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.
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.