re-examination of the federal government. It’s massively large and, even without the dysfunction of Congress, it’s damn near impossible to get around inertia during the onerous budget cycle.

To my recollection, we haven’t done anything like this since Bill Clinton put Al Gore in charge of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government more than thirty years ago. It’s noteworthy that, despite a considerably more orthodox and transparent structure, it was largely ineffective. The cuts Congress ultimately authorized were marginal, with most of the commission’s major recommendations rejected.

Schleifer and Ngo gather this effort will suffer a similar fate:

Despite all this firepower, many budget experts have been deeply skeptical about the effort and its cost-cutting ambitions. Mr. Musk initially said the effort could result in “at least $2 trillion” in cuts from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. But budget experts say that goal would be difficult to achieve without slashing popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, which Mr. Trump has promised not to cut.

Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have also recast what success might mean. Mr. Ramaswamy emphasized DOGE-led deregulation on X last month, saying that removing regulations could stimulate the economy and that “the success of DOGE can’t be measured through deficit reduction alone.”

And in an interview last week with Mark Penn, the chairman and chief executive of Stagwell, a marketing company, Mr. Musk downplayed the total potential savings.

“We’ll try for $2 trillion — I think that’s like the best-case outcome,” Mr. Musk said. “You kind of have to have some overage. I think if we try for two trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one.”

It’s possible, I suppose, that the sorting of our parties and particularly the transformation of the GOP, which has slim majorities in both Houses of Congress, to a Trump loyalist machine could result in more lockstep support. But the lion’s share of government spending is on popular programs and interest on the national debt.

The money spent on Social Security, Medicare, Veterans Benefits, and Interest are “mandatory spending,” and likely to continue going up. Unless we’re going to shut down the Defense Department entirely—which would be rather unpopular—there isn’t a trillion, less than two trillion in cuts to be made.

Again, I welcome oversight and periodic bottom-up reviews of agency spending. I believe there to be legitimate fat in the budget. But, if balancing the budget and getting out from the onerous debt burden is the goal rather than simply gutting agencies deemed disloyal to the MAGA cause, it’s far more easily done on the revenue side than the spending side.

FILED UNDER: Bureaucracy, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Jax says:

    So the short version is Trump and Musk are going to embed minions to identify how best to enrich themselves at the expense of US taxpayers. Got it. 😐

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  2. Assad K says:

    Any programs that benefit the poor and underprivileged will be on the chopping block. That will certainly save some billions and will be enough for them to say ‘See, we saved some money!’

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  3. DrDaveT says:

    I’m not inherently opposed to the notion of a department-by-department re-examination of the federal government. It’s massively large and, even without the dysfunction of Congress, it’s damn near impossible to get around inertia during the onerous budget cycle.

    Nobody defends the current structure, bloat, and inefficiency of the federal government. The key rift is between those who want to find a way to do its mission(s) more efficiently, and those who want to abandon those missions. The GOP went down that second path long ago — they want government to suck, so that they can then get rid of it on the grounds that it sucks, leaving their oligarch masters free to run everything the Old-Fashioned Way.

    Of the original list of purposes of government, drafted long ago by that first set of could-have-been oligarchs, which do the GOP still value? Form a more perfect union? No; they need division. Establish justice? Not hardly. Ensure domestic tranquility? They stormed the Capitol, fer Chrissakes. Provide for the common defense? Not against Russia. Promote the general welfare? Get serious.

    “Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” is the only one they have left, and then only for members of their clan/tribe/cult. Sic transit gloria Columbia.

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  4. DrDaveT says:

    Anyone who has seriously studied the budget knows that there is only one viable plan to significantly reduce spending without crippling the country. It goes like this:
    1. Implement a modern universal health-care system
    2. Raise the top marginal personal income tax rates, and abandon the long-outdated idea that capital gains deserve a lower tax rate. Consider a per-transaction microtax on securities trades.
    3. Stop pretending the defense industrial base is private enterprise, and treat it in law as the regulated public utility is has become in fact
    4. Use the massive net revenues from the first three to pay down the debt over time

    That could work, except that half of our politicians would die on any of those hills, in the name of “free enterprise” (by which they mean “my donors”).

