Americans learn the meaning of kakistocracy
Patrimonial regimes are “simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance. The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies.”
"Both criminals and foreign adversaries traditionally have used information like this to enrich themselves through a variety of actions," explained Handorf, the former FBI cyber official. "That includes blackmail, targeting and prioritizing intellectual property theft for espionage or even harming a company to enrich another."
Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis. While it's possible the user was disguising their location, it's highly unlikely they'd appear to be coming from Russia if they wanted to avoid suspicion, cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR explained.
"When you move fast and break stuff, the opportunity to ride the coattails of authorized access is ridiculously easy to achieve."
He said he could also see foreign adversaries trying to recruit or pay DOGE team members for access to sensitive data. "It would not surprise me if DOGE is accidentally compromised."
"This case has been particularly sensitive as it involves the possibility of sophisticated foreign intelligence gaining access to sensitive government systems."
In one case dealing with Treasury Department payment systems that control trillions of dollars in federal spending, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas blocked DOGE access on Feb. 21, finding "a real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law."
"Our cyber teams are pissed because they have to sit on their hands when every single alarm system we have regarding insider threats is going off," said one employee at an agency of the Interior Department who requested anonymity, fearing retribution. Cybersecurity teams wanted to shut off new users' access to the system, the employee continued, but were ordered to stand down.
The combination of interest rates soaring amid a slump and the currency plunging despite rising interest rates isn’t what we normally expect for advanced countries, let alone the owner of the world’s leading reserve currency. It is, however, what we often see in emerging-market economies. That is, investors have started treating the United States like a third-world economy.
I knew that Trump’s policies would be irresponsible and destructive. However, even I didn’t expect him to destroy credibility accumulated over 80 years in less than three months. But he has.
And even if Trump were to backtrack on everything he’s done, we wouldn’t get the lost credibility back. The whole world, sanewashers aside, now knows that America is run by a mad king, surrounded by enablers, who can’t be trusted to behave rationally.
I don’t know how this ends. In fact, I don’t know what policy will be next week. But that’s basically the point.
In what appears to be the latest move in this administration’s total incompetence with regards to critical government tech infrastructure, MITRE announced yesterday that funding had run out for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system, the fundamental framework that basically everyone in cybersecurity relies on to keep computer systems safe.
After the entire cybersecurity world freaked the fuck out, one of the remaining unfired people at the the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced that they had extended the funding for another 11 months.
But just the fact that it came literally hours away from shutting down is both terrifying and a real sign of how totally incompetent and clueless the administration is, and how they’re putting everything at risk by just totally YOLOing all sorts of critical projects.
The fact that the administration let it get to this point — where a system this fundamental to global cybersecurity could vanish overnight — demonstrates an administration that isn’t just incompetent, but recklessly destructive. They’re not just failing to understand the consequences of their actions — they’re failing to even recognize there might be consequences worth understanding.
President Trump has fired six National Security Council staffers a day after meeting with far-right troll and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
Loomer’s presence in the White House is surprising considering the pains the campaign took in the fall of 2024 to distance the president from the noxious conspiracy-monger.
After Loomer appeared alongside Trump at an event commemorating 9/11 — which she once claimed was “an inside job” — MAGA insiders scrambled to dig a canyon between the two. Following the incident, CNN reported that Loomer had been instrumental in influencing some of Trump’s most insane statements during his 2024 campaign, including claims that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating local pets.
The premise is that since other countries have high tariffs on us (they don’t), we should have high tariffs on them (we shouldn’t). But that’s not even the weird part.
At the heart of this policy is a chart. Not just any chart, but what might be the most creative work of economic fiction since, well, Donald Trump launched his memecoin.
none of the numbers were real tariff rates. Not even close. Vietnam, according to the chart, imposes a 90% tariff on US goods. This would be shocking news to Vietnam, which does no such thing.
The administration didn’t just make up random numbers — that would have been too simple. Instead, they invented a formula that manages to be both more complicated and more wrong: they took our trade deficit with each country and divided it by that country’s exports to us.
This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to “make my wrong econ math look more scientific.” The document even admits that they couldn’t figure out the actual tariff rates, so they “proxied” them with this formula instead. That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.
