This is coming out the same day two DOJ cases led by a US attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience were unceremoniously tossed out. DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology while cutting entire groups of experienced technologists like 18F. To say nothing of the CDC, whose communications are starting to look like a bad, late-night infomercials.
I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.
Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.
Synthetic 20-somethings that cost a few bucks per megatoken may technically be different from flesh 20-somethings working for free for the exposure or whatever it was, but it's not an important distinction.
Much as I find LLMs useful, even today I'd only rate their competence in any given domain like a 21 or 22 year old in that domain. The Penguin Island* tariffs comes to mind as an example of probably-AI; I can think of a few mistakes of this level before the days of AI, the only one I'd like to mention is having had to explain to a real human that someone saying they're in "London" doesn't automatically mean they're in the UK.
And that's if I'm being generous and assuming Musk's statements on this topic were based in reality — given Musk also asserted that savings of 1-2 trillion dollars were possible when this was not only beyond the powers of the executive, but obviously so with minimal research, I don't trust his word.
Nope, can't all agree. DOGE was great and you should expect to see a lot more of it in future, even more systematized.
Look at it like this:
> About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.”
So of the employees the government actually wanted back, there were maybe 10,000 - according to Ars which is an enemy of DOGE and Musk. Probably far fewer in reality.
But this was always the plan, it's what worked at Twitter too. The theory is that you can't easily know if you can cut more until you start finding that you needed people. And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
The "idea" was an ideological purge dressed up as something everyone can get behind. Given the outstanding success in bamboozling idiots, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are.
The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
> Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash.
The idea was trash, too.
The idea wasn't actually make "a more efficient government with less corruption," it was "let Elon Musk and a bunch lackeys literally just move fast and break things."
Nothing wrong with being 20 somethings in itself regardless of the rest. Average age for the Manhattan project was 25-27. We can focus on the merits or mistakes no need to focus on age.
Did the DOGE 20-somethings also have the benefits of supervision from PhDs in various specialties? It's not the age alone, but the age in combination with other factors that make it concerning.
I’m ok with age being used as a partial proxy for experience when we’re talking about highly specialized roles with massive implications like the ones that DOGE staffers were dropped into.
You are right — I shouldn't have been dismissive about the age, but rather the complete lack of experience around governance, why some of these rules exist, and why some of the technology is the way it is.
I think this misses a point.. hiring adolescent hacks with after-midnight chops and thrill-trophies on the walls IS part of the selling point of the DOGE raids. It was a raiding party. That is as old as pre-history, in itself. But the playing fields are terminals and web browsers. Age is a "partial maybe just a little bit proxy for experience" no it is judgement and some healthy understanding of the weight of historic events, and the financial weight of some of the systems.
All that said there is another side of the coin. That is that there were under-the-radar payment systems and not quite audited channels of money in those systems. Built with care, you bet. Essentially diagramming the tech stacks, documenting admin systems, getting and using root and root equivalent at all times possible.. those were the scalps taken, and the targets were actually rotten in some ways in some places. /rant
An ability to execute well requires a focus on task and purpose, and an organization given set up & leeway to iterate and improve.
DOGE just seemed completely uninterested in doing real work. They fired whomever was possible to fire wherever they could (and especially in places with more expertise / Blueness), while calling it reducing "Waste Fraud and Abuse" (without presenting any evidence).
Some of these folks are now embedded in agencies, some even doing actual work to try to improve these systems in some way. There's very little clarity or transparency to it all though: part of the Trump/DoGE takeover has always been being accountable to no one, presenting no real evidence, but lots and lots of sound and thunder.
Doge cut muscle sure. They cut the bones too. They sold one of our kidneys on the black market. And then jabbed us in the eyes 3 Stooges style for good measure so we couldn't even see how bad it really was.
We went in for liposuction and buccal fat removal surgery and came out the other side severely disfigured with Maralago face and a hunchback.
This is one of many frequent reminders: In some environments, how you brand and market your work (Mush with a chainsaw cutting spending comes to mind) is often more important than the work you do. Most wont bother to look at the actual results of your work.