    Nothing else can work, because there simply isn’t any money to speak of anywhere else in the budget*. The problem with Social Security isn’t that it’s expensive; it’s that the rich don’t pay their fair share to support it. The grand total of all welfare programs — even including the hidden ones like the Earned Income Tax Credit — just ain’t that much in the big picture.

    *Technically, the bloat in veterans’ disability payments is worth going after, at tens of billions of dollars per year, but that’s even more politically impossible than the others for the foreseeable future, no matter how badly broken the compensation schedules are.

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  5. Rob1 says:

    None of the work lives of the DOGE principals (Musk, Ramaswamy, Thiel) necessarily speak to the kind of efficiency that would be best applied to the largescale government institutions necessary for administering the complex needs of a nation of 330 million people.

    Musk’s idea of efficiency might be illustrated by his “moon shots” that have exploded in spectacular fashion on launch. You cannot take that approach where the lives of many citizens are at stake, and the mechanism of the economy exceedingly complex and intertwined.

    And all three (Musk, Ramaswamy, Thiel) do not inspire confidence in their leadership abilities even though they are well into adulthood, as they continually spout adolescent memes, conspiracies, and culture references that elude the serious nature of governing human community.

    Too much money, too little maturity.

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  6. Jen says:

    Government business, especially that which impacts policy and budgeting, is supposed to be conducted on secured government channels precisely so that it can be monitored, at least retroactively if there are questions.

    The hiding of all of this sounds, pardon the pun, extremely dodgy.

    These @ssh0les are going to quickly learn that the only way to dramatically improve efficiency in government agencies is by *spending* an epic f*&^ton of money to upgrade systems and processes.

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  7. Kathy says:

    I handle petty cash at work. Not the same thing as a federal budget, by several orders of magnitude, but you find that fixed and necessary expenses preclude any kind of massive savings. Unless you want to wreck the whole thing.

    I did have some success when I persuaded the boss to get on the corporate gas payments, rather than charging it to petty cash. That was bout 10-15% of my funds. But overall at best I can save maybe 1-2% on office supplies now and then.

    You may find the Social Security bureaucracy can be reduced a little while not delaying payments much, for instance, but removing a few employees won’t net you much in the way of savings. Especially compared to the billions in benefits that have to be paid out.

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  8. Scott F. says:

    But also scary, if the ruination of Twitter is to be the model.

    What’s truly scary is that Musk is certain that Xitter is significantly better than Twitter.

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  9. steve says:

    I agree that I am not opposed to looking at govt processes to se if they can be improved. It’s highly likely that if efficiency were the goal and Congress was competent that we could cut billions from the budget. However, there are lots of problems with how they are doing this but I will limit it to two for now. First, it sounds like they are focusing on bringing in people with a right wing political bent so this is likely just an effort to cut spending on stuff that Dems might support. Second, Congress has to approve any cuts. Congress has never been competent on spending issues and their voting will not be based upon what will make the govt more efficient but rather when will win them votes while hurting the opposition.

    Steve

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  10. Jen says:

    I will believe they’ve made headway when they are successful in closing down the manufacturing of weapons/defense systems that the military has explicitly stated it no longer wants or needs. This seems like a no-brainer, but as Congress has the power of the purse, there is a jobs protection element that kicks in. Same with base closures.

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  11. James Joyner says:

    @Jen: In fairness, “the military” often has goals that are at odds with the prudent management of the national defense. Cutting the C-130 wholesale, for example, is way more efficient than trimming multiple programs but there is no adequate replacement for providing close air support to the Army; but CAS is a tertiary USAF mission. Conversely, buying small runs of multiple systems is way more expensive but keeps options open. Deciding which way to balance the risk is a proper role for Congress.

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  12. Andy says:

    My government experience is now 8 years old, but I doubt things have changed much. Plus, I still have many close friends who are civil servants who tell me the stories.

    One of my soapboxes here for the past two decades has been the need for significant civil service and federal government reform.

