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.
> And the US Gov is in so much debt, drastic measures are absolutely required. Any argument to the contrary ignores the fiscal situation.
When your household expenses are 38% higher than your household income, you don't fix it by eliminating the 3% you spend on refuelling your car.
The USA federal budget in 2024 was 38% higher than its income, DOGE claims to have saved about 3%: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Fy2024_f...
When "your household" is a metaphor for "a government", the obvious other things they can do include:
• Just directly ordering itself more income (taxes)
• Literally printing more money to reducing the burden of existing interest payments that are 4 times what DOGE claims to have saved
• Increasing the pension age, broadening the tax base and reducing the expense for whatever the USA's federal pension is. Every year of increase to the federal pension age makes about as much difference as DOGE claims to have made.
• In the USA's case sorting out the mess that is how Medicare (12.7% of federal spending) and Medicaid (9% of federal spending) spend more per person than the UK spends on the NHS despite Medicare and Medicaid being in addition to all that private healthcare and also despite the combination of public and private American health spending giving worse average life expectancy. This would free up by far the largest amount of money in the overall economy, but you may have to pretend in this already hypothetical scenario that the federal government first nationalised all the insurance payments before you see it impact the combined budget of taxes-and-insurance.
• Even just shrink the armed forces (12.5% of federal spending) from "biggest by a large margin" to "biggest by a smaller margin".
• Encouraging as many working-age foreigners as possible to come and do work while being registered as taxpayers.
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
> $191k USAGM broadcasting contract for “broadcast operations and maintenance in Ethiopia, Africa”
USAGM's mission is to promote the USA's diplomatic interests in parts of the world with little or no press freedom. Whole thing was cut by executive order of Trump to the maximum extent possible.
Because of that order, it's not even a "not specialised" role, it's not a role.
If USAGM should be cut or not, should have been the choice of congress rather than the executive, but that's a different question entirely.
> Botswana MI curriculum
What's "MI"? Mission-Influenced? That sounds like a plausible amount to spend on a curriculum about Botswana for the benefit of the State Department, let alone in Botswana on anything.
And if it is in Botswana, you have to then actually ask "what is this mission, and is this in the interests of the USA taxpayer?", which needs specialists.
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.