I'm a massive weirdo, what I like and dislike is almost anti-correlated with public success, or at least success in American markets.
You should therefore be unsurprised to learn that I laughed about the sink and had a completely neutral reaction to the chainsaw (other than who it was in support of). I should have noticed in advance that my reactions were warning signs. Unfortunately, I can also add the visual design of Cybertruck to that list — not that I'd want it on the road, obvious safety hazard from the shape, but I liked the look of it.
I think rather he's saying that Musk loudly declared he was slashing government waste and firing do-nothing bureaucrats, and the people who supported him never really bothered to see if that was the case or not.
Its one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; ideology isn't greater than experience.
One of the biggest lessons I learnt when I was a younger dev is a living allegory that my manager told me:
"one day the new boss came in to a budget meeting. The boss was out to make a good impression, and come out winning. The boss looked for any 'useless spend'.
Looking at the budget, the Boss saw how much was being spent on cleaner.
Looking around, the Boss boomed 'The place is spotless, why the fuck am I paying for cleaners. There's nothing to clean'
The underlings laughed and clapped. Oh how clever the Boss was, saving such a big amount at the first budget.
Needless to say the Boss was most put out when the invoice for pest removal, food standard violation and toilet cleaning landed in the next budget.
"
There's a reason why things are done that way. It might not be a good reason, but its still a reason. You need to find and evaluate the reason for something existing, before you fuck it up. Yes, before you ask, I did fuck up, more than once.
At the risk of stretching the metaphor - fat is useful, too. In animals, a layer of fat will help you withstand 'lean times' of less nutrition or higher work. Run the body too hard without fat, and you burn muscle for short-term gain, or worse, die.
Similarly, in organizations, 'fat' helps out when the workload increases or productivity decreases. Run an organization too lean, and when you need to respond to a new situation, you burn out your muscle (workers) and/or go broke. This is similar to the concept of "slack."
The metaphor extension is valid. If they had succeeded in just cutting fat, it might have been merely a mistake -- failing to understand how redundancy works in an organization.
Instead, they cut without regard to fat content. Many of the organizations were already operating on a shoestring. We didn't have an abundance of park rangers. It wasn't "merely" a mistake. It was the application of ideology, without regard to either the principles of good governance or the law.
Its one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; the bell is run, the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen. Then a country, or large organization, or a business is at the end of its ropes and hard decisions have to be made.
The bumbling idiots who lead us into the situation won't take the blame, the "mean guy" who makes the cuts to save the country does.
Was the USA failing before Trump took power? Most would say no. World's largest economy, and while it did have problems the nation was still an aspiration for many outside it.
Now it looks like the aspirations go elsewhere. And they do so because the cuts increased the problems, they did not save anything.
Core point aside, a nit to pick:
> the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen
If the canary is making a noise, the coal mine is safe. They get sick and die quickly in bad air.
That's what the supporters said. The problem was, and is, a complete lack of deliberation, which his process doesn't provide room for.
As mentioned in one of the linked discussions by ChrisArchitect, they didn't go out and actually talk to the groups they were cutting (or not cutting). The people in the field know where a lot of waste is, and having an organization, theoretically, at the level of DOGE take interest in it would have gotten things moving that just don't happen when you're 10-20 levels from those with actual authority to change policy.
The fallacy here is assuming Musk actually knows what he's doing (or even where he is) most of the time.
He is objectively, measurably spending the majority of his waking hours tweeting, not learning or performing work of any value. There was a whole project to install a bigass gaming rig in his government office dormitory[1], because the remaining time when he wasn't tweeting he needed to play video games.
Unfortunately, 600K people and counting are no longer in a condition to be restored...
> As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
doge in the end was not allowed to do their work, they tried to fight the swamp but the swamp won. In my sector management fought tooth and nail after doge pinpointed major waste..and we made sure they could not go any further. meanwhile the wheels of waste kept rollin'
What I saw was that DOGE spent all their time chasing non-existent (or at most minor) problems imagined from the conspiracy theories they heard about in the media (e.g. woke contracts). They drank their own kool-aid and when they were actually given the keys they came up with nada. A total waste of everyone's time.
I would be interested in knowing what specific 'major waste' DOGE found in your agency. I would also be curious, given how much latitude they were given, how your management made sure they could now go any further. What I saw was senior managers escorted from the building by security and put on administrative leave if they offered anything other than complete cooperation.
This is coming out the same day two DOJ cases led by a US attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience were unceremoniously tossed out. DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology while cutting entire groups of experienced technologists like 18F. To say nothing of the CDC, whose communications are starting to look like a bad, late-night infomercials.
I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.
Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.
> DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology ...
Elon Musk claims that the vast majority of decisions were made by AI modeling.
Synthetic 20-somethings that cost a few bucks per megatoken may technically be different from flesh 20-somethings working for free for the exposure or whatever it was, but it's not an important distinction.
Much as I find LLMs useful, even today I'd only rate their competence in any given domain like a 21 or 22 year old in that domain. The Penguin Island* tariffs comes to mind as an example of probably-AI; I can think of a few mistakes of this level before the days of AI, the only one I'd like to mention is having had to explain to a real human that someone saying they're in "London" doesn't automatically mean they're in the UK.
And that's if I'm being generous and assuming Musk's statements on this topic were based in reality — given Musk also asserted that savings of 1-2 trillion dollars were possible when this was not only beyond the powers of the executive, but obviously so with minimal research, I don't trust his word.
* Heard and McDonald Islands, IIRC
I'd trust the 20 somethings more than the AI model.
I think we can all agree that the whole thing was an incredibly bad idea.
Nope, can't all agree. DOGE was great and you should expect to see a lot more of it in future, even more systematized.
Look at it like this:
> About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.”
So of the employees the government actually wanted back, there were maybe 10,000 - according to Ars which is an enemy of DOGE and Musk. Probably far fewer in reality.
But this was always the plan, it's what worked at Twitter too. The theory is that you can't easily know if you can cut more until you start finding that you needed people. And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash.
Absolutely everyone can get behind a more efficient government with less corruption (the idea of a business man cutting corruption is nuts).
The execution however, as is often the case, was awful (leave it up to the individual to decide if that was deliberate or not).
The "idea" was an ideological purge dressed up as something everyone can get behind. Given the outstanding success in bamboozling idiots, I expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
It's worse than "the idea is better than the execution." You are offering a lot of leniency in the meaning of your words there, and that should bother you more than it seems to but here we are.
The "idea" that was executed on here was a non-starter to begin with. You don't get anywhere by lighting everything that seems like waste on fire and burning it to the ground, learning its effects later. A modern government is not something that is riddled with waste so much that it does nothing. Their first target, USAID, as far as I could tell had no idea what was coming. They didn't even seem to bother to look into what they did, just the cashflows. Which of course will seem wasteful if you don't have a human heart with feelings, it's called U-S-A-I-D. Saying the idea was good here is like giving them the benefit of the doubt that sure maybe they can't read or understand anything, but let them axe these things without a second thought? Come on, you shouldn't let Elon off that easy.
> Like a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash.
The idea was trash, too.
The idea wasn't actually make "a more efficient government with less corruption," it was "let Elon Musk and a bunch lackeys literally just move fast and break things."
It was all incredibly reckless.
The transformer architecture was introduced in 2017, so they send in a bunch of 8 year olds to "fix" the technology ;)
Nothing wrong with being 20 somethings in itself regardless of the rest. Average age for the Manhattan project was 25-27. We can focus on the merits or mistakes no need to focus on age.
The average age for scientific contributors was 29. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/L...
Did the DOGE 20-somethings also have the benefits of supervision from PhDs in various specialties? It's not the age alone, but the age in combination with other factors that make it concerning.
I’m ok with age being used as a partial proxy for experience when we’re talking about highly specialized roles with massive implications like the ones that DOGE staffers were dropped into.
It's not a highly specialized role. Look at the contracts they were cutting. A lot of it could be done by an LLM.
> $191k USAGM broadcasting contract for “broadcast operations and maintenance in Ethiopia, Africa”
> $1.3M State Dept. education contract for “Botswana MI curriculum”
etc
You are right — I shouldn't have been dismissive about the age, but rather the complete lack of experience around governance, why some of these rules exist, and why some of the technology is the way it is.
I wouldn't compare someone like Richard Feynman to "Big Balls."
I think this misses a point.. hiring adolescent hacks with after-midnight chops and thrill-trophies on the walls IS part of the selling point of the DOGE raids. It was a raiding party. That is as old as pre-history, in itself. But the playing fields are terminals and web browsers. Age is a "partial maybe just a little bit proxy for experience" no it is judgement and some healthy understanding of the weight of historic events, and the financial weight of some of the systems.
All that said there is another side of the coin. That is that there were under-the-radar payment systems and not quite audited channels of money in those systems. Built with care, you bet. Essentially diagramming the tech stacks, documenting admin systems, getting and using root and root equivalent at all times possible.. those were the scalps taken, and the targets were actually rotten in some ways in some places. /rant
Agreed that we don't have to focus on age!
An ability to execute well requires a focus on task and purpose, and an organization given set up & leeway to iterate and improve.
DOGE just seemed completely uninterested in doing real work. They fired whomever was possible to fire wherever they could (and especially in places with more expertise / Blueness), while calling it reducing "Waste Fraud and Abuse" (without presenting any evidence).
Some of these folks are now embedded in agencies, some even doing actual work to try to improve these systems in some way. There's very little clarity or transparency to it all though: part of the Trump/DoGE takeover has always been being accountable to no one, presenting no real evidence, but lots and lots of sound and thunder.
Doge cut muscle sure. They cut the bones too. They sold one of our kidneys on the black market. And then jabbed us in the eyes 3 Stooges style for good measure so we couldn't even see how bad it really was.
We went in for liposuction and buccal fat removal surgery and came out the other side severely disfigured with Maralago face and a hunchback.
This is one of many frequent reminders: In some environments, how you brand and market your work (Mush with a chainsaw cutting spending comes to mind) is often more important than the work you do. Most wont bother to look at the actual results of your work.
I guess I'm what they derisively call a normie. Both the sink and the chainsaw seemed like red flags.
I'm a massive weirdo, what I like and dislike is almost anti-correlated with public success, or at least success in American markets.
You should therefore be unsurprised to learn that I laughed about the sink and had a completely neutral reaction to the chainsaw (other than who it was in support of). I should have noticed in advance that my reactions were warning signs. Unfortunately, I can also add the visual design of Cybertruck to that list — not that I'd want it on the road, obvious safety hazard from the shape, but I liked the look of it.
I don’t understand. Are you claiming the actual results of Musk’s work here were good?
I think rather he's saying that Musk loudly declared he was slashing government waste and firing do-nothing bureaucrats, and the people who supported him never really bothered to see if that was the case or not.
Its one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; ideology isn't greater than experience.
One of the biggest lessons I learnt when I was a younger dev is a living allegory that my manager told me:
"one day the new boss came in to a budget meeting. The boss was out to make a good impression, and come out winning. The boss looked for any 'useless spend'.
Looking at the budget, the Boss saw how much was being spent on cleaner.
Looking around, the Boss boomed 'The place is spotless, why the fuck am I paying for cleaners. There's nothing to clean'
The underlings laughed and clapped. Oh how clever the Boss was, saving such a big amount at the first budget.
Needless to say the Boss was most put out when the invoice for pest removal, food standard violation and toilet cleaning landed in the next budget. "
There's a reason why things are done that way. It might not be a good reason, but its still a reason. You need to find and evaluate the reason for something existing, before you fuck it up. Yes, before you ask, I did fuck up, more than once.
I have a big legacy code base as part of my responsibility and Chesterton's Fence comes up at least once a month.
At the risk of stretching the metaphor - fat is useful, too. In animals, a layer of fat will help you withstand 'lean times' of less nutrition or higher work. Run the body too hard without fat, and you burn muscle for short-term gain, or worse, die.