    One of the reasons I left is the sclerotic nature of the federal government. It took months to years to hire people (I’ve relayed many times how it took a year from the time I applied until I started working). The structure and allocation of billets were – to put it nicely—suboptimal and highly resistant to change. Many motivated employees ended up leaving for contracting or, like me, something else entirely. I could go on about all the issues.

    That said, DOGE is not going to be the catalyst for needed change, and I doubt it will accomplish anything. It has no real authority, and during my time working in the trenches, I saw various consultants, experts, and other people come through with lots of ideas and suggestions that crashed on the ramparts of the bureaucracy.

    Also, the entire focus of DOGE on cutting costs and reducing the workforce is dumb and in the wrong direction. At this point, just about everything that can be contracted out already has been, and the federal workforce – overall- is likely too small, not too big. Most everyone who is a federal worker (except maybe James, who is in an educational institution, which may be different) understands “additional duties.” In my own case, my main job was as an intelligence analyst for a thousand-person organization, but I was also the primary security manager, which probably took 40% or more of my time, and it was also the thing that was much more important bureaucratically due to compliance and oversight reasons. For whatever reason, the higher-ups decided that this size of an organization in which everyone had at least a secret clearance did not warrant a full-time security manager, so it was me as the head and several others helping in their departments, also on an additional duty basis. My efforts over the course of four years to get a full-time security manager billet went nowhere, and when we finally did get a full organization manning review, they concluded that the current system was working fine and actually took away several positions (not in my areas, thankfully). It’s one example of getting punished for doing a good job. I certainly saw my share of people “fail” at additional duties to get them off their plate which, sadly, was often successful.

    Anyway, there are many problems in the civil service. DOGE isn’t going to fix them, and to the extent it succeeds in its mission (which I’m extremely skeptical of), it will make the problems worse.

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  13. Slugger says:

    I think it likely that DOGE will come up with money saving ideas like cutting funding for IRS enforcement further, restructuring USPS, and doing away with NOAA. People will gladly volunteer to pay for the government; Fedex can take care of deliveries, and state governments can handle weather issues.

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  14. DrDaveT says:

    @James Joyner:

    Cutting the C-130 wholesale, for example, is way more efficient than trimming multiple programs but there is no adequate replacement for providing close air support to the Army; but CAS is a tertiary USAF mission.

    I assume you’re talking about the A-10, not the C-130? The fact that there is no adequate CAS replacement is irrelevant, given that the USAF declines to do that mission anymore. It has fallen to the Army and its Apaches to do what they can. Maintaining squadrons of Aardvarks to do fly-overs at football games is ridiculously wasteful.

    I understand the argument that A-10s are not survivable against a peer foe, or even a moderately well-equipped second-tier military. That shouldn’t be any more relevant than that body armor on infantry is not useful against current weapons. We don’t let the Army decide that they aren’t going to fight on the ground anymore because it’s too dangerous.

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  15. DrDaveT says:

    @Andy:

    Also, the entire focus of DOGE on cutting costs and reducing the workforce is dumb and in the wrong direction. At this point, just about everything that can be contracted out already has been, and the federal workforce – overall- is likely too small, not too big.

    For a refreshing change, we agree 100% on this, and the rest of your points.

    DOGE is not about efficiency, or effectiveness. It’s step one in drowning the baby.

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  16. al Ameda says:

    An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.

    As you know, Assistant Vice President JD Vance is a disciple and wholly-owned subsidiary
    of Peter Thiel.

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  17. Matt Bernius says:

    @Andy:

    That said, DOGE is not going to be the catalyst for needed change, and I doubt it will accomplish anything. It has no real authority, and during my time working in the trenches, I saw various consultants, experts, and other people come through with lots of ideas and suggestions that crashed on the ramparts of the bureaucracy.

    Also, the entire focus of DOGE on cutting costs and reducing the workforce is dumb and in the wrong direction. At this point, just about everything that can be contracted out already has been, and the federal workforce – overall- is likely too small, not too big. Most everyone who is a federal worker (except maybe James, who is in an educational institution, which may be different) understands “additional duties.”