So we have a policy that:
Is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of trade deficits
Uses made-up numbers derived from a nonsense formula
Would actually make the “problem” it’s trying to solve even worse
Will definitely make Americans poorer
A mildly competent team might have wondered why these places have zero trade with us and done a quick check before declaring economic war on them.
But this team isn’t mildly competent. This team is extremely, profoundly, impressively incompetent.
So let’s look at who exactly we’re launching a trade war against, starting with the Heard and McDonald Islands. Total population: zero human beings. The only residents are some absolutely stunning penguins.
Let that sink in for a moment: Donald Trump just imposed tariffs on our own military base. On territory we lease. Where the only residents are US military personnel.
So to sum up where we are:
The administration invented an economic emergency
To justify a policy based on made-up numbers
Generated by an AI formula that came with explicit warnings not to use it
Which they’re now using to launch trade wars against:
Penguins
Our own military
And presumably Santa’s Workshop (someone check for a North Pole entry)
"the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing" -Paul Krugman
First, there was the illegal Signal chat where he accidentally added a journalist while discussing potential war crimes. Then we learned about his completely exposed Venmo contacts and leaked passwords. And now, in a twist that would be too on-the-nose for fiction, it turns out the same official who previously demanded DOJ action over private email use… has been conducting government business through Gmail.
This is, needless to say, pretty fucking bad. First, there’s the basic security incompetence: the National Security Advisor conducting sensitive government business through a commercial email service. Even if Gmail has robust security, it’s completely inappropriate for handling government communications — giving Google potential access to sensitive national security discussions that should never leave secured government systems.
The scale of security failures here should be absolutely disqualifying for any administration official, let alone America’s top national security advisor.
I do not believe that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian plant, hired by the Kremlin to destroy America’s economy and global influence. But frustratingly, Trump’s actions are often indistinguishable from what he might do if he were a foreign agent bent on destruction.
Trump and his people simply have no idea how manufacturing, mining, drilling, and other industries actually work. It’s all theory, no actual knowledge. And when reality doesn’t cooperate, Trump himself doesn’t even notice or care; instead, he simply lets the American people suffer for his theory’s failures.
even those closest to the president…have privately indicated that they’re unsure exactly what the boss will do…“No one knows what the fuck is going on”
Trump, like Orban, clearly doesn’t have any fixed principles other than power and self-aggrandizement. Under Trump, policy won’t reflect any consistent ideology. It will, instead, change with his perception of personal advantage, his temper tantrums, his whims and his malignant narcisissim. If he doesn’t like rising prices, he’ll try to stop inflation through bullying.
In short, MAGA will be very bad for business.
Trump’s apparent turn to price controls is just one more indication that there are no longer any rules, that economic policy changes from day to day with Trump’s moods.
This kind of uncertainty is paralyzing for businesses
the point is that there really isn’t a MAGA economic philosophy, just whatever suits Trump’s fragile ego.
All of this was predictable and predicted. Before the election many economists warned that Trump’s policies would be destructive, although the models didn’t really take the sheer craziness into account.
What they should have realized is that Trump’s lack of concern for ordinary Americans’ lives doesn’t mean that he’s pro-business, and that the election wasn’t about left versus right — it was about rule of law versus autocracy. Now we’re getting a first taste of what life under autocracy is like, and it’s bad for everyone, including businesspeople.
Two months into the second Trump administration, the United States is in pure chaos mode. Tens of thousands of workers are fired one week and forcibly rehired the next. Tariffs rise and fall based not on strategy but on one man’s ire. Deportations fly in the face of judicial orders, careening the country toward a constitutional crisis. The only constant is the volatility itself.
A central premise of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he is an apex businessman. Same with Elon Musk. The elevator pitch: Through the sheer force of their combined savvy, America will be saved from “bankruptcy”—or worse. There aren’t many Harvard Business School case studies, though, that suggest maximum instability is the path to success.
The US is wobbling wildly because its president and de facto CEO are some combination of self-serving and inept
That’s the point, really. The standardization of chaos. The steady insistence that no matter how outlandish, how dangerous, this tilt away from democracy gets, it’s actually nothing to get upset about. Attempt to remake the US government as quickly and radically as possible, because otherwise how will you know how far you can push it? Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the kakistocracy.
Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk’s DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following:
Pushed a website live to track “savings” that showed no savings for several days and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it.
Published classified information on that same website.
Got called out for accidentally inflating that savings amount by $7.992 billion, and doubled down on their inaccuracy before they fixed it.
Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn’t know how to get in touch.
Basically the same deal, except with the US Department of Agriculture employees working to protect the country from a looming bird flu crisis.
Rehired a 25-year-old engineer with a stack of racist tweets to his name.
Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who’s getting Social Security benefits. (OK, that was all Musk.)
That’s just a sampling. It doesn’t include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy. It doesn’t include the opportunity cost of tossing hundreds of government contracts and programs into a bonfire.
Worse still, none of this will actually help DOGE make a dent in its purported mission. What’s efficient about firing people you have to scramble to hire back? What are the cost savings of a few thousand federal employees compared to the F-35 program? What are we even doing here, actually?
Let’s break this down: The two officials most responsible for America’s intelligence security (1) were using Signal to illegally discuss information that should have been classified, (2) had their phone numbers and other personal data exposed online, including in Waltz’s case, about his social circle, and (3) kept using those same compromised accounts even after being warned about potential attacks.
There’s a particular irony in watching an administration that campaigned against the “deep state” bureaucracy and “DEI hires” while promising to bring in only the “best people” install national security officials who can’t figure out basic privacy settings.
These aren’t just embarrassing gaffes or fodder for tech journalists. They’re potentially devastating vulnerabilities in our national security apparatus, created by the very people tasked with protecting it. When your National Security Advisor and Director of National Intelligence are ignoring basic security practices that every corporate IT department requires of entry-level employees, something has gone deeply wrong with your hiring practices.
100% OPSEC indeed. Remember, this is the Secretary of Defense (who we all knew was unqualified for the job) literally promising perfect operational security while inadvertently sharing war plans with a journalist over a non-governmental communications system.
Think about that for a moment: these top officials were casually texting information so sensitive that even after the fact, a journalist felt publishing it would endanger lives.
This isn’t just incompetence — though it certainly demonstrates how the rank amateurs Trump put into power are catastrophically unqualified for their jobs. This is criminal negligence with national security implications.
Under 18 USC 793, “gross negligence” in handling defense information carries up to ten years in prison. And this case goes way beyond mere negligence — they deliberately chose to conduct classified military planning on an unauthorized platform, then accidentally broadcast it to a journalist. That’s before we even get to the numerous other laws likely violated here.
And here’s what should really keep you up at night: we only know about this because they happened to add a journalist who went public about this single chat. How many other sensitive conversations are happening on Signal or other unauthorized platforms? How many other “accidental” additions might have gone unnoticed? How many foreign intelligence services are already exploiting this administration’s casual approach to operational security?
This isn’t just covering up incompetence anymore. This is actively endangering national security by normalizing absolutely reckless handling of classified military operations. Anyone claiming otherwise is either lying or has completely abandoned any pretense of caring about operational security when their team is in charge.
The messages couldn’t be clearer. Details of precise strike timing, delivered just hours before bombs actually dropped, along with specific weapons information — information that anyone with even passing familiarity with classified material (or basic common sense) would recognize as obviously classified. Even Fox News’ own national security reporter noted that every expert she spoke to said, if anything, what Hegseth texted was actually worse than what is commonly referred to as “war plans.”
“Attack orders” or “attack sequence” puts the joint force directly and immediately at risk, according to former senior defense official #1. “It allows the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against US forces.”
This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than “war plans,” which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials.
It was texting clear details of a military operation before it occurred. It included details of weapons being used and timing. No one — NO ONE — thinks that this is acceptable or normal.
Let that sink in: they authorized bombing a civilian apartment building because a target’s girlfriend lived there. This isn’t just reckless — it’s a likely violation of international humanitarian law, which explicitly prohibits attacks directed at civilian objects. The fact that these officials casually discussed targeting civilian infrastructure in an unsecured chat group — while including a journalist by mistake — demonstrates a shocking combination of moral bankruptcy and operational incompetence.
