DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency
136 comments
·February 13, 2025lordnacho
SamBam
I think that they are having a good think about what they are doing, but I believe that, in cutting key agencies that protect consumers from corporations, their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.
jrussino
> their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.
When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)
To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.
But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
idle_zealot
Congratulations, you've discovered class analysis. Unfortunately, that mode of thinking was successfully stigmatized during the Cold War's red scare, so good luck getting any group with power to take it seriously.
killerteddybear
Good example is the CFPB. If they destroy it return all the money to taxpayers as Elon is saying he is doing, it's about 2 dollars to each of us. In return, we have a largely unregulated banking system that can do things like charge structuring for credit cards and checking account to maximize fees or overdrafts in a frankly fraudulent manner. It will cost us billions of dollars as a society to not have those protections anymore. Not to mention things like forced subscriptions that are impossible to cancel that the CFPB has been working against.
I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
Kapura
well good thing we have inspectors general to make sure that people in the government are acting correctly!
oh wait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
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SmirkingRevenge
It's like hiring Cookie Monster to make the cookie factory more efficient.
He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.
Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.
kemayo
The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary.
I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.
That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.
EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.
tbatchelli
A key difference is that twitter has (had) users, and users can move to e.g. bluesky once twitter's CEO decides to wreck it. The US has citizens instead, not users, not customers, but citizens, and citizens can't move if they don't like what Elon is doing. There is no Bluesky equivalent of the USA, and citizenship is not a free market.
A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.
oceanplexian
The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.
A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
cadamsdotcom
The argument you’re making is potentially valid but we can’t know for sure as it depends on numbers you don’t provide - how much government growth there’s been since 1990.
There’s two extra nuances too. First, what’s been the corresponding capability growth; and second, what’s been the growth in population served.
It may be that, controlling for these factors, things are more efficient than back then. And to go back would require removing capability that would be missed by some - or be critical due to today’s more complex world.
ravetcofx
except when things break, actual people in the country get harmed, and "Repairing" in this case will be privatization
kemayo
Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that it was a good approach to apply to the US government. ;_;
cma
And the federal workforce outside of the military is only like 4.5% of the federal budget
moolcool
Of course there's a lot of factors, but the people who defend his cutbacks at twitter often ignore just how crappy the platform has gotten under his relatively tenure.
Kapura
Why are we giving these people charitable interpretations any more? Elon Musk did a full on nazi salute at the inauguration rally; since then he and his cronies have extralegally tried to insert themselves inside the entire american government to cripple the regulations that prevent him and other techno-fascists doing exactly what they want with their effectively infinite money.
You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.
meowkit
Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times.
One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.
I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
saagarjha
You think breaking things for 10% of Americans is not harmful?
spiderfarmer
The biggest problem for people like you is that there are plenty governments and companies that are being led by competent leaders that don’t need to wield an axe to effect change. To the people wielding the axe, every problem looks like a tree.
outside1234
The challenge is that he is following his values and not the values of the country.
The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*
We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.
* https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-02-13/hate-speech...
jillesvangurp
It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning.
It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.
Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.
Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.
The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.
The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.
I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.
That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.
bryanlarsen
> Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people
At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
coolKid721
Here's another chestertonism: There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
kemayo
..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened.
This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
coolKid721
reread the quote
richardw
No. There are many things that are path dependent and much harder to fix if you do it wrong the first time. People resign and move on, and it can take decades to build up the skills again. For example: if Trump breaks Ukraine, how do you fix that later? Deals are signed. The war stops. China is now emboldened to have a shot at Taiwan.
hiddencost
People are already dying, and quite a few more will. You can't turn the clock back on that.
drc37
Elon's philosophy is the exact opposite. Remove 90% and see what really needs to be added back.
cguess
The problem here is people die when those things are removed even for a few weeks or months. You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. He's not doing this in good faith, he's convinced he's the smartest man in the world and should literally be a dictator.
sjsdaiuasgdia
It's fine, it won't hurt Musk himself. All these wild experiments are perfectly okay from his perspective because, to him, there's basically zero risk.
laverya
> You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments.
"Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.
drc37
[flagged]
tmaly
I wish there was a good solution to Chesterton's fence.
fny
And yesterday I learned they’re shielded from FOIA despite whatever transparency was promised.
justinator
They didn't.
demosthanos
> It’s unclear how many people are being let go, but multiple sources tell WIRED that list could be upwards of 70 if not more. Prior, there were around 650 TTS employees.
So the worst case scenario that anyone can imagine numbers for is that this department gets hit with 10% layoffs. That's not fun for anyone involved, but it's also not exactly crisis mode yet, and it seems like there are bigger things that this administration is doing to focus our pitchforks on?
There's a very real risk of burning out people's ability to be indignant if we get up in arms about every obscure department that suffers moderate layoffs. Let's save our outrage for the really important things.
Kapura
To characterize this as a "department [getting] hit with 10% layoffs" is completely disingenuous. This isn't a department cutting staff; it's an unelected body going around and firing people out of the government for reasons spanning malice, cronyism, and corruption.
bufferoverflow
Trump has been talking openly about starting DOGE during his campaign. People voted for it.
demosthanos
This executive branch department is cutting staff on the orders of the chief executive who is taking advice from a body he put together to find places to cut. They may have ulterior motives for giving that advice, but what is happening is technically perfectly legal because Trump is (unfortunately) the elected chief executive and is ultimately all of these people's boss.
I don't like Trump any more than you do, but mischaracterizing what is happening isn't helping the situation. The people who are pro-Trump or in the middle see through it, and the people who are already anti-Trump already agree with you.
scroot
> but what is happening is technically perfectly legal because Trump is (unfortunately) the elected chief executive and is ultimately all of these people's boss
This is not correct. Normally civil servants need to be fired "with cause," as called for by statute. Larger scale Reductions in Force (RIFs) -- which EOs say are coming -- must be approved by Congress, again according to law. The President does not have supreme authority in these matters, at least not on paper. We are about to find out what that paper's worth.
hintymad
En serio? Unelected what? DOGE was set up by Trump. It was a temporary entity in Trump's executive branch. It was part of USDS, an agency created by Obama. Even the Democrats have a hard time suing his EOs. And just because you don't like what Trump and Elon are doing, then it's cronyism and corruption? It is exactly this kind of hysteria that pushed people who voted democrats all their lives like me to support Trump, got that?
We elected Trump to fuck up the corrupted government, and Trump followed through. We elected Trump to fuck up the NGOs who funnel money to study LGBTQ monkeys in a foreign country or funnel money to the media to wash our brain with our own fucking money, and Trump followed through. We elected Trump to dig out years of waste and misspending of our tax money, and Trump is following through. Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Let that sink in.
cadamsdotcom
To anyone sad about this:
The alternative offered was Kamala Harris. Thanks DNC.
First-past-the-post voting practically guarantees a two party system emerges over time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
The US gov has been worn way at for decades by unscrupulous people seeking power and made so unpleasant to work in that few young people want to go into political leadership - and those that do don’t get far enough to have impact (eg. Buttigieg).. hence, old ass presidents.
Truly impactful movers and shakers have easy access to capital in the US, can keep their companies and lives private, and achieve a very comfortable life. Why would anyone choose politics over that?
Finally, the US gov system of checks and balances was designed assuming it could be perfected incrementally, but long-lived systems also need cycles of renewal - think of a forest. That design flaw is showing up now as key systems are getting cracked open by opportunists.
LastTrain
What was wrong with Kamala Harris?
i_love_retros
It feels like america is being run by reddit memeing snickering schoolboys.
tflinton
I'd go as far as say 4-chan rather than reddit, but yeah, pretty much.
SmirkingRevenge
And a dash of kiwi farms as well
krapp
Because it is. The "government agency" which is the subject of this thread was named after a Reddit meme, and it's run by a redpilled cringelord shitposter who uses terms like "woke mind virus" and "shadow government," and some tech-bro incels who trade Nazi memes on Discord.
There is nothing about the American government that is serious anymore. The US is not a serious country run by serious people, it's a clownshow and a kleptocracy.
i_love_retros
I know.