    Anyway, there are many problems in the civil service. DOGE isn’t going to fix them, and to the extent it succeeds in its mission (which I’m extremely skeptical of), it will make the problems worse.

    Andy, thank you for already writing the substance of what would have been my comment.

    I completely agree there is a LOT of room for reform. But this ain’t the catalyst for it. And, if anything, it’s going to do a lot of damage if it gains any traction. If anyone is interested in the tl;dr of why anyone with experience is saying that, imagine the following scenario:

    Imagine hiring someone with no experience in your organization to make it run efficiently. Now imagine if the people you are hiring aren’t inquisitive about your business, how it works, or why things are inefficient. Instead they have ideas about what has worked in the past for them (in totally different business and organizations) and just wants to apply those ideas to your business.

    Or, for those with experience with larger organizations, just think about the last time you heard your leadership was bringing in Deloitte, McKinsey, or some other managerial/organizational consulting group to “optimize” your business. How did that go?

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  18. wr says:

    @Andy: “during my time working in the trenches, I saw various consultants, experts, and other people come through with lots of ideas and suggestions that crashed on the ramparts of the bureaucracy.”

    I am reminded here of the endless stream of outsiders who looked at the way the movie business worked, realized it was completely irrational, and decided to buy a studio and make a fortune by demonstrating how it should work.

    Matsushita, Coca-Cola, Seagram’s and so many others poured billions into acquiring a studio, only to hit the rocks time and again, effect essentially no useful changes, and sell out and slither away five or ten years later.*

    It’s the most basic mistake so many of us make (and God knows I have) — we see a terrible situation and say “A-ha, this is all wrong, I know how to do it much better.” And then we get into a position of power and discover what we should have known all along — that what we thought was a terrible situation is actually not the problem at all, it’s the best possible solution that anyone has been able to come up with for a much more serious, unfixable underlying problem.

    People like Musk look at deficits and think “These idiots have never thought of the obvious solution — cut spending!” But then once they get in there they will discover that the reason for the deficits is a set of entrenched interests fighting for every bit of income and outgo.

    *For some reason, Sony turned out to be the great exception. Not sure why — maybe it’s because they think they would change the system, just work within it and make better movies…

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  19. wr says:

    @Matt Bernius: “just think about the last time you heard your leadership was bringing in Deloitte, McKinsey, or some other managerial/organizational consulting group to “optimize” your business. How did that go?”

    My guess would be that it worked out great — for McKinsey.

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  20. MarkedMan says:

    @Matt Bernius: I 100% agree that reform and improvement is necessary and in fact should be an ongoing effort. But I would also add that reform must be done right, which means done by people intimately familiar with government, and with long experience on real world effects of various changes. Since Republicans have made ignorance of and contempt for government their only real value, they shouldn’t have a place in this effort.

    For an example of smart people with good intentions doing a lot of harm because they lacked the above prerequisites, see Al Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government. I searched in vain for a citation, but one of the side effects of attempting to scale back the amount of paperwork essentially made it impossible to purchase anything up to date in fast changing areas such as software systems and computer hardware. I believe another flaw was that it allowed any citizen to challenge any paperwork requirement, leading to millions of man hours spent on writing justifications for everything the government did, and also became a tool for those who wanted to slow down or eliminate new initiatives.

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  21. MarkedMan says:

    @wr: I have long suspected that the most significant value for McKinsey and the like is to the C Suites job protection efforts. McKinsey advises the execs on what to do, and also advises the financial analysts on what good CEO’s should be doing.

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  22. CSK says:

    I do so love the way Trump stands with his head thrown back and his chin jutting out, a la Mussolini. He may be trying to look taller than everyone near him, but I suspect he’s desperately trying to conceal that 9-pound bag of lard suspended from his throat.

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  23. Jen says:

    @James Joyner:

    Conversely, buying small runs of multiple systems is way more expensive but keeps options open. Deciding which way to balance the risk is a proper role for Congress.

    Agree and agree. My point was more that these guys don’t *really* know what they are talking about, it’s just more “you should run government like a business” but they haven’t a clue how it actually works.