This reckless disregard for both operational security and international law isn’t just dangerous — it’s potentially criminal. And while the administration tries to deflect with absurd arguments about the difference between “war” and “attack” plans, the reality is that they’ve provided documentary evidence of planning what appears to be a war crime, sharing classified operational details in an unsecured channel, and then lying about it to Congress.
While I hesitate to use the term Kafkaesque, it is difficult to find a better adjective to describe Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The entity, which is not a department but rather an austerity initiative combined with a parapolitical apparatus, appears set on making the federal government as inefficient and wasteful as possible.
About two months after President Trump announced he would send up to 30,000 migrants to Guantanamo Bay, an expansive tent city on the naval base sits vacant. Hundreds of troops are still deployed to the base to guard the facilities and prepare them for use, even though the nearly 300 migrants who were briefly detained on the island in two separate structures are now gone.
The operation has so far cost at least $16 million, according to lawmakers who recently toured the naval base.
The tents were incompatible with the government’s standards for migrant detention, according to lawmakers who toured the facilities and another defense official.
They cost $3.1 million to get out of storage and set up, the lawmakers were told.
“They are proceeding with the orders of the president despite the fact that every single person there has to know that this is not an option.”
The overall $16 million price tag for the plan that lawmakers were briefed on during their visit didn’t appear to include expensive flights that carried migrants, troops and supplies to the island.
The administration opted to send the first transfers of migrants to Guantanamo Bay on expensive Air Force C-17 and C-130 aircraft. A Wall Street Journal analysis calculated that it cost more than $20,000 to transfer a single migrant to Guantanamo Bay on those planes.
Today in Politics, Bulletin 90. 3/13/25
… Fox reporter Jennifer Griffin: “GITMO detention plans hit another bump. The Admin’s decision to take migrants to Gitmo appears at best to have been an expensive photo op. All the migrants held at Gitmo have been sent back to the US and plans to send more have been put on hold. There are currently no migrants being held at Gitmo, and no flights scheduled to arrive with more migrants."
About 325 NNSA workers initially received notices late last week that they had been laid off, according to Reuters.
"To order the firing of employees without knowing that NNSA is responsible for maintaining a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile while also preventing, countering, and responding to a terrorist or other adversary with a nuclear or radiological device is utterly callous and dangerous,"
the NNSA struggled to notify some of the agency's originally fired employees that their terminations were rescinded because they lost access to their government email accounts.
“The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel,"
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that it is moving to correct the accidental firing of several people working on the federal government’s response to an outbreak of avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu.
Federal workers told The Washington Post that basic functions are slowing at several agencies and could collapse as crucial staff members are pushed out.
Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?
The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.
Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework.
And he shares these traits with Donald Trump, which makes them allies, although I keep wondering when their egos will collide explosively.
Selecting "gang members" by tattoos:
The tattoo on Suárez’s neck is of a colibrí, a hummingbird. His wife said it is meant to symbolize “harmony and good energy.” She said his other tattoos, like a palm tree on his hand—an homage to Suárez’s late mother’s use of a Venezuelan expression about God being greater than a coconut tree—were similarly innocuous.
Alvarado’s older sister, María, stressed in a call from Venezuela that her brother has no connection to Tren de Aragua. She said her brother was deeply devoted to helping Neryelson—explaining that one of his three tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name on it and that he used to teach swimming classes for children with developmental disabilities. “Anyone who’s talked to Neri for even an hour can tell you what a great person he is. Truly, as a family, we are completely devastated to see him going through something so unjust—especially knowing that he’s never done anything wrong,” María said. “He’s someone who, as they say, wouldn’t even hurt a fly.”
An attorney representing two federal workers—Jane Does 1 and 2—filed a motion this morning arguing that the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government staffers’ personal information to hostile foreign adversaries through unencrypted email.
McClanahan’s lawsuit highlights the government’s response to the OPM hack of 2015, which compromised personnel records on more than 22 million people, including some who’d undergone background checks to obtain security clearances. A congressional report authored by House Republicans following the breach pinned the incident on a “breakdown in communications” between OPM’s chief information officer and its inspector general: “The future effectiveness of the agency’s information technology and security efforts,” it says, “will depend on a strong relationship between these two entities moving forward.”
OPM’s inspector general, Krista Boyd, was fired by President Donald Trump in the midst of the “Friday night purge” on January 24—one day after the first HR@opm.gov email was sent.
