While you’ve been distracted by Trump bringing the WWF to the world stage via tariff body slams leading to market knockouts, the end of due process thanks to doubling down on the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Harvard resisting Trump’s plan to dictate many of the university’s operations, and Witkoff playing at being a diplomat in high-stakes negotiations, DOGE has continued burrowing away at the foundations of Federal agencies like hungry termites.

Keep in mind that DOGE’s aim is not to reduce inefficiency. It’s to reduce government operations in a very big way so as to:

Immiserate the poor and others DOGE deems to be burdensome…like Social Security beneficiaries who paid into the system, often over decades

Eliminate or wreck government functions so that the private sector can take over. But as we know, the government has been on an outsourcing kick for decades, so the idea that functions now operated at the Federal level can be done better by outsiders is suspect. This campaign is all about the opportunity for looting, and the harm to the operation of commerce and society be damned.

DOGE as a fraud: Claiming savings while increasing costs. We highlighted an earlier DOGE spreadsheet that claimed to show the source and amount of DOGE’s asserted cost reduction and showed that many of the biggest items were false. For instance, DOGE took credit for contacts that had already been terminated, and on top of that, cited the maximum authorized amount, when the actual expenditures were lower, often greatly so. DOGE then greatly reduced the information it presents so as to preserve its ability to lie.

DOGE as destruction: Tearing down the highly efficient Social Security Administration, as opposed to taking on the pork machine of defense spending. On April 14, the Social Security Administration cut its phone staffing and also changed its policy so that “sensitive” information like bank details will no longer be taken over the phone. That means that if you can’t sign up for Social Security successfully online, you will have to go to an office…where getting someone to see you is Kafkaesque….and DOGE has promised to shutter offices.

And even before that, the Social Security site was already crashing, thanks to IT cuts. So even if you were to manage to get to see a live person at an office, if the system was down, they would not be able to address your issue.

And DOGE employees are still trying to defy a court order and access Social Security data…even with not just old hands but even some Trump officials in opposition. From the Washington Post:

Representatives of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have sought for weeks to get around a court order barring their access to sensitive data and internal systems at the Social Security Administration, prompting career staff to repeatedly resist their efforts, according to a half dozen people familiar with the DOGE team’s actions and records obtained by The Washington Post.

The battle inside the agency led the Justice Department to intervene to deny DOGE access to the data, even as the Trump administration installed and promoted DOGE-friendly leaders to dramatically cut back services at Social Security.

Please read the piece in full. The reporting is impressive and revealing.

DOGE as fraud: Taking credit for finding abuses so well known they’ve been the subject of Congressional hearings, and resulted from Trump 1.0 expanded unemployment benefits. From Associated Press:

The latest government waste touted by billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency is hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims it purportedly uncovered.

One problem: Federal investigators already found what appears to be the same fraud, years earlier and on a far greater scale…

“They’re trying to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, government is inefficient and government is stupid and they’re catching these things that the government didn’t catch,’” says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor during the administration of former President Joe Biden. “They’re finding fraud that was marked as fraud and saying they found out it was fraud….

Though states have almost complete control over their own unemployment systems, special relief programs — most notably widely expanded benefits enacted by the first Trump administration at the outset of the COVID pandemic — inject more direct federal involvement and a flood of new beneficiaries into the system….

Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020, and from the very start it became a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officials about two weeks later, the Department of Labor warned that the expanded benefits had made unemployment programs “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”…

A Labor Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about Musk’s findings and DOGE gave no details on how it came to find the supposed fraud or whether it duplicates what was already found.

Though DOGE ostensibly looked at longer timeframe than federal investigators previously had, it tallied just $382 million in fake unemployment claims, a tiny fraction of what investigators were already aware.

DOGE as fraud: After loudly promising transparency, DOGE is anything but. From Politico:

DOGE KEEPS IT UNDER WRAPS: The battle to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding DOGE and its operations is coming to a head in several lawsuits…

Many of the anti-DOGE….lawyers are trying to answer questions like: What is the basic structure of DOGE? Which officials were involved in cutting-and-slashing efforts? And what sort of access does DOGE have to sensitive agency systems?…

But the Justice Department is fighting vigorously to shield DOGE from having to divulge that information, despite Trump and ELON MUSK’s repeated assurances about transparency. The administration has refused to provide testimony from virtually every official that plaintiffs have tried to depose — and especially from people who work for DOGE.

The entire Politico piece, which goes through several cases of persistent evasiveness and misdirection, is worth reading.

DOGE as a fraud: Endangering national security, stealing data apparently to target opponents like organized labor. This is a much bigger caper than the Watergate break-in, but hacking is so common that even when insiders do it to abuse their power, the outrage is muted. From NPR which broke the story:

In the first days of March, a team of advisers from President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency initiative arrived at the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board.