    Former New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson was one of these business/entrepreneur types who thought he would be able to reform government. He gave up after two years.

    They’ll learn soon enough that this isn’t the movie Dave, where he brings in the Charles Grodin accountant character and finds all kinds of nonsense things to cut, and everyone is somehow happy with the results.

    Again, as with so many things revolving around Trump, I just hope that they don’t FUBAR something important.

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  24. Kathy says:

    So, what happens when president Xlon makes his recommendations or whatever, then threatens to primary any GQP rep and senator that doesn’t vote his way. He has the money to primary everyone.

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  25. DK says:

    @wr:

    People like Musk look at deficits and think “These idiots have never thought of the obvious solution — cut spending!” But then once they get in there they will discover that the reason for the deficits is a set of entrenched interests fighting for every bit of income and outgo.

    We’re not taxing people like Elon Musk as much as we should be, another reason for the deficits.

    We could make a dent if the American people gave up our addiction to voodoo economics and admitted we cannot have nice things unless we pay for them with taxes, to grow our economy and socioeconomic health from the poor up. Followed by electing liberal legislative majorities to raise taxes on the rich — including taxing wealth and capital gains — and then invest heavily in universal healthcare, guaranteed housing, debt-free vocational and educational training, mass transit, neighborhood greenspace, and renewable energy.

    So expect the deficits, the societal decay, and the failing-to-mediocre infrastructure to continue apace in the US. Not enough of the American public is ready to grow up, get serious, and face reality. Too busy pretending Hillary’s emails, trans athletes, migrant fruit pickers, drag queens, Biden’s age, and wokeness are real problems.

    And the private sector has no interest in anything but exploitation, price gouging, hoarding wealth, and paying slave wages.

    So the deficits — and mediocre American quality of life relative to our Western peer nations — will remain.

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  26. Not the IT Dept. says:

    Nothing about DOGE but looking at that photo at the top of the page and I’m wondering if Trump’s vision is going. Can he not see what he really looks like? Like he fell face down into a dog dump on the sidewalk. For a guy who’s always been pretty vain, I can’t believe he’s in denial. Or does everyone around him tell him it looks really great, no, seriously don’t change it, makes you look like John Wayne, blah blah blah…?

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  27. DK says:

    @Kathy: Same thing that happened when illegal immigrant and S. African oligarch Musk threatened to primary any Republican that voted to fund the government and prevent a shutdown last month?

    They descended into infighting and chaos and ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, until caving to mathematics and the superior leadership of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

    Then everyone on the right pretended they “won” because they know being able to declare some kind of victory over woke liberal elites matters more to modern MAGA sheep conservatives than actual policy, outcomes, or good governance.

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  28. Fortune says:

    The graphic in the article is as of November 30 2024, or two months into the fiscal year so multiply all numbers by 6.

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  29. Modulo Myself says:

    Musk is a dweeb and completely alienating. The article quotes Trevor Traina, noted everyman who happens to be an heir to like two fortunes and grew up in wine country. You have to hand it to Mark Penn for knifing the other GOP dipshit pollster whose name I can’t remember in the back to get a piece of this scam. They’re going to find somebody not white and male and then start going into their personal life while ranting about DEI or a pride flag. In the end, the result will be the new American right to use slurs like ‘tranny’ at the workplace.

    I used to think that the American public at a certain level realizes this is no way to live. I’m not so certain now. We’re at the point if you understand that DEI might, just might, be a response to vast amounts of money being paid out for egregious cases of harassment and discrimination, you have become a Maoist. And far as I can tell, the endless number of non-Trump centrists cashing in on and advocating this logic as a guiding principle for politics points to its popularity with the people writing their checks.

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  30. Kathy says:

    @DK:

    They had little choice but to pass something. Unlike the felon, I think most Republiqans in Congress understand how damaging a government shutdown is to them.

    Eviscerating the budget is a different matter.

    I guess we’ll see. The president may not even threaten to primary anyone.

