You can't really evaluate DOGE without mentioning that it is an attempt to usurp the Constitutional order. I understand the focus on efficiency and efficacy, but somewhere we must have values outside of those, specifically democratic values and the power of the purse. Will it be good for long run growth if any program can be cut by a petty man with an amorphous role? I doubt it! Why would any scientific institution trust that their funding won't be eliminated on a whim? Republicans are conservative and they are going to do conservative stuff; I get that. However, eliminating the power of Congress to enact this changes will lead to long-run instability, and, more fundamentally, contradicts our democratic values.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was someone who would have loved to work for government one day. Now, I'm not sure I can if I risk being randomly fired every four years.
One thing I like to keep in mind when informing my views is: something that has always made America "a moral step above the other guys out there" has been our comparatively progressive values and our decentralized power (one man can't just 'control A delete' things he doesn't like, all for one and one for all).
This piece does not properly convey the extent to which DOGE’s purpose has nothing to do with the values exposed by Statecraft and that it is using “efficiency” in a completely pretextual way.
These people (especially Elon) are in no way committed to improving the operation of the federal government, and mostly don’t even grasp its basic operations. They don’t care to study or learn about any of the programs they’re slashing. They aren’t actually building any better processes. They’re just idiots who think they know how to run the government because they’ve run some companies. This piece goes out of its way to buy the premise that DOGE wants to do a good thing the readers here might like, when there is no evidence DOGE is a serious operation aimed at those goals.
The author does convey disappointment in DOGE, but can’t get his hands around the fact that the reason it’s not doing what its name says is because it’s a ruse and it’s headed by an absolute moron (I’m not being provocative, Musk is clearly an idiot based on this post’s own summary of his information diet and response).
I kept expecting to read this point: How will the federal government attract the best civil servants in the future? After DOGE, why would someone with choices start a career with the feds? Do you think it was easy for the GSA to attract the techies in 18f?
The left's explanation of what DOGE is doing seems to best fit the facts. DOGE is trying to cripple state capacity as quickly and deeply as possible.
You do not gotta hand it to DOGE. You didn't even mention in any of the above the sheer illegality of what they are doing. Nor how it relates to the effort of the Trump administration to simply circumvent Congress and take direct control of government spending. I appreciate the discussion of Elon Musk's bad epistemological environment but none of this comes down to a serious efficiency drive (a fact you do drive home in your point about simply firing people who you can fire rather than because they're the right people to fire) and there's no point highlighting the "good" when they're just breaking things left and right and it's unclear what we're going to be left with afterwards. You've got to stop treating this like it's a potentially normal or valid efficiency drive and recognize it for what it is, part of the personalization of the power of the executive branch.
I see the impoundment point in 37, think I missed it just because it was mostly about attempting to discern what's DOGE vs what's broader Trump administration stuff.
To use a specific example, reformers have long wanted to integrate IRS data, as DOGE wants to do. It’s fine to want this on the merits, but reform is prevented *by statute*. Change must happen through Congress if we are still a nation of laws.
I feel like you were a bit lenient on DOGE in regard to what they are doing/planning to do to the IRS. Someone above mentions that the reason the IRS isn’t integrated is because it’s barred by law. DOGE isn’t seeking to change the law it’s seeking to ignore it so I wouldn’t give it credit there.
I also somewhat doubt claims that they are attempting to modernize the IRS when they fired 18F which was responsible for IRS Direct file, the best & most recent attempt at modernization (that I know of).
I also feel like you missed more discussion on the specifics of the firings at other agencies such as NOAA & the NWS. While you did talk about how you thought it was a horrible idea to do broad strokes firings, I feel like DOGE’s negative impact appears understated and the positive impact overstated. I also may be wrong in that these weren’t actions directly from DOGE but were attributed to them for convenience.
That being said these are your thoughts and opinions and I don’t want to tell you what to think or feel. I agree with a lot of your thoughts but the above were just some points that I felt added some additional context to DOGE’s actions so far. I personally think DOGE is far more harmful than beneficial and have low expectations for it. I would like to see an actual push for increased government efficiency through the elimination of regulatory barriers some day, but I don’t think DOGE will do it.
I find it simply impossible to reconcile Elon's private sector accomplishments with the immense stupidity and incompetence he exhibits every single day on Twitter.
As Hanania has recently begun pointing out, he falls for the dumbest of the dumbest tweets; even dumb MAGA people don't fall for them. Hanania has been saying Elon is either 'the dumbest person in politics or the biggest liar in politics'. I am inclined to think the latter, much like how Ben Carson was a brilliant neurosurgeon but an ignoramus who believed in creationism. So many right-wing figures are this way.