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone,
One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
The experience of 18F echoes a pattern of chaos in DOGE’s actions across the federal government—at USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Human Health and Services, and elsewhere. DOGE has exposed potentially sensitive data on its website, and fired and then tried to rehire nuclear-security, bird-flu, food-safety, and medical-device experts. As my colleagues and I have reported, DOGE has flouted cybersecurity protocol to access data and IT systems at a number of federal agencies—potentially including sensitive information on U.S. citizens, defense technologies, and infectious diseases.
Elon Musk’s group obscured the details of some new claims on its website, despite promises of transparency. But The Times was still able to detect another batch of mistakes.
The result was that the group’s new claims appeared impossible to check.
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code.
DOGE deleted some of its largest claims about the savings from canceled contracts after news reports pointed out that they were wrong.
Nonetheless, that list of canceled contracts still contains errors.
The website posted it, deleted it, then restored it. The group has not responded to questions about why either time.
He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.
But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.
As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.
“By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”
Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Staffing cuts set up the IRS to lose money in two ways: A reduced IRS has less capacity to collect and enforce taxation, and taxpayers who think they won’t be audited may be more inclined to start cheating.
Sarin expects that the agency’s losses will far outweigh the $140 billion DOGE says it has saved (DOGE’s self-reported data is opaque and has been full of errors). She and her colleagues at the Budget Lab at Yale forecast that the plan to cut half of the agency’s workforce alone would conservatively translate to $395 billion in lost revenue in the next decade, and possibly up to $2 trillion.
A Trump administration freeze on purchase cards that agencies use to cover everything from dumpster pickups at national parks to liquid nitrogen for lifesaving military research is upending work across the government
government scientists who study food safety say they are running out of cleaning fluid for their labs
federal aviation workers report cuts to travel for urgent work
contractors who help identify U.S. soldiers killed in combat were told to pause their efforts
A Defense Department memo announcing the freeze, which was reviewed by The Post, stunned researchers who work on developing lifesaving protective equipment, including helmets, medical supplies, flame-resistant uniforms and cold-weather gear
immediate disruption across the region as the limit radically altered daily operations, grinding shipping to a halt and preventing the delivery of entry passes scheduled to arrive at various parks ahead of the summer season. Staffers could not buy medicine and supplies needed to care for visitors and the horses ridden by some park rangers
the card reduction means workers cannot place orders for lab supplies, including personal protective equipment and ethanol used to disinfect surfaces
FAA employees said the clampdown interrupted travel for an on-site meeting needed to keep a key runway project on schedule. “The FAA’s investment is in the hundreds of millions of dollars” into the runway, an employee said. “This delay is to avoid spending around $20,000 on a trip.”
Trump claimed the Biden administration spent $8 million "making mice transgender." The White House tried to back up this number with records of funding for research into cancer, asthma, and HIV, some of which used transgenic (genetically modified) mice.
Listed under "Derp State"
"this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”
Ahead of the strikes, several members of the chat expressed disagreement with the president’s desire to launch the strikes this month.
Hegseth said that while “waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus,” if they waited and “this leaks, and we look indecisive.”
Well, it did leak, and they don’t look indecisive so much as wholly incompetent.
The breathtaking incompetence displayed in the war plans leak represents a genuine national security crisis. Mike Waltz, supposedly one of our nation's top security officials, created a group chat discussing classified military operations and somehow included a journalist—then tried to blame it on some mysterious technical glitch rather than taking actual responsibility.
This isn't merely embarrassing. It's dangerous. It's a level of staggering ineptitude that would be comedic if it weren't potentially lethal. It represents a catastrophic breakdown in basic operational security at the highest levels of government.
We're witnessing a system in advanced decay. High-ranking officials are casually discussing war plans on encrypted messaging apps. Classified information is being handled with less care than a teenager's group chat about weekend plans. Basic protocols for national security operations are being ignored or misunderstood by the very people charged with maintaining them. And the response to this systemic breakdown? Technical excuses about contact mix-ups and partisan deflection.
This isn't just incompetence; it's structural failure. The constitutional architecture designed to prevent precisely this kind of dangerous behavior is buckling under the weight of institutional corruption and partisan loyalty.