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  31. Kathy says:

    @James Joyner:
    @DrDaveT:

    Around the start of the Iraq war, I recall reading somewhere, possibly TIME, that it would be better for all if the Army had close air support fixed wing aircraft of their own, and the Air Force handled all battlefield air defense. I think this was the opinion of a retired Army general. It’s been a while.

    Also, there’s a C-130 gunship.

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  32. Matt Bernius says:

    @MarkedMan:

    For an example of smart people with good intentions doing a lot of harm because they lacked the above prerequisites, see Al Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government. I searched in vain for a citation, but one of the side effects of attempting to scale back the amount of paperwork essentially made it impossible to purchase anything up to date in fast changing areas such as software systems and computer hardware. I believe another flaw was that it allowed any citizen to challenge any paperwork requirement, leading to millions of man hours spent on writing justifications for everything the government did, and also became a tool for those who wanted to slow down or eliminate new initiatives.

    Thanks for bringing this up. I’ll do some digging as I haven’t ever looked into the National Partnership for Reinventing Government in depth.

    I think what you are referring to are changes to the Paperwork Reduction Act (or PRA). I’ve never heard that story. Ironically, the PRA of 1995 is considered by many in my line of work to have been a huge long-term success.

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  33. Jim Brown 32 says:

    @DrDaveT: He’s referring to the AC-130 gunship—although the A-10 is also a CAS platform.

    The problem with this platforms is that they are good in VEO scenarios. When we talk peer threat fight’s—they fly low & slow—and are sitting ducks.

    In the current fight in Ukraine—neither of those platforms would last long and would therefore be runway decorations. The Air Force has tried to get rid of them for years—congress says no because there are thousands of job ramifications. Plus, for certain niche situations the AC-130 and the A-10 are just what the doctor orders. It’s hard to get rid of a capability when its still feasible that you could still need it in certain situations.

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  34. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Kathy: On the other hand, maybe encouraging Musk to primary everyone is a plan by which we could get a hundred billion or so out of storage and back into the economy where lots of people who aren’t L & A attorneys could get pieces of it.

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  35. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @DK:

    We could make a dent if the American people gave up our addiction to voodoo economics and admitted we cannot have nice things unless we pay for them with taxes, to grow our economy and socioeconomic health from the poor up.

    And I wish you well on this goal. Boomers and silents used our turn at the wheel to expand the homelessness problem by NIMBYing every working class and above neighborhood and fighting against turning Medicare into a “socialized medicine scheme.”

    And we did a decent job at it. Look at how many more homeless we have than 20 years ago and how we pushed the impending funding shortages in Medicare onto the next generation.

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  36. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Fortune: Six times larger numbers will not change the basic argument that the categories are ones where budget cutting will either be tangibly problematical or prohibited by law. What’s your point?

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  37. Michael Reynolds says:

    Musk still can’t get the gaps in the bodies of his cars under an inch, but he’s going to fix the USG. Sure.

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  38. gVOR10 says:

    I am very much of two minds about DOGE. I consider it probable that Musk pestered Trump for an important position and Trump created one for him. One with an impressive title and cool sounding charter, but no actual power. And Musk, having little idea how things actually work, bought it. If so, I expect a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

    But I also consider it possible this is an opening wedge of gleichschaltung, the harmonizing of life in Germany with Nazi ideology. Not mentioned in this WIKI link is that, IIRC, one of the first things Hitler did on ascending to the Chancellorship was to put a few Party representatives in each government department. They had no official charge, but obviously could both exert pressure and spy on everything. I recall that in Trump’s first term he did something similar, I think they called them “landing parties”, a few bodies in the building, outside the chain of command, reporting to Trump’s minions. DOGE’s snoops could play the same role, a Party commissar in each agency.

    In South America and Europe wannabe populist autocrats seem to need at least 80% popularity before they can corrupt democratic institutions, which seems impossible for Trump to reach. But the Nazis never got even 50% in an election and were able to execute gleichschaltung to bring everything under Hitler’s control. I don’t think Trump is well focused enough to pull of something like this, but if he does, the link above is chilling.

