Jonathan V. Last writes about Luke Farritor, one of the DOGE boys who was profiled in a massive Bloomberg feature last week. He is basically a spoiled, smart, young, jerk who has the blood of millions of people on his hands:
I want to quote liberally from the Bloomberg piece so you can get a sense of what DOGE was like:
The White House’s executive order creating DOGE said it would modernize technology and maximize productivity. “It took a couple of weeks to realize that, despite the stated mission, their main focus would be destruction,” says a current government employee who, like others we interviewed, requested anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak with the media. “That it was less about evolving and improving than tearing down to the floorboards. I think part of what confused everybody was that you had these foot soldiers you were seeing and you assumed that they were there just to support the generals, but they weren’t. The generals had delegated everything to the foot soldiers.”
Deleting USAID seems to have been Farritor’s most important task:
On Friday, Jan. 31, Farritor was invited to an “urgent meeting” about the US Agency for International Development. Over the weekend, Musk called the agency, which provides humanitarian assistance to millions of the world’s poorest people, a criminal organization and a viper’s nest full of radical-left Marxists who hate America. After midnight on that Sunday, he wrote on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” . . .
[W]hen a former friend posted an article critical of Farritor and DOGE on Instagram, Farritor replied with a meme of a crying baby and the caption: “When the corrupt elites can’t access USAID anymore.”
And:
DOGE members didn’t identify themselves when they came into an agency, government employees told us, and demanded access to sensitive data but wouldn’t explain why. They communicated on Signal, where they could make their messages disappear. They shielded their work from public-records review. . . .
They were busy—and Farritor may have been among the busiest. “Good God. You’d see him and think that he must be harmless,” says a current government employee. “And I guess he would be if other people weren’t giving him an obscene amount of power and access and telling him to move fast and break things.”
Farritor helped assess, slash or dismantle at least nine departments and agencies after USAID— the Offices of Personnel Management and of Management and Budget; the Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services; the National Science Foundation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—according to interviews with dozens of current and former government employees, and lawsuits and records seen by Businessweek.
Last:
The irony in all of this is that while no one denies Farritor’s genius as an engineer, it’s not clear that destroying the federal government required any special gift. Building requires skill; any monkey can do the demolition work.
Look at DOGE and you don’t see an elite strike force that was needed to figure out how to execute an intricate, novel task. You see a bunch of privileged elites who were granted the honor of unthinkingly mashing the delete button as part of the reward system in their clique.
I’m pretty sure that I could have figured out how to destroy USAID.
But then again, maybe that’s the key: Maybe the point of bringing in geniuses like Luke Farritor is that they’d be so smart that they couldn’t understand what they were actually doing?
I dunno. They just seem like anti-social assholes who could just as easily have become gangsters or concentration camp guards if they’d come up in different circumstances.
This is the quote in the Bloomberg piece that got to me:
The DOGE team wasn’t what I expected,” says a current government employee who’s interacted with Farritor and other core members of DOGE. “Marketed as tech geniuses, yet they could barely keep up with basic tasks. In reality, they were overconfident, drunk on power and utterly clueless. They giggled and asked me how my day was going—right as they hit the keys to obliterate nearly a decade of my work. There wasn’t even a flicker of understanding or care. It wasn’t just the loss that gutted me. It was the audacity of their casual cruelty.”
Sick, sick, sick. And, I’m sorry, I don’t care if they’re young.
Last wonders:
[H]ow would you describe the moral culpability for a man who casually destroys a program that will result in the deaths of millions without even achieving his stated aims of saving money?
Because that seems like more than just a “mistake,” or a “youthful indiscretion,” or a bad choice.
Especially because the final piece of the puzzle is that it is almost certain that Farritor will never face any consequences for his actions. Hell, his professional prospects will probably be improved by his association with Musk and DOGE. The spigots of the red-pilled tech world will be running full-blast for him.
This is the proverbial banality of evil without any accountability. In fact, it seems to be becoming the norm.