“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database, and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and personal data of millions of people across all of those records”
In its apparent quest to cut government spending and improve efficiency, DOGE has fired entire tech teams devoted to those very things.
When former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of TTS director and met with TTS including 18F on February 3, 2025, he acknowledged that the group is the “gold standard” of civic technologists and that “you guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.” He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the work, and the value of the talent that the teams bring to government.
What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
On Saturday, employees throughout the federal government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), demanding a reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.” On X, Elon Musk posted that failure to respond “will be taken as a resignation.”
The email appears to have been sent even to federal judges. “We understand that some judges and judiciary staff have received an email from HR@opm.gov,” read an email from the director’s office of the Department of Administrative Services for US Federal Courts. “Please be advised that this email did not originate from the Judiciary or the Administrative Office and we suggest that no action be taken.”
At least some military personnel also received the email and have been told to await guidance from the Department of Defense. That holding pattern appears to be the response at most agencies, where workers say they have not heard from senior leadership
“National security staff are getting notified of OPM’s request, which is taking them from the important work of ensuring national security interests. These are essential employees who keep us safe.”
Trump-appointed officials fired, then scrambled to rehire some employees in critical jobs in health and national security.
“The layoffs and then rehires undermine the productivity and confidence not only of the people who left and came back but of the people who stayed”
new and disturbing.”
DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast.
More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.
Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.
After DOGE rampaged through the VA, agency leadership put out statements saying laid-off employees were “non-mission critical” and “probationary” (some were even in DEI!). Meanwhile, press reports trickled out detailing who had actually been fired: hospital staff, veteran outreach workers, employees manning a Veterans Crisis Line.
Last week, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced that the agency would cut $2 billion in current contracts: “No more paying consultants to do things like make Power Point slides and write meeting minutes!” he boasted.
The reality was starkly different. The AP, which obtained the list of affected contracts, reported the cuts “would affect everything from cancer care to the ability to assess toxic exposure.” A day of frantic interventions from lawmakers and veterans’ groups later, Collins backtracked, announcing the contract cancellations would be paused until they could be individually assessed.
Work has ground down to a stunning degree and management is spending a significant amount of time responding & preparing to respond to the chaos incited by the never ending barrage of EOs & accompanying memos
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (reichlinmelnick.bsky.social)
A USAID contracting officer (who for obvious reasons is not disclosing her identity) says a company named after its founder Philip Green almost got its federal contract cancelled because the fools at DOGE thought it had something to do with "green" energy.
employees who review the safety of food ingredients, medical devices and other products were fired
Nearly half of the FDA’s $6.9bn budget comes from fees paid by companies the agency regulates, including drug and medical device makers, which allows the agency to hire extra scientists to swiftly review products. Eliminating those positions will not reduce government spending
In particular, Martin found that almost $500M in food assistance was at risk of spoilage thanks to confusion and the freeze/unfreeze of funds Musk/Trump triggered.
Also fired in the name of increased efficiency: nuclear-arsenal scientists, veterans-affairs officials, healthcare researchers, national-park rangers, clean-energy experts and air-safety workers.
Additionally, DOGE has imposed a $1 spending limit on federal credit cards, which has led to some regional SSA offices experiencing issues buying basic supplies, including paper and toner, according to details shared with WIRED by one SSA employee.
“We have started rationing paper,” the source says. “People like to ask for four copies of their benefit verification letter. We’ve been giving them one and telling them to make their own copies.”
The provision of sign language interpreters for appointments at the SSA have also been interrupted due to the $1 spending limit. “We have to go back to that client and tell them we can’t provide an interpreter, even though everything on our website says we will provide that,” the source said, citing an incident that happened this week.
SSA staff are also now unable to order death certificates, which are used to verify whether someone within the system is dead or not, according to an email reviewed by WIRED.
The source added that the office is also unable to pay the company that shreds mountains of documents it prints out on a daily basis, raising fears that piles of paper with highly sensitive personally identifiable information could soon be left lying around the office.
The NIH—an agency that has long prided itself on its mission of science funded by scientists—spends most of its $47 billion annual budget on driving biomedical innovation: developing new drugs and vaccines, containing epidemics, treating cancer, mitigating the harms of heart disease.
