The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.
The US also had a relatively very small government overall compared to many other countries and variably multiple areas are extremely under-resourced like product and worker health and safety generally.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
I decided to not tackle the lies about "savings" because the math was so bad and it was quite frankly being covered much better by other organizations and sites. I also don't want to perpetuate the idea that this was about efficiency, since that and "IT Modernization" were more like a cover for DOGE's other activities.
I would like to add more graphics and charts, but I have been struggling a lot with how murky and noisy the data is. Charts communicate a certainty that I don't feel entirely comfortable presenting. One possibility might be to use them for timelines (like I do for the CIOs on the Enablers page), but if you have other suggestions, I'm always open to hear them! Thanks!
This has been unfortunately necessary since DOGE has worked to really avoid any transparency or accountability. If FOIA or legal filings have more information, I do add them, but I always provide the source citation for you to know.
I think it is really important from time to time to shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives and form a somewhat subjective overpromise/underdeliver judgement (also looking at where, why and how they succeeded or failed).
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard:
Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
Oh great, I was really hoping to get my blood boiling today. Reading about data breaches done in the light of day is appalling, infinitely more so when it's condoned by the government who's supposed to prevent such grift and violations of privacy. It will take a long time to recover from this insane timeline (if ever).
The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
Putting everything that DOGE has done, am I the only one who thinks that there is a teeny, tiny conflict of interest in Musk naming a department pretty much the same as one of the cryptocurrencies that he supports (Dogecoin)? Isn't that using the government for marketing?
DOGE has no power. It produces information. Is the premise of this page that information about government operations is bad? If the goal is to persuade somebody that government should grow with no oversight forever, good luck. Democrats will read the site with horror. Republicans will cheer the accomplishments listed. People in neither camp probably won't pay attention, but if they do, they'll split down the middle.
Just today I ran into one of the very minor legacies of doge. When talking about conflict styles I used to have students take a survey on the US Institute of Peace's website. Doge shut it down. I guess that survey was taking up too much money to run... Now the only thing there is a press release stroking Trump's ego.
It is biased. I do not think we can "both sides" the impact of DOGE here and I think the site makes its case for why it should be seen as a destructive force.
Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, MbS, Netanyahu, Berdimuhamedow, and much of the worldwide pedophile oligarch class are celebrating all of their various, ascendant authoritarian restoration of de facto criminal aristocracy in multiple countries. Fascism rarely leaves peacefully once it takes hold.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 44.6 ms ] threadI'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
I decided to not tackle the lies about "savings" because the math was so bad and it was quite frankly being covered much better by other organizations and sites. I also don't want to perpetuate the idea that this was about efficiency, since that and "IT Modernization" were more like a cover for DOGE's other activities.
I would like to add more graphics and charts, but I have been struggling a lot with how murky and noisy the data is. Charts communicate a certainty that I don't feel entirely comfortable presenting. One possibility might be to use them for timelines (like I do for the CIOs on the Enablers page), but if you have other suggestions, I'm always open to hear them! Thanks!
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard: Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
I truly hope our future DSA gov takes this experience to heart.