I kind of wish people would pronounce it dee oh gee ee instead of doge just to piss of musk and ruin his pathetic joke
AlgorithmicTime
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kevin_thibedeau
> focusing on AI, automating different internal processes, and centralizing data from across the federal government.
So billions are going to be wasted with nothing to show for it in the end.
Rastonbury
xAI and all his friends are going to have fat pockets at least!
pluc
No billions will be wasted, Elon is gonna get a new lucrative contract.
Kapura
I mean, it won't be nothing; there will be craters where the government used to be. People will be studying exactly what the hell happened here for decades to come.
EcommerceFlow
I read the entire article and it doesn't mention what this "key" US tech agency even does.
tim333
It kind suggests that maybe some of what they do isn't that necessary and a 10% staff cut not so bad?
I looked on their website and it says they do digital.gov, and on that site there is stuff like
>An introduction to digital governance. Understand how and why to implement digital governance
>Case study At the General Services Administration (GSA), we operate a Digital Experience Executive Board, supported by an agency-wide Digital Council. The Board is composed of senior executives who provide high-level direction, and Council members coordinate implementation of digital initiatives within their business line. We also have an Enterprise Digital Experience team to coordinate enterprise improvements to our agency’s digital experience. Read more about digital governance at GSA.
>We also defined the work of a website manager and identified one website manager for each digital property at GSA. Then, we updated their position descriptions... https://digital.gov/resources/an-introduction-to-digital-gov...
It doesn't sound that lean and mean.
karaterobot
I think they probably should have given it a sentence or two. Apparently the GSA does operational things like leasing office space for other agencies, purchasing supplies, buying vehicles, etc.
Swoerd
It seems like the U.S. has truly screwed itself this time—dragging down what remains of the civilized world in the process.
From a European perspective, it’s baffling that so many people (Republican voters) genuinely believe this will all work out for the best. Are Trump supporters really that naive? (Rhetorical question.)
You’ve crippled your own government, abandoned your allies, and handed power to a compulsive liar who’s draining the country’s finances.
You had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to financially cripple Russia—your adversary for over 75 years. But no. Trump, ever the "stable genius," prefers cozying up to dictators. Instead of standing firmly behind Ukraine, he’s suggesting they surrender their most valuable land and pay the U.S. $500 billion in minerals. Because, apparently, Ukraine’s right to exist is negotiable.
The U.S. has profited immensely from this war, yet Trump chooses to undermine Ukraine rather than capitalize on a strategic victory.
No country will ever see the U.S. as a stable partner again.
And to those still working at Meta, and X, with their psycho CEO's- You’re complicit in enabling this ridiculous timeline.
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alephnerd
IMO, I'd ignore the AI part.
The really scary thing is FedRAMP is part of the TTS (the affected agency).
FedRAMP is the program used to procure Cloud and Cybersecurity services for federal agencies.
With TTS in flux, that means FedRAMP is in flux as well - which means tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in Cloud and Cybersecurity spend is on the line.
I have significant qualms about FedRAMP, but it was at least better than nothing.
FedRAMP was also one of the last tethers for the Cloud and Cybersecurity industry to remain in the US. Otherwise, the entire center of gravity is in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (as I have mentioned multiple times).
seltzered_
Since not everyone remembers the Great American Recession or the origins of Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), I link to a Nov. 2008 piece in Harper's magazine by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi "Protect Financial Consumers": http://archive.harpers.org/2008/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2008-...
"For most of the country’s history, state and lo- cal usury laws imposed modest consumer protec- tions by setting caps on interest rates and fees. But in 1978, a federal statute was used to bypass these laws. Creditors quickly rewrote the rules, issuing un- intelligible contracts that increased fees, penal- ties, and interest rates. The fragmented financial regulatory bodies that remain have operated as if their main goal were lender profitability."
[...]