Suppose I had a magic wand to cut fraud and waste and boost economic growth. In that case, I'd just assemble a commission and implement the best recommendations of think tanks like Mercatus, AEI, Progress Institute, and the like. Instead, what we got is Obama-era anti-government dumb tea party-ism.
You can reconcile a lot of it simply by not assuming he necessarily believes or cares about the truth of anything he posts.
Like Trump, he's realized that to many people, it doesn't matter if what he posts is true or not. They'll believe it if they want to believe it, or ignore it if they don't. So if he sees something, and retweeting it would serve his agenda (or even his whims), he'll do it.
The rest IMO you can reconcile by comparing videos of him talking now vs 10-15 years ago. Whether it was social media or aging or drugs, he has cooked or shut off some important bits of brain.
What's weird about this analysis is that it doesn't dispute the humanitarian cost of the USAID fiasco, but then shrugs at evaluating the program on net. On the one hand, a yet-to-be-calculated-but-substantial number of people will die due to the withdrawal of--in the words of this article!--"lifesaving aid". On the other, possibly the tech stacks used at some federal agencies will be upgraded. <Mimes weighing the scales with both hands> Who's to say if the impact is positive overall?
I am! It's not. Preventable death is bad! Using COBOL in 2025 is also bad, but it is not nearly as bad as death.
The situation is especially egregious because there was no attempt to do things via more normal and legal channels. People seem to have forgotten that Jennifer Pahlka is a darling of the center-left, with major amplification by Ezra Klein and so on. It's a failure of the Biden admin that they didn't do much with this, but there really is substantial support on the left for, dare I say, increasing government efficiency. If the GOP--who, please also remember, control Congress--had tried to pass the "Upgrade Federal Tech Stacks and Hire Joe Gebbia Act of 2025", it probably would have passed. If feckless Democrats had filibustered such a bill, what we're seeing now would have been more understandable.
OK on reflection this was a little glib, sorry about that. I sympathize with people trying to do sober and non-partisan analysis in the Trump era, and add nuance to media reports.
There's just no way around the fact, though, that a lot of this sort of thing over the next 4 years is going to have a "But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, we're going to have to thoroughly evaluate stage direction and set design in order to ascertain the overall impact of the play" kind of vibe.
The critical error in thinking from DOGE and Conservatives is that the government should be efficient. If the founders wanted the government to be ‘efficient’ they would not have written the constitution to have a separation of powers. They would have just consolidated those powers into one body. The States purpose is stability, not quarterly earnings.
I would say it does though. As a federal employee, the red tape that makes my job ‘inefficient’ comes from the legislature. An obvious example being how and what our budget can be used for.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole. Executive branch functions are hemmed in by the legislature. Where does the legislature get their ideas? Not from the members that’s for 🦫 sure. Think tanks and lobbyists write the laws they pass. Lobbyists are paid for by private people and organizations. Therefore the private sector who criticizes their government for bloat and inefficiencies are the ones who create the situation.
You’re defending the founders’ vision of checks and balances and then immediately noting that checks and balances are currently mostly realized today by copy pasting the proposals of various special interests into the acts of Congress?
While I agree, this is a very interesting piece, I do agree with most of the comments below. One of the biggest issues I have is with your #45 - this is completely wrong. First, while antiquated, these systems work. The original team are inexperienced 20 somethings, which is a joke - one of them was even fired from prior job for giving company secrets to their competitor. The news reports of how they are trying to effectively break into organizations by lying who they are is just wrong. What is beyond comprehension it that NO ONE, including MUSK has security clearance. They are bringing their own laptops.
I have worked on COBOL systems in my career and I have replaced them with modern systems in banks (specifically Wells Fargo Bank). This is idiocy at its finest, and bringing in a founder of Airbnb, with zero experience in mainframes or COBOL, this is also dumb. If you want to modernize the antiquated computer systems, you hire people who have done this before.
Great analysis, but very weak conclusion. Have some strength and vision.
Shaking up inefficient government orgs can lead to a permanent gain of hundreds of billions or trillions of value, annually. Cutting off PEPFAR for a few days barely matters in comparison. Where is your utilitarian calculation?
Taking any action to reform government is bound to produce terrible press and appear chaotic. Wise people should know that this is good because it's basically the only way it could ever happen. Knowing what you know, you need to be out here sharing optimism.