“they’re just going in and picking random grants to terminate.”
If anything, the grant cancellations have become a game of whack-a-mole, in which political appointees take a mallet to any seemingly relevant research projects that pop into view—without regard to the damage they might do.
the decisions about which grants to cancel and why are primarily being made outside the agency
Several letter recipients told me that their grants had received perfect or near-perfect scores in early reviews; others told me that their results were well on their way to publication, proof of some return on the agency’s investment.
Many studies, once terminated, would be difficult, if not outright impossible, to restart, Sean Arayasirikul, a medical sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. Medical interventions in clinical trials, for instance, can’t simply be paused and picked back up; many studies also rely heavily on collecting data at small and regular intervals, so interruptions are equivalent to massive data holes.
They have now spent weeks watching colleagues resign, get fired, or be abruptly put on administrative leave. The environment at the agency has become suffocatingly toxic. “People are being screamed at, bullied, harassed.”
President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have shown that a principled discussion over tariff policy is simply not on the agenda, because the administration’s tariff policy is nonsense.
Chaos is Trump’s calling card, but few could have expected how quickly the president would ricochet all over the place on the size, nature, and timing of—not to mention the justifications for—one of his signature policies.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor who had a valid visa, was expelled in apparent defiance of a court order.
There is a shortage of American doctors working in Dr. Alawieh’s area of specialty, transplant nephrology. Foreign-born physicians play an important role in the field, according to experts.
Her patients included individuals awaiting transplants and those dealing with the complex conditions that can occur after a transplant, Dr. Bayliss said. He called Dr. Alawieh “a very talented, very thoughtful physician.”
Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away.
They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.
Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).
Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
“We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”
“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”
It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January.
Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit".
Keith Camire, 48 years old, received one of those letters. He started in September at the IRS to streamline spending on IT. His co-workers, he said, are now scrambling to absorb the work.
Camire, in Milford, Penn., said he voted for Trump three times. He said he’s not opposed to downsizing the government but is against the indiscriminate manner in which the cuts are being made.
“Is it mission critical in the sense of police, fire, border security?” he said of the work he was doing. “No, but it’s essential to provide fiscal accountability and responsibility, which is what DOGE is about.”
Trump had the audacity to accuse Zelensky of being a catalyst for a World War III, when in fact the greatest threat of a new world war is presented by a combination of Putin’s antics and Trump’s narcissistic incompetence. The Russian military complex is arguably at its weakest point in a century. Desperately seeking support from China and North Korea, Putin has been unable to vanquish Ukraine and the Ukrainian military, which, with the support from Europe and the United States (until now), have not succumbed to Putin’s attacks.
Mass layoffs and weak leadership are taking a severe toll on the US government’s cyber defense agency, undermining its ability to protect America from foreign adversaries bent on crippling infrastructure and ransomware gangs that are bleeding small businesses dry.
CISA’s turmoil could have underappreciated consequences for national security and economic prospects. The agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has steadily built a reputation as a nonpartisan source of funding, guidance, and even direct defensive support for cities, businesses, and nonprofits reeling from cyberattacks.
Trump administration workforce cuts at federal agencies overseeing U.S. dams are threatening their ability to provide reliable electricity, supply farmers with water and protect communities from floods, employees and industry experts warn.
The heads of 14 California water and power agencies sent a letter to the Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of Interior last month warning that eliminating workers with “specialized knowledge” in operating and maintaining aging infrastructure “could negatively impact our water delivery system and threaten public health and safety.”
… CNN reports that the IRS is in complete chaos because of issues with DOGE as it heads into peak tax season. Young DOGE staffers have been working inside the IRS for the past month, and thousands of workers and auditors have already been fired with 110 taxpayer assistance offices across the country also being shut down.
… One IRS employee: “They just randomly drop by people’s offices, demanding access to systems. They’re bullying us and there’s no discipline in what they are doing, which really worries me.”
… Another: “It’s a clusterfuck, and I can’t believe no one is stepping in to do anything.”
… A third IRS source: “We are paralyzed.”
For decades, new parents across the United States have been able to check a box on hospital forms in order to request Social Security numbers for their newborns.