The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.

The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB’s internal systems….

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.

Threats against the whistleblower have a guilty look:

DOGE as incompetent: exposing logins. Leaving tech doors unlocked is either incredibly amateurish or done deliberately to get something in return. Russians of course are one of our default bad guys. Readers can opine as to how hard it is to create the appearance of a “Russian IP address”. A VPM could achieve that, FFS.

DOGE as fraud: Forcing resignation of tech experts, thus risking cyber attacks. People who actually know something about the relevant entity and have some tech chops might show up DOGE, and worse, rat out to external parties how DOGE is doing a piss poor job. One fresh case is the resignation of DoD ‘SWAT team of nerds.’ From Politico:

Under pressure from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, nearly all the staff of the Defense Digital Service — the Pentagon’s fast-track tech development arm — are resigning over the coming month….

The Defense Digital Service was created in 2015 to help the Pentagon adopt fast tech fixes during national security crises and push Silicon Valley-style innovation inside the Pentagon. It built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid, drone detection technologies and more.

Without the program, some key efforts to streamline the DOD’s tech talent pipeline and counter adversarial drones will be sunset…

Several other digital modernization efforts within the government have met similar fates. The U.S. Digital Service, which helped the government modernize its technology and attract tech talent, has now been subsumed by DOGE, amid mass layoffs and firings. A program called 18F, a technology unit within the GSA, was eliminated by DOGE as well….

One former senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be named because of possible retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive

“They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said.

DOGE as destructive: Infighting as agency chiefs correctly point to DOGE doing damage, here killing people:

Recall that the New York Times had earlier reported on a Cabinet meeting row where Elon Musk pressed Secretary of State Mario Rubio over allegedly not having gotten rid of enough State staffers, which Rubio vigorously contested. Trump somewhat backed Rubio by calling for cuts to be surgical. But regardless, this was a behind-closed-doors dispute that was made public, and not one taken straight to the press.

And then we have ideological enforcement. Covid was supposedly a big Democratic party invention to allow for a power grab, ergo Covid was fake, ergo no need for Covid testing:

And even the 250th Fourth of July celebration is also being jeopardized, although in light of the apparent “wreck the US as we know it” exercise, this is fitting. From Axios:

The big picture: State humanities councils planning 250th anniversary celebrations all over the country have had their funding slashed, and those organizations tell Axios they likely won’t be able to execute the big, patriotic plans they had been making.

  • Trump has called for an “extraordinary celebration” next summer….
  • The chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities is part of that task force, and state humanities councils across the country had a leading role in planning public events to mark the occasion.

But 80% of the NEH’s staff was placed on administrative leave earlier this month…

  • Those layoffs came just days after the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils were alerted that their funding grants were being terminated.
  • “These were funds that were already appropriated, that had already been distributed through a competitive process, and they had already been under contract to be provided,” said Julie Ziegler, the CEO and executive director of Humanities Washington.

The latest: The National Endowment for the Humanities on Monday opened applications for 250 challenge grants, worth up to $25,000 each, for projects related to the “founding of the American nation, key historical figures, and milestones that reflect the exceptional achievements of the United States” in honor of the anniversary.

  • But state officials say the cuts have already prompted them to shed staff and suspend new programming, so even the possibility of new anniversary-specific funding would not fill the massive gap.

DOGE survivors, for now. Despite being an early and high profile DOGE target, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, though a bit bloodied, is still standing. From Fortune:

On Tuesday evening, Sen. [Elizabeth] Warren and fellow Democratic Sen. Andy Kim, who both sit on the Committee of Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, demanded investigations into a push to slash the CFPB’s workforce and cancel its contracts….

A federal judge has temporarily reversed some of the initial cuts at the agency. As part of a lawsuit between a union representing CFPB employees and Vought, a judge ordered the CFPB to reinstate all its probationary and term employees. The order also blocked the agency from terminating employees without cause, issuing a reduction-in-force, or directing employees to stop work or take administrative leave while the case moves forward—though an appeals court said last week that the CFPB could allow work stoppages that didn’t interfere with its statutory duties.

Note that legal experts have repeatedly opined that DOGE can’t cancel contracts, but if DOGE breaches them by withholding payment, they can still kill the contractors since many need the money. That in many cases will have the effect of the victims getting a recovery if they have the means to put up a fight, while the government won’t get the work they will wind up (to at least a degree) paying for. Of course, DOGE wants to destroy firms that can help with enforcement of regulation, so cost is really not an objective, despite that serving as the pretext.

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