Also re:state capacity. The AI's will compute soon enough that a minimal state which allows mutually beneficial transactions (i.e. markets) will flourish much more than allowing technocrats the power force stuff top down. Please reconsider your state capacity thesis.
The AIs will only compute what humanity has already decided is the pattern. Humanity hasn't agreed that's the conclusion and an appeal to hallucinatory pattern-matchers as some sort of authority in this area lacks strength and vision.
If minimal states were the answer then failed states / lawless areas would be leading the globe. I understand that state taxes are very low in these areas yet surprisingly few multinationals have their HQ in Somalia or CAR. The mind boggles as to why. Perhaps there aren't enough people in the know sharing optimism?
You miss the reputational harm for anyone in the moderate to liberal side, and even the "career risk" harm for anyone on the right who might consider working for government. If you join government or even a contractor, you have to assume you're out in 2-4 years. In the private sector you can adjust for this with stock options, but do you want to pay young talent $1M plus a year--going rate in Silicon Valley? And it will kill any projects that take more than two years--say anything infrastructure. Ask Boeing how forcing out your institutional knowledge and relying on new, cheaper, more pliant hires goes. You thought projects were expensive before.
This is the most insightful and even-handed evaluation of DOGE I have read thus far. Great piece! One potential advantage of DOGE that you did not mention is its bottom-up approach. Traditional deficit spending reduction/ government efficiency strategies involve a blue ribbon commission that goes nowhere. These top-down approaches quickly die when our political system is unable or unwilling to deal with the hard tradeoffs involved in these proposals (absent a bond crisis). DOGE's strategy is going after small contracts that might serve as political red meat (to their side). Maybe this bottom-up approach, leveraged with social media, is a more efficient way of reducing waste. This will not result in significant change to the top-line numbers, but it could result in behavioral change and political momentum that breaks the current stasis. I am not convinced that this bottom-up theory is right, but it is one of the models that I am currently testing.
Sometimes to make progress when faced with the grotesquely bloated and corrupt Leviathan that is the US government you must throw out the baby with the bath water. So be it. The Federal Government is rotten to the core.
I find it gross to see execs like Joe Gebbia getting involved. Whatever best attempts at lip sticking this pig, this is still an effort being led by corrupt anti-American zealots. The toxic mix of incompetence, lies, and corruption is grotesque. Zero transparency or accountability. Everything these people (Trump, Musk et al) touch is poisoned and everyone involved eventually realizes it. And by then most are in so deep that they have no choice but to join the clan for good.
One thing I'd put more emphasis on is that the reason his approach of focusing on hard kpis and easy-to-understand metrics isn't working well is that it's what managers do already.
take welfare fraud. every welfare dept in the world audits welfare for fraud. they report a tiny % of fraud, which is inevitably the % that's too expensive to fix (recovery costs > repayments). if you just get a teenager to dig around a database they're only going to find that fraction that's already known about. this isn't to say that there isn't often rampant welfare fraud, but that's it's hidden from official data (e.g. people lied on their forms, it's their lies in the database). fixing it requires cross-comparing with another data source, which is a much bigger harder job DOGE seems unwilling to undertake (see the Australian robodebt scandal for that approach backfiring).
same with headcounts. everyone in gov is used to frequent retrenchments, it's always of the muscle rather than the fat. bureaucrats have gotten very wiley about juking those numbers (e.g. org charts will accumulate vacant positions to be used as a sacrifice in the next round of cuts).
ironically it's the opposition to DEI, which vibe-wise is the most political and least technocratic component of the program, that will almost certainly be *most* successful. because DEI work really didn't need to be done, and cuts by genuinely reducing the scope of government activity works a lot better than dumb efficiency drives which effectively get implemented by the managers who made the organisations inefficient in the first place.
You can't really evaluate DOGE without mentioning that it is an attempt to usurp the Constitutional order. I understand the focus on efficiency and efficacy, but somewhere we must have values outside of those, specifically democratic values and the power of the purse. Will it be good for long run growth if any program can be cut by a petty man with an amorphous role? I doubt it! Why would any scientific institution trust that their funding won't be eliminated on a whim? Republicans are conservative and they are going to do conservative stuff; I get that. However, eliminating the power of Congress to enact this changes will lead to long-run instability, and, more fundamentally, contradicts our democratic values.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was someone who would have loved to work for government one day. Now, I'm not sure I can if I risk being randomly fired every four years.
How is this any different than what you would experience in the private sector?
The private sector pays better and has better benefits to make up for that risk.
So the private sector randomly fires everyone every four years in favor of people with different political views? Hmm. Has not been my experience.
One thing I like to keep in mind when informing my views is: something that has always made America "a moral step above the other guys out there" has been our comparatively progressive values and our decentralized power (one man can't just 'control A delete' things he doesn't like, all for one and one for all).
This piece does not properly convey the extent to which DOGE’s purpose has nothing to do with the values exposed by Statecraft and that it is using “efficiency” in a completely pretextual way.
These people (especially Elon) are in no way committed to improving the operation of the federal government, and mostly don’t even grasp its basic operations. They don’t care to study or learn about any of the programs they’re slashing. They aren’t actually building any better processes. They’re just idiots who think they know how to run the government because they’ve run some companies. This piece goes out of its way to buy the premise that DOGE wants to do a good thing the readers here might like, when there is no evidence DOGE is a serious operation aimed at those goals.
The author does convey disappointment in DOGE, but can’t get his hands around the fact that the reason it’s not doing what its name says is because it’s a ruse and it’s headed by an absolute moron (I’m not being provocative, Musk is clearly an idiot based on this post’s own summary of his information diet and response).
Agree 100%. Elon reminds me of the loud kids in school who espouse nonsensical anarchistic beliefs and say too much while understanding very little.
I kept expecting to read this point: How will the federal government attract the best civil servants in the future? After DOGE, why would someone with choices start a career with the feds? Do you think it was easy for the GSA to attract the techies in 18f?
The left's explanation of what DOGE is doing seems to best fit the facts. DOGE is trying to cripple state capacity as quickly and deeply as possible.
You do not gotta hand it to DOGE. You didn't even mention in any of the above the sheer illegality of what they are doing. Nor how it relates to the effort of the Trump administration to simply circumvent Congress and take direct control of government spending. I appreciate the discussion of Elon Musk's bad epistemological environment but none of this comes down to a serious efficiency drive (a fact you do drive home in your point about simply firing people who you can fire rather than because they're the right people to fire) and there's no point highlighting the "good" when they're just breaking things left and right and it's unclear what we're going to be left with afterwards. You've got to stop treating this like it's a potentially normal or valid efficiency drive and recognize it for what it is, part of the personalization of the power of the executive branch.
I do in fact mention the legal challenges and the attempt to take direct control of government spending.
Yes, but you don’t give any weight to the argument that doing so is part of unconstitutional. Fruit of the poisoned tree and all that.
Apologies for missing it, tried to read everything carefully!
I see the impoundment point in 37, think I missed it just because it was mostly about attempting to discern what's DOGE vs what's broader Trump administration stuff.
To use a specific example, reformers have long wanted to integrate IRS data, as DOGE wants to do. It’s fine to want this on the merits, but reform is prevented *by statute*. Change must happen through Congress if we are still a nation of laws.
I feel like you were a bit lenient on DOGE in regard to what they are doing/planning to do to the IRS. Someone above mentions that the reason the IRS isn’t integrated is because it’s barred by law. DOGE isn’t seeking to change the law it’s seeking to ignore it so I wouldn’t give it credit there.
I also somewhat doubt claims that they are attempting to modernize the IRS when they fired 18F which was responsible for IRS Direct file, the best & most recent attempt at modernization (that I know of).
I also feel like you missed more discussion on the specifics of the firings at other agencies such as NOAA & the NWS. While you did talk about how you thought it was a horrible idea to do broad strokes firings, I feel like DOGE’s negative impact appears understated and the positive impact overstated. I also may be wrong in that these weren’t actions directly from DOGE but were attributed to them for convenience.
That being said these are your thoughts and opinions and I don’t want to tell you what to think or feel. I agree with a lot of your thoughts but the above were just some points that I felt added some additional context to DOGE’s actions so far. I personally think DOGE is far more harmful than beneficial and have low expectations for it. I would like to see an actual push for increased government efficiency through the elimination of regulatory barriers some day, but I don’t think DOGE will do it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts so far
This is triple accurate since the post says DOGE is doing this modernizing and integrating. They are NOT.
I find it simply impossible to reconcile Elon's private sector accomplishments with the immense stupidity and incompetence he exhibits every single day on Twitter.
As Hanania has recently begun pointing out, he falls for the dumbest of the dumbest tweets; even dumb MAGA people don't fall for them. Hanania has been saying Elon is either 'the dumbest person in politics or the biggest liar in politics'. I am inclined to think the latter, much like how Ben Carson was a brilliant neurosurgeon but an ignoramus who believed in creationism. So many right-wing figures are this way.
