More on DOGE’s Fraud and Destruction

When you’ve been distracted by Trump bringing the WWF to the world stage by way of tariff physique slams resulting in market knockouts, the top of due course of due to doubling down on the unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Harvard resisting Trump’s plan to dictate most of the college’s operations, and Witkoff enjoying at being a diplomat in high-stakes negotiations, DOGE has continued burrowing away on the foundations of Federal companies like hungry termites.

Remember that DOGE’s purpose is to not cut back inefficiency. It’s to cut back authorities operations in a really huge method in order to:

Immiserate the poor and others DOGE deems to be burdensome…like Social Safety beneficiaries who paid into the system, usually over many years

Remove or wreck authorities capabilities in order that the non-public sector can take over. However as we all know, the federal government has been on an outsourcing kick for many years, so the concept capabilities now operated on the Federal degree might be performed higher by outsiders is suspect. This marketing campaign is all concerning the alternative for looting, and the hurt to the operation of commerce and society be damned.

DOGE as a fraud: Claiming financial savings whereas growing prices. We highlighted an earlier DOGE spreadsheet that claimed to indicate the supply and quantity of DOGE’s asserted price discount and confirmed that most of the greatest gadgets had been false. For example, DOGE took credit score for contacts that had already been terminated, and on prime of that, cited the utmost licensed quantity, when the precise expenditures had been decrease, usually significantly so. DOGE then significantly diminished the knowledge it presents in order to protect its capability to lie.

DOGE has been a whole and complete failure. pic.twitter.com/qAClziAldr

— Micah Erfan (@micah_erfan) April 11, 2025

Elon Musk has diminished the claims about what DOGE is saving from $1-2 trillion to $150 billion.

The NYT reviews he’s nonetheless getting the numbers unsuitable by means of issues like accounting errors and cancelling contracts that don’t exist.

What a fraud from begin to end. pic.twitter.com/69qjsixF5c

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) April 13, 2025

DOGE as destruction: Tearing down the extremely environment friendly Social Safety Administration, versus taking over the pork machine of protection spending. On April 14, the Social Safety Administration minimize its cellphone staffing and in addition modified its coverage in order that “delicate” info like financial institution particulars will now not be taken over the cellphone. That implies that when you can’t join Social Safety efficiently on-line, you’ll have to go to an workplace…the place getting somebody to see you is Kafkaesque….and DOGE has promised to shutter places of work.

And even earlier than that, the Social Safety web site was already crashing, due to IT cuts. So even when you had been to handle to get to see a dwell individual at an workplace, if the system was down, they’d not be capable to deal with your concern.

And DOGE staff are nonetheless making an attempt to defy a court docket order and entry Social Safety knowledge…even with not simply previous arms however even some Trump officers in opposition. From the Washington Submit:

Representatives of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have searched for weeks to get round a court docket order barring their entry to delicate knowledge and inside methods on the Social Safety Administration, prompting profession workers to repeatedly resist their efforts, in response to a half dozen folks conversant in the DOGE crew’s actions and information obtained by The Washington Submit.

The battle contained in the company led the Justice Division to intervene to disclaim DOGE entry to the information, even because the Trump administration put in and promoted DOGE-friendly leaders to dramatically reduce companies at Social Safety.

Please learn the piece in full. The reporting is spectacular and revealing.

DOGE as fraud: Taking credit score for locating abuses so well-known they’ve been the topic of Congressional hearings, and resulted from Trump 1.0 expanded unemployment advantages. From Related Press:

The most recent authorities waste touted by billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Division of Authorities Effectivity is lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} in fraudulent unemployment claims it purportedly uncovered.

One downside: Federal investigators already discovered what seems to be the identical fraud, years earlier and on a far higher scale…

“They’re making an attempt to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, authorities is inefficient and authorities is silly and so they’re catching these items that the federal government didn’t catch,’” says Michele Evermore, who labored on unemployment points on the U.S. Division of Labor through the administration of former President Joe Biden. “They’re discovering fraud that was marked as fraud and saying they came upon it was fraud….

Although states have virtually full management over their very own unemployment methods, particular aid applications — most notably broadly expanded advantages enacted by the primary Trump administration on the outset of the COVID pandemic — inject extra direct federal involvement and a flood of latest beneficiaries into the system….

