Elon Musk the visionary genius is tasked with making the government more efficient with a much leaner workforce full of brainy Trumpers who love America. How’s that going so far?
Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post:
Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.
- At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.
- At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.
- At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)
I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing frustrated civil servants, whose remarks typically rotate through panic, rage and black humor. Almost none are willing to speak on the record because of concerns about purges by the U.S. DOGE Service. But their themes are easy to corroborate: Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.
That sounds very efficient.
How about this Orwellian busywork?
For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”
What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.
They are literally scrubbing “forbidden words” repeatedly. I think this describes it well:
“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service (which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”
Having been through some corporate takeovers where geniuses come in and immediately fire a bunch of people making those who are left absorb all the work in the midst of chaos, let’s just say the work suffered. The best transitions were those that featured someone coming in and interviewing everyone to find out exactly what they did and spending time evaluating the systems before making wholesale changes. Even then there were months of people being nervous and worried if they were going to have a job and a lot of good people leaving for greener pastures.
But for all that, even the worst ones I went through were nothing like this level of sheer destruction. This is akin to asset stripping by vulture capitalists who take over a company with the intention of selling its various parts and closing the company itself. But the government isn’t a business and even if they want to privatize everything it’s not possible. And mostly, what they want is to destroy “the deep state” which they have defined broadly as the entire federal bureaucracy without the slightest idea of what the ramifications of doing that will be to our society and economy.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to work in the federal government right now. Trauma doesn’t really describe it. I think emotional torture is more like it. But then that’s part of the plan. Project 2025 author and Director of OMB Russell Vought made it very clear with his “trauma” comment:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
I actually don’t think Vought is getting enough “credit” for the current dumpster fire. His plans are being implemented by Elon Musk not the other way around. Musk really is “IT Support” as his cutesy t-shirt says.
If you haven’t seen this undercover video of Vought before the election explaining what he planned to do, you should watch it. it’s not long and it’s really well done. His plan is being perfectly executed: