bonkers shit as Trump waves around a printout of one of his Truth Social posts meant to show how he purportedly gave water to California pic.twitter.com/9LTlyGhAIc
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 25, 2025
That’s incredibly dumb but then, what else is new?
Remember the big water release in California Trump bragged would soon be in Los Angeles and we would never have any fires again? You know, the one that almost flooded the flood plain and wasted billions of gallons of water for nothing? Well, it started out as a DOGE thing:
Representatives from the Department of Government Efficiency repeatedly pressured the head of a United States water management agency to open a major California pump system in late January, intending to release a huge amount of water south toward Los Angeles — even though the water would have never made it to the fire-scarred metropolis. […]
Representatives from Elon Musk’s then-nascent efficiency department repeatedly called senior officials at the Bureau of Reclamation — the federal agency that manages some of the country’s major rivers, reservoirs and dams in the American West — days before Trump ordered the Army Corps to open the dams.
DOGE agents, including Tyler Hassen, a former oil company CEO, told senior Reclamation officials they had an order from the president to turn on water pumps at the Jones Pumping Plant, three people with knowledge of the requests told CNN. The plant transfers water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into a canal system, delivering water to farmers and other water users in the Central Valley.
They weren’t allowed in for obvious reasons. Nobody knew who the hell they were, they had no security clearances and the whole thing was insane:
Hassen and Bryton Shang, another DOGE representative, flew to California in the last week of January. They were given a tour of the Jones Pumping Plant and were briefed on Reclamation’s operations. The White House and DOGE did not respond to CNN’s question on which agency paid for the flights.
But the men’s request to have a photo taken of them turning on the Jones pumps didn’t happen; Shang wasn’t an official government employee, he wasn’t allowed inside the pump facility’s control room, which is under strict cybersecurity protocols. Hassen had to travel back before the electricity was scheduled to be restored.
Instead, Hassen and Shang posed in front of a 3-dimensional map of the Central Valley in a public space inside the plant and posted their photos to DOGE’s X account, congratulating Reclamation for getting its pumps back up and running — part of the facility’s standard operating procedure.
“They didn’t get their photo op,” a person with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The entire episode felt like “what DOGE has been this entire time — this slapstick operation of 20-somethings they’re seeing as whiz kids but have zero knowledge.”
This is what we’re dealing with. Cos-playing, tech bro, masters of the universe, bully boys running around like they can make the sun revolve around the earth because they are just that smart.
A few days later Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to do it wasting 2.2 billion gallons of water which could have irrigated 6,000 acres of almond trees for a year.
How’s this all working out for us?