Trump signed the COVID unemployment aid into legislation on March 27, 2020, and from the very begin it turned a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officers about two weeks later, the Division of Labor warned that the expanded advantages had made unemployment applications “a goal for fraud with vital numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or artificial identities.”…

A Labor Division spokeswoman didn’t reply to questions on Musk’s findings and DOGE gave no particulars on the way it got here to seek out the supposed fraud or whether or not it duplicates what was already discovered.

Although DOGE ostensibly checked out longer timeframe than federal investigators beforehand had, it tallied simply $382 million in pretend unemployment claims, a tiny fraction of what investigators had been already conscious.

DOGE as fraud: After loudly promising transparency, DOGE is something however. From Politico:

DOGE KEEPS IT UNDER WRAPS: The battle to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding DOGE and its operations is coming to a head in a number of lawsuits…

Most of the anti-DOGE….legal professionals try to reply questions like: What’s the fundamental construction of DOGE? Which officers had been concerned in cutting-and-slashing efforts? And what kind of entry does DOGE need to delicate company methods?…

However the Justice Division is combating vigorously to protect DOGE from having to disclose that info, regardless of Trump and ELON MUSK’s repeated assurances about transparency. The administration has refused to offer testimony from just about each official that plaintiffs have tried to depose — and particularly from individuals who work for DOGE.

Your complete Politico piece, which matches by means of a number of circumstances of persistent evasiveness and misdirection, is price studying.

DOGE as a fraud: Endangering nationwide safety, stealing knowledge apparently to focus on opponents like organized labor. This can be a a lot larger caper than the Watergate break-in, however hacking is so widespread that even when insiders do it to abuse their energy, the outrage is muted. From NPR which broke the story:

Within the first days of March, a crew of advisers from President Trump’s new Division of Authorities Effectivity initiative arrived on the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Nationwide Labor Relations Board.

The small, unbiased federal company investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It shops reams of doubtless delicate knowledge, from confidential details about staff who wish to kind unions to proprietary enterprise info.

The DOGE staff, who’re successfully led by White Home adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB’s inside methods….

However in response to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and different federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and information of inside communications, technical workers members had been alarmed about what DOGE engineers did after they had been granted entry, notably when these staffers seen a spike in knowledge leaving the company. It’s doable that the information included delicate info on unions, ongoing authorized circumstances and company secrets and techniques — knowledge that 4 labor legislation specialists inform NPR ought to virtually by no means go away the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the federal government extra environment friendly or slicing spending.

In the meantime, in response to the disclosure and information of inside communications, members of the DOGE crew requested that their actions not be logged on the system after which appeared to attempt to cowl their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring instruments and manually deleting information of their entry — evasive conduct that a number of cybersecurity specialists interviewed by NPR in comparison with what prison or state-sponsored hackers may do.

Threats in opposition to the whistleblower have a responsible look:

loopy. an NLRB whistleblower who shared considerations about DOGE’s actions with authorities officers was subjected to tried blackmail and/or surveillance, possible by DOGE workers, in retaliation. pic.twitter.com/gyJrwYB2Fw

— Nat Purser (@NatPurser) April 15, 2025

DOGE as incompetent: exposing logins. Leaving tech doorways unlocked is both extremely amateurish or performed intentionally to get one thing in return. Russians in fact are one in all our default dangerous guys. Readers can opine as to how laborious it’s to create the looks of a “Russian IP deal with”. A VPM may obtain that, FFS.

Some (circumstantial) proof that DOGE sloppiness is risking nationwide safety:

A Russian IP deal with has close to real-time entry to login credentials for DOGE accounts on federal methods. https://t.co/eajfmb0CRt pic.twitter.com/ccmoFxkhbj

— Santi Ruiz (@rSanti97) April 15, 2025

DOGE as fraud: Forcing resignation of tech specialists, thus risking cyber assaults. Individuals who really know one thing concerning the related entity and have some tech chops may present up DOGE, and worse, rat out to exterior events how DOGE is doing a piss poor job. One contemporary case is the resignation of DoD ‘SWAT crew of nerds.’ From Politico:

Below stress from the Elon Musk-led Division of Authorities Effectivity, almost all of the workers of the Protection Digital Service — the Pentagon’s fast-track tech improvement arm — are resigning over the approaching month….

The Protection Digital Service was created in 2015 to assist the Pentagon undertake quick tech fixes throughout nationwide safety crises and push Silicon Valley-style innovation contained in the Pentagon. It constructed speedy response instruments for the army through the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to switch Ukrainian army and humanitarian help, drone detection applied sciences and extra.