"The ever-widening information imbalance between consumers and creditors has only made borrowers easier marks. In a Federal Trade Commission study conducted last year, for instance, nine in ten mort- gage customers examining relatively straightforward fixed-rate loan agreements could not figure out the up-front costs on the loan; half could not iden- tify the loan amount. Of all the borrowers who were sold subprime mortgages in the past five years, nearly 60 percent would have qualified for prime mortgages if brokers had offered them; the sub- prime mortgages carried so many rate escalators, prepayment penalties, and other traps that even would-be prime borrowers defaulted."
Elizabeth Warren back in this era was also famous for talking about the twin-income trap, here's a 2004 talk about 'The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&feature=youtu.be
ck2
Every time each one of these actions finally appears in front of a court, it is almost always stopped in whole or part.
There's a growing list I don't have handy but easy to google
I get part of the strategy is exhaustion and make sure no-one wants to ever work for federal government again but what exactly happens when they run out of agencies to destroy and refuse court orders to restore?
fncypants
And what happens when they're successful even in part and we dump a lot of unemployed workers all at once into the job market in the private sector? Measured and calculated reform is one things. Smashing things without addressing what happens next is just kindergarten level stupidity.
But then again, maybe crashing the job market with masses of unemployed, which will drive down wages and labor bargaining power, is exactly their strategy.
6stringmerc
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ARandumGuy
> I get part of the strategy is exhaustion and make sure no-one wants to ever work for federal government again
It's difficult to tell what their strategy is. There's so much chaos going on that it's impossible to say for sure what the end game is. But we can make some guesses.
They could be assuming the supreme court overturns the lower courts, allowing them to do everything unopposed. They may be trying to overwhelm the system, allowing at least some stuff to get through. They may be trying to drive out federal employees, weakening the federal bureaucracy. Or they might just be idiots who are moving fast without stopping to consider the consequences of their actions.
Ultimately, regardless of their specific end goal, the best course to stop them is to try and slow them down at every opportunity. We may not be able to fully stop them, but the more we can slow them down, the more we can minimize the damage.
dmazin
I am just praying for the day that Musk takes on the Pentagon.
They will destroy him. (There's a reason Bannon is egging him on to do it.)
And if they don't... well, Pentagon is one agency where we know the financial inefficiency is legendary.
justinator
> There's a growing list I don't have handy but easy to google
If you wanna talk about it, please make this list.
Unless your theory of compliance via exhaustion applies to you too.
And in that case they won. And we're all going to lose.
bodhi_mind
justinator
An excellent resource. Everyone should check this page out. It's... not short.
inciampati
To date there is no evidence that any court order has been respected. The crisis continues.
keernan
JD Vance has made clear they are following the pre-election script:
The Judiciary does not have the constitutional authority to compel the Executive to do, or stop doing, anything. They are simply going to ignore SCOTUS and, since SCOTUS has zero enforcement mechanism, there is nothing SCOTUS can do about it.
PS US Marshals are part of the Executive Branch.
freejazz
Elon is calling for any judge that opposes his actions to be impeached.
dragonwriter
He can call for that all day, its not going to matter. A major reason they are relying on executive fiat protected by a passive Congress is that even a Republican Congress doesn't want recorded votes on most of their agenda, good luck getting their political retaliation through a process that takes a majority in the House followed by a supermajority that would require substantial Democratic support in the Senate.
kagakuninja
Elon / Trump will ignore court orders they don't like, they are basically doing that already. The only remedy will be impeachment. It is extremely unlikely that Republicans will remove Trump from office, and so the coup will continue.
freejazz
I'm not convinced it wont matter. And I don't agree with your reasoning why.
drc37
Actually, most of the items that an activist judge initially blocked have since been overturned and allowed to progress through higher-court judges.
singleshot_
Would you mind providing a caption for such an appeal that the administration has won? I’d love to read it. Right now I’m only finding the CA1 upholding the funding freeze, and CA9 is about to take up the birthright citizenship order.
freejazz
There's several judges that have made decisions adverse to Elon's actions and I'm not sure why you think they are activist aside from Elon's self-serving description of them. Where did you see that their decisions were overturned, I have not seen that anywhere. The last I did see on the issue is that Elon is calling for all of them to be impeached.
null
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.