Suppose I had a magic wand to cut fraud and waste and boost economic growth. In that case, I'd just assemble a commission and implement the best recommendations of think tanks like Mercatus, AEI, Progress Institute, and the like. Instead, what we got is Obama-era anti-government dumb tea party-ism.
You can reconcile a lot of it simply by not assuming he necessarily believes or cares about the truth of anything he posts.
Like Trump, he's realized that to many people, it doesn't matter if what he posts is true or not. They'll believe it if they want to believe it, or ignore it if they don't. So if he sees something, and retweeting it would serve his agenda (or even his whims), he'll do it.
The rest IMO you can reconcile by comparing videos of him talking now vs 10-15 years ago. Whether it was social media or aging or drugs, he has cooked or shut off some important bits of brain.
There's a beautiful irony in Hanania accusing a public figure of being dumb because they fall for obviously incorrect information on the Internet.
What's weird about this analysis is that it doesn't dispute the humanitarian cost of the USAID fiasco, but then shrugs at evaluating the program on net. On the one hand, a yet-to-be-calculated-but-substantial number of people will die due to the withdrawal of--in the words of this article!--"lifesaving aid". On the other, possibly the tech stacks used at some federal agencies will be upgraded. <Mimes weighing the scales with both hands> Who's to say if the impact is positive overall?
I am! It's not. Preventable death is bad! Using COBOL in 2025 is also bad, but it is not nearly as bad as death.
The situation is especially egregious because there was no attempt to do things via more normal and legal channels. People seem to have forgotten that Jennifer Pahlka is a darling of the center-left, with major amplification by Ezra Klein and so on. It's a failure of the Biden admin that they didn't do much with this, but there really is substantial support on the left for, dare I say, increasing government efficiency. If the GOP--who, please also remember, control Congress--had tried to pass the "Upgrade Federal Tech Stacks and Hire Joe Gebbia Act of 2025", it probably would have passed. If feckless Democrats had filibustered such a bill, what we're seeing now would have been more understandable.
OK on reflection this was a little glib, sorry about that. I sympathize with people trying to do sober and non-partisan analysis in the Trump era, and add nuance to media reports.
There's just no way around the fact, though, that a lot of this sort of thing over the next 4 years is going to have a "But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, we're going to have to thoroughly evaluate stage direction and set design in order to ascertain the overall impact of the play" kind of vibe.
The critical error in thinking from DOGE and Conservatives is that the government should be efficient. If the founders wanted the government to be ‘efficient’ they would not have written the constitution to have a separation of powers. They would have just consolidated those powers into one body. The States purpose is stability, not quarterly earnings.
This is a critique I hear a lot, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the question of executive branch effectiveness.
I would say it does though. As a federal employee, the red tape that makes my job ‘inefficient’ comes from the legislature. An obvious example being how and what our budget can be used for.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole. Executive branch functions are hemmed in by the legislature. Where does the legislature get their ideas? Not from the members that’s for 🦫 sure. Think tanks and lobbyists write the laws they pass. Lobbyists are paid for by private people and organizations. Therefore the private sector who criticizes their government for bloat and inefficiencies are the ones who create the situation.
You’re defending the founders’ vision of checks and balances and then immediately noting that checks and balances are currently mostly realized today by copy pasting the proposals of various special interests into the acts of Congress?
That’s not the connection I’m making. I was making a separate but related point.
You can be efficient within the construct and rules by which you are governed and required to operate.
We can follow the FAR inefficiently, or find ways to be most effective and efficient within the FAR. There's a clear distinction.
Go lookup how large the federal register is and get back to me. There’s a reason Heritage created Project 2025
Oh please, “malicious compliance” my ass. DOGE owns this. They have no one but themselves to blame for their own hubris and incompetence.
While I agree, this is a very interesting piece, I do agree with most of the comments below. One of the biggest issues I have is with your #45 - this is completely wrong. First, while antiquated, these systems work. The original team are inexperienced 20 somethings, which is a joke - one of them was even fired from prior job for giving company secrets to their competitor. The news reports of how they are trying to effectively break into organizations by lying who they are is just wrong. What is beyond comprehension it that NO ONE, including MUSK has security clearance. They are bringing their own laptops.
I have worked on COBOL systems in my career and I have replaced them with modern systems in banks (specifically Wells Fargo Bank). This is idiocy at its finest, and bringing in a founder of Airbnb, with zero experience in mainframes or COBOL, this is also dumb. If you want to modernize the antiquated computer systems, you hire people who have done this before.