With out this system, some key efforts to streamline the DOD’s tech expertise pipeline and counter adversarial drones might be sundown…

A number of different digital modernization efforts inside the authorities have met related fates. The U.S. Digital Service, which helped the federal government modernize its know-how and appeal to tech expertise, has now been subsumed by DOGE, amid mass layoffs and firings. A program referred to as 18F, a know-how unit inside the GSA, was eradicated by DOGE as effectively….

One former senior Pentagon official, who requested to not be named due to doable retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Protection Division as damaging and unproductive

“They’re probably not utilizing AI, they’re probably not driving effectivity. What they’re doing is smashing every thing,” the previous official stated.

DOGE as harmful: Infighting as company chiefs accurately level to DOGE doing harm, right here killing folks:

BREAKING: In a surprising second, Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary simply blamed Elon Musk and DOGE for cuts after a number of deadly plane crashes. That is stunning. pic.twitter.com/88fXHEWtSo

— Democratic Wins Media (@DemocraticWins) April 11, 2025

Recall that the New York Occasions had earlier reported on a Cupboard assembly row the place Elon Musk pressed Secretary of State Mario Rubio over allegedly not having gotten rid of sufficient State staffers, which Rubio vigorously contested. Trump considerably backed Rubio by calling for cuts to be surgical. However regardless, this was a behind-closed-doors dispute that was made public, and never one taken straight to the press.

After which now we have ideological enforcement. Covid was supposedly an enormous Democratic occasion invention to permit for an influence seize, ergo Covid was pretend, ergo no want for Covid testing:

DOGE simply shut down San Diego County’s wastewater testing system. No extra analysis or monitoring for lethal illnesses regardless of the vital position wastewater surveillance performed in combating COVID. Harmful and actually silly.https://t.co/3e2LzRnnfs

— Mike Levin (@MikeLevin) April 15, 2025

And even the 250th Fourth of July celebration can be being jeopardized, though in mild of the obvious “wreck the US as we all know it” train, that is becoming. From Axios:

The massive image: State humanities councils planning 250th anniversary celebrations everywhere in the nation have had their funding slashed, and people organizations inform Axios they possible gained’t be capable to execute the large, patriotic plans they’d been making.

• Trump has referred to as for an “extraordinary celebration” subsequent summer season….
• The chair of the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities is a part of that activity drive, and state humanities councils throughout the nation had a number one position in planning public occasions to mark the event.

However 80% of the NEH’s workers was positioned on administrative go away earlier this month…

• These layoffs got here simply days after the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils had been alerted that their funding grants had been being terminated.
• “These had been funds that had been already appropriated, that had already been distributed by means of a aggressive course of, and so they had already been below contract to be offered,” stated Julie Ziegler, the CEO and govt director of Humanities Washington.

The most recent: The Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities on Monday opened purposes for 250 problem grants, price as much as $25,000 every, for initiatives associated to the “founding of the American nation, key historic figures, and milestones that mirror the distinctive achievements of the US” in honor of the anniversary.

• However state officers say the cuts have already prompted them to shed workers and droop new programming, so even the potential of new anniversary-specific funding wouldn’t fill the huge hole.

DOGE survivors, for now. Regardless of being an early and excessive profile DOGE goal, the Client Monetary Safety Bureau, although a bit bloodied, remains to be standing. From Fortune:

On Tuesday night, Sen. [Elizabeth] Warren and fellow Democratic Sen. Andy Kim, who each sit on the Committee of Banking, Housing, and City Affairs, demanded investigations right into a push to slash the CFPB’s workforce and cancel its contracts….

A federal choose has quickly reversed a few of the preliminary cuts on the company. As a part of a lawsuit between a union representing CFPB staff and Vought, a choose ordered the CFPB to reinstate all its probationary and time period staff. The order additionally blocked the company from terminating staff with out trigger, issuing a reduction-in-force, or directing staff to cease work or take administrative go away whereas the case strikes ahead—although an appeals court docket stated final week that the CFPB may enable work stoppages that didn’t intervene with its statutory duties.

Notice that authorized specialists have repeatedly opined that DOGE can’t cancel contracts, but when DOGE breaches them by withholding cost, they’ll nonetheless kill the contractors since many want the cash. That in lots of circumstances could have the impact of the victims getting a restoration if they’ve the means to place up a combat, whereas the federal government gained’t get the work they are going to wind up (to at the least a level) paying for. In fact, DOGE desires to destroy corporations that may assist with enforcement of regulation, so price is actually not an goal, regardless of that serving because the pretext.