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  39. Andy says:

    @Jen:

    There are many problems in defense. Many stem from well-meaning but ultimately short-sighted decisions at the end of the Cold War. Others are just the typical rent-seeking that permeates industries with significant government control/oversight. As mentioned, there is the bureaucracy, which is so large and unwieldy that it takes longer than the entirety of WW2 to design a new weapon system and 1/3 of the entire Cold War to get it into production and fielded.

    The procurement process, just as one example, is just a bit complex.

    This is a good overview of the history of issues with Defense with a lot of nice infographics.

    @wr:

    That is both genuinely interesting and not something I was aware of. Tangentially, YouTube has been feeding me videos that give an overview of how the sausage is made for movies and TV – and it’s a lot more complicated than I imagined. Combined with your comments, I can perhaps see some parallels, where innovation has to come from mavericks/disruptors inside the tent and not outside.

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  40. DrDaveT says:

    @Jim Brown 32:

    He’s referring to the AC-130 gunship

    OK, but the AC-130 is a special forces platform — that mission isn’t usually referred to as “close air support”. You would never use them against an actual first- or second-tier national armed force. And there aren’t enough of them to worry about the O&S costs, unlike the A-10…

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  41. Ken_L says:

    Having a commissar monitoring the decisions of the professionals, authorised to over-rule them if politically necessary, was a feature of the Red Army in WW2. Musk’s proposal seems to follow the same organisational logic.

    However a US government agency bears little resemblance to an army divisional HQ. Any competent agency head will have no trouble preventing a MAGA person on a six month secondment from learning anything useful.

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  42. Eusebio says:

    Some, including possibly Mr. Musk, will be so-called special government employees, a specific category of temporary workers who can only work for the federal government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.

    and

    “The friends I know have huge lives,” Mr. Traina said, “and they’re agreeing to work for free for six months, and leave their families and roll up their sleeves…”

    Is someone gonna tell these geniuses that 130 days is not 6 months?

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  43. Jen says:

    @Eusebio: I believe that is days worked, not calendar days. So, 5 working days a week, minus any federal holidays. Depending on the start date, it does get you to around 6 months.

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  44. Eusebio says:

    @Jen:
    And that’s why I’m not cut out to be a paradigm-shifting DOGE bro iconoclast—my brain can only understand a work assignment in the conventional terms of a duration in calendar days; e.g., a 180-day detail.

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  45. mattbernius says:

    @wr:

    It’s the most basic mistake so many of us make (and God knows I have) — we see a terrible situation and say “A-ha, this is all wrong, I know how to do it much better.” And then we get into a position of power and discover what we should have known all along — that what we thought was a terrible situation is actually not the problem at all, it’s the best possible solution that anyone has been able to come up with for a much more serious, unfixable underlying problem.

    This is similar to the journey that most folks who stay in civic tech go through. On day one we are all ready to James T. Kirk it and announce to the folks (though usually at this point we think of them as sweet summer fools) we work with in government that “down is up, their gods are false, and all they need to do is change their thinking and everything will work better.”

    It’s ultimate Dunning Kruger cringe.

    This who survive realize that most of the obvious things have been tried already and failed for a variety of reasons. As we get more humble we learn to seek out the old time bureaucracy hackers who work in government (i.e. the people who get shit done) and try to make their lives easier and help implement their ideas.

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  46. Gavin says:

    Hopefully Musk’s nonsense will finally put paid to the 110% false mantra “private can do better than government”. But that would require a non-ideological analysis that questions Musk’s results, and the act of questioning the president makes you a partisan.
    The reason Accenture and the rest hire low-wage grads is [not shockingly] the solutions they have are cookie-cutter because they’re applying an ideological solution.
    When a government at any level privatizes something, the people LOSE money — always have, always will. Any actual efficiency is skimmed by the C-suite of the new company [more is taken, of course] and uses the same employees of the government department – at lower wages and benefits. Also, everyone in the area pays MORE for a lower service level.
    Local broadband, local power, local gas, local trash, local water — all are possible and are currently being done in the US for cheaper and better than what you’re paying a conglomerate… But hey, thinking “The Leaders Will Always Get Theirs So I’ll Just Give Up” is much easier than actually fighting corporate control and corruption, right?

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