Similarly, in organizations, 'fat' helps out when the workload increases or productivity decreases. Run an organization too lean, and when you need to respond to a new situation, you burn out your muscle (workers) and/or go broke. This is similar to the concept of "slack."
The metaphor extension is valid. If they had succeeded in just cutting fat, it might have been merely a mistake -- failing to understand how redundancy works in an organization.
Instead, they cut without regard to fat content. Many of the organizations were already operating on a shoestring. We didn't have an abundance of park rangers. It wasn't "merely" a mistake. It was the application of ideology, without regard to either the principles of good governance or the law.
...said no junior associate at a private equity firm ever.
Who’s going to prosecute them? It won’t be the Trump DOJ. They’re safe, sadly.
And pardoned if they behave
About those Biden pardons. Yeah, about those Trump pardons.
[flagged]
> this stat in particular is not proof they were dumb or didn't implement their objectives.
No argument on that point: their objectives were always graft, mixed with a sprinkling of revenge and self-promotion.
[dupe]
'Suddenly exposed' DOGE employees fear prosecution after Musk abandoned them
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024983
Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028721
Its one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; the bell is run, the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen. Then a country, or large organization, or a business is at the end of its ropes and hard decisions have to be made.
The bumbling idiots who lead us into the situation won't take the blame, the "mean guy" who makes the cuts to save the country does.
Was the USA failing before Trump took power? Most would say no. World's largest economy, and while it did have problems the nation was still an aspiration for many outside it.
Now it looks like the aspirations go elsewhere. And they do so because the cuts increased the problems, they did not save anything.
Core point aside, a nit to pick:
> the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen
If the canary is making a noise, the coal mine is safe. They get sick and die quickly in bad air.
well I learned two malapropisms today. One the Canary, the other blinkenlights.
Regardless, governemnt spending and debt eventually gets hit with austerity if you can't grow your way out. Nobody wants to be greece.
> well I learned two malapropisms today. One the Canary, the other blinkenlights.
Not malapropisms in my opinion - a malapropism is someone using the wrong word such as “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.”
Isn’t this part of Elons „process“: Delete until you deleted too much, then restore enough to make it work again, hopefully in a leaner state
That's what the supporters said. The problem was, and is, a complete lack of deliberation, which his process doesn't provide room for.
As mentioned in one of the linked discussions by ChrisArchitect, they didn't go out and actually talk to the groups they were cutting (or not cutting). The people in the field know where a lot of waste is, and having an organization, theoretically, at the level of DOGE take interest in it would have gotten things moving that just don't happen when you're 10-20 levels from those with actual authority to change policy.
The fallacy here is assuming Musk actually knows what he's doing (or even where he is) most of the time.
He is objectively, measurably spending the majority of his waking hours tweeting, not learning or performing work of any value. There was a whole project to install a bigass gaming rig in his government office dormitory[1], because the remaining time when he wasn't tweeting he needed to play video games.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/opinion/532455/elon-musk-gaming-pc-d...
Unfortunately, 600K people and counting are no longer in a condition to be restored...
> As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
[dead]
no one gives a shit if a tweet fails to post. can't bring the same energy into running a country, can you
[dead]
doge in the end was not allowed to do their work, they tried to fight the swamp but the swamp won. In my sector management fought tooth and nail after doge pinpointed major waste..and we made sure they could not go any further. meanwhile the wheels of waste kept rollin'
What I saw was that DOGE spent all their time chasing non-existent (or at most minor) problems imagined from the conspiracy theories they heard about in the media (e.g. woke contracts). They drank their own kool-aid and when they were actually given the keys they came up with nada. A total waste of everyone's time.
I would be interested in knowing what specific 'major waste' DOGE found in your agency. I would also be curious, given how much latitude they were given, how your management made sure they could now go any further. What I saw was senior managers escorted from the building by security and put on administrative leave if they offered anything other than complete cooperation.
Your post was flagged and dead because the experience of an insider contradicts what HN socialists want to believe.