Article URL: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-year-on-the-doge-disaster Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950667 Points: 13 # Comments: 1

The day after Christmas gave rise to one of the most remarkable social media posts you are likely to see. Elon Musk attacked the appointment of the new head of the New York City’s Fire Department, on the grounds that “proven experience matters when lives are at stake” in public services. (Mamdani clapped back, pointing out that the appointee had decades of experience working in emergency services). To get new posts in your inbox, consider supporting “Can We Still Govern?” as a free or paid subscriber. It is hard to fathom anyone on the planet less qualified than Elon Musk to opine on the value of public service experience when lives are at stake. And yes, I know that pointing out that Musk is a hypocrite is like pointing out that water is wet. With DOGE, he held extraordinary public power. How did he use it? Across the government Musk put people with zero experience of government services in charge of those services, determining what contracts would be maintained, which employees would stay or go. At one point they fired the guys taking care of nuclear weapons, before rehiring them after some members of Congress got very nervous. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have died because Musk ignored the people with real experience. So a year on from its creation, its time for a reckoning: What did DOGE do? Lets dig in. It is important to distinguish between the formal mission of DOGE (“modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity”) and the reason for its creation. It is especially important to remember that Musk pushed DOGE on Trump, not vice-versa. DOGE is best understood a political project of an increasingly politically active and right-wing broligarchy. The day before Trump took office I laid out out what we might expect from DOGE. I wanted to be hopeful. The idea of DOGE was not a bad one. But having watched Musk cook his brain on social media, and listen to the stated goals of the people sponsoring DOGE, it was hard to maintain such optimism. So my bottom line was this: Here is a factual description of DOGE: it is a group run by right-wing billionaires who oppose government regulation of their businesses, and benefit from government contracts. It avoids accountability standards that we expect of other groups who seek to influence government. It is not run by people who have a deep knowledge of the function of government, or have much patience with the procedural requirements that flow from laws.