For a brief period this week, that was no longer the case in Maine, where parents were told they would have to visit a Social Security field office thanks to a shocking move by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“As a result of SSA’s contract termination, effective immediately, Maine hospitals are no longer able to enroll newborns into Social Security at the time of birth so parents will now need to visit their local Social Security office to apply in-person for their child’s Social Security Number.”
No justification was given for the change, which was first reported by the Portland Press Herald. But on Friday morning, the Social Security Administration abruptly changed course and announced the contracts would be reinstated.
In Maine, the canceled contracts would have also forced funeral directors to report deaths by submitting paper records instead of using an electronic system. The Social Security Administration has contracts with all U.S. states and territories to collect death information through a digital portal. In addition to halting Social Security retirement benefits, the SSA shares the information with other federal agencies to prevent them from making improper payments.
“The Social Security Administration’s abrupt termination of Maine’s ‘Enumeration at Birth’ and ‘Electronic Death Records’ contracts and its subsequent reversal are yet another example of the utter incompetence of this Trump Administration.”
… The New Republic reports that DOGE canceled a MANA contract for nutritional peanut paste that has served as lifesaving assistance for starving kids abroad. It is grown by American farmers and manufactured by American workers, and huge amounts of it that was ready to ship has been sitting in Georgia warehouses rotting. Former USAID official Atul Gawande told them this will result in "a massive loss of life."
… The optics of the richest man in the world starving kids while food from American farmers rotted in warehouses was maybe a bit much for someone with a modicum of sense inside the Trump Admin, so Musk announced that the funding to ship the peanut paste and distribute it was reinstated. Except he reinstated funding for the wrong company.
… "... someone pointed out to Musk that he was letting food we had already paid for go to waste, Musk called that person an ‘imbecilic propagandist’, and then several hours later reinstated the wrong contract.”
… NYT reported that DOGE has deleted ANOTHER $4 billion more in savings from the "wall of receipts" on their website. Musk previously deleted 5 of 7 biggest savings that were posted when they launched the site. But DOGE still claims credit for saving $53 million by cancelling a Coast Guard contract that was actually completed 20 years ago.
DOGE, headed by unelected billionaire Elon Musk, is spearheading these federal layoffs
But federal workers’ salaries only make up a small fraction of total spending.
That’s 1% of gross domestic product (GDP). The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP
The federal civilian workforce as a share of total non-farm employment is on the decline, Shapiro said. In 1960, that share was about 3.5%. Now it’s about 1.5%.
“There’s a huge amount of federal services delivered by a very small and quite effective federal workforce,” Shapiro said.
Cutting federal workers indiscriminately will “substantially damage the economy,” Shapiro said.
It’s best to view Elon Musk’s DOGE as an attack. While right wing propaganda (and gullible media outlets and politicians) frame DOGE as a “cost saving” effort at “improving government efficiency,” that’s just flimsy-ass cover for its real purpose: the dismantling of corporate oversight, environmental guard rails, consumer protection, civil rights, and the social safety net by weird zealots.
But DOGE is also just an incompetently run clown show.
It’s very rare, weird, and very dangerous to just mindlessly intermingle a private, and potentially unencrypted telecom connectivity option with existing White House systems and workflows.
And if you have no shame or ethics, you also think nothing of leveraging your unelected influence to use the White House as a glorified marketing stunt. And if you’re incompetent, you’re going to be incompetent.
All very much in character for the fake government agency run by the fake super-genius engineer tasked with fake innovation and efficiency improvements.
These aren't abstract concerns about procedural fairness or institutional standards. These are immediate, tangible dangers created by abandoning the very meritocratic principles that were supposedly non-negotiable. The Waltz text debacle isn't just embarrassing—it's dangerous. It reveals a level of basic incompetence that adversaries will undoubtedly note and potentially exploit. It demonstrates that the people with their fingers on the metaphorical button have less operational security discipline than the average teenager with a group chat.
This is what the collapse of meritocracy looks like in practice: incompetence followed by deflection followed by denial. Not accountability, not learning, not the standards of excellence that were supposedly sacrosanct—just the naked protection of power regardless of performance.
Firing tens of thousands of employees in departments that have a huge area of responsibility, yet account for a small share of the budget, is how Musk is managing to simultaneously incapacitate the government’s functionality in key areas without improving the government’s fiscal position.