Great analysis, but very weak conclusion. Have some strength and vision.
Shaking up inefficient government orgs can lead to a permanent gain of hundreds of billions or trillions of value, annually. Cutting off PEPFAR for a few days barely matters in comparison. Where is your utilitarian calculation?
Taking any action to reform government is bound to produce terrible press and appear chaotic. Wise people should know that this is good because it's basically the only way it could ever happen. Knowing what you know, you need to be out here sharing optimism.
Also re:state capacity. The AI's will compute soon enough that a minimal state which allows mutually beneficial transactions (i.e. markets) will flourish much more than allowing technocrats the power force stuff top down. Please reconsider your state capacity thesis.
The AIs will only compute what humanity has already decided is the pattern. Humanity hasn't agreed that's the conclusion and an appeal to hallucinatory pattern-matchers as some sort of authority in this area lacks strength and vision.
If minimal states were the answer then failed states / lawless areas would be leading the globe. I understand that state taxes are very low in these areas yet surprisingly few multinationals have their HQ in Somalia or CAR. The mind boggles as to why. Perhaps there aren't enough people in the know sharing optimism?
PEPFAR was never turned back on.
You miss the reputational harm for anyone in the moderate to liberal side, and even the "career risk" harm for anyone on the right who might consider working for government. If you join government or even a contractor, you have to assume you're out in 2-4 years. In the private sector you can adjust for this with stock options, but do you want to pay young talent $1M plus a year--going rate in Silicon Valley? And it will kill any projects that take more than two years--say anything infrastructure. Ask Boeing how forcing out your institutional knowledge and relying on new, cheaper, more pliant hires goes. You thought projects were expensive before.
This. I suspect it will take years to make the U.S. Government as efficient as it was pre-DOGE.
This is the most insightful and even-handed evaluation of DOGE I have read thus far. Great piece! One potential advantage of DOGE that you did not mention is its bottom-up approach. Traditional deficit spending reduction/ government efficiency strategies involve a blue ribbon commission that goes nowhere. These top-down approaches quickly die when our political system is unable or unwilling to deal with the hard tradeoffs involved in these proposals (absent a bond crisis). DOGE's strategy is going after small contracts that might serve as political red meat (to their side). Maybe this bottom-up approach, leveraged with social media, is a more efficient way of reducing waste. This will not result in significant change to the top-line numbers, but it could result in behavioral change and political momentum that breaks the current stasis. I am not convinced that this bottom-up theory is right, but it is one of the models that I am currently testing.
But DOGE’s approach is not bottom up. It is random, stochastic.
Sometimes to make progress when faced with the grotesquely bloated and corrupt Leviathan that is the US government you must throw out the baby with the bath water. So be it. The Federal Government is rotten to the core.
That’s a remarkably fact-free and emotional statement.
Sorry you can’t handle the truth.
I find it gross to see execs like Joe Gebbia getting involved. Whatever best attempts at lip sticking this pig, this is still an effort being led by corrupt anti-American zealots. The toxic mix of incompetence, lies, and corruption is grotesque. Zero transparency or accountability. Everything these people (Trump, Musk et al) touch is poisoned and everyone involved eventually realizes it. And by then most are in so deep that they have no choice but to join the clan for good.
One thing I'd put more emphasis on is that the reason his approach of focusing on hard kpis and easy-to-understand metrics isn't working well is that it's what managers do already.
take welfare fraud. every welfare dept in the world audits welfare for fraud. they report a tiny % of fraud, which is inevitably the % that's too expensive to fix (recovery costs > repayments). if you just get a teenager to dig around a database they're only going to find that fraction that's already known about. this isn't to say that there isn't often rampant welfare fraud, but that's it's hidden from official data (e.g. people lied on their forms, it's their lies in the database). fixing it requires cross-comparing with another data source, which is a much bigger harder job DOGE seems unwilling to undertake (see the Australian robodebt scandal for that approach backfiring).
same with headcounts. everyone in gov is used to frequent retrenchments, it's always of the muscle rather than the fat. bureaucrats have gotten very wiley about juking those numbers (e.g. org charts will accumulate vacant positions to be used as a sacrifice in the next round of cuts).
ironically it's the opposition to DEI, which vibe-wise is the most political and least technocratic component of the program, that will almost certainly be *most* successful. because DEI work really didn't need to be done, and cuts by genuinely reducing the scope of government activity works a lot better than dumb efficiency drives which effectively get implemented by the managers who made the organisations inefficient in the first place.