Elon Musk and the DOGE Boy Clown Show
Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0
When thinking of what Elon Musk and his DOGE gang are doing it is worth remembering that the crypto coin DOGE was started as a joke. Elon Musk seems to be going back to these roots with his DOGE gang running around trying to dismantle government agencies.
To put a couple points on the table: Making government more efficient is certainly a worthwhile goal. We spend $7 trillion a year, surely there is some waste that can be eliminated.
There are also some government employees who don’t pull their weight. Take any company with a thousand or more workers. You can be certain that at least a dozen or so, or possibly quite a lot more, aren’t worth their paycheck. Given that the federal government employs more than 2.4 million workers, we can be confident that there are many who we could do without.
While these points are pretty much undeniable, it’s hard to see what Elon Musk and his chainsaw routine have to do with eliminating government waste. It seems that he and his team of “super-high IQ” DOGE boys have not made even the most minimal effort to study what the government does.
We actually have an agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), that regularly audits the operations of various agencies and makes recommendations for reducing waste and fraud. Musk doesn’t show any evidence that he knows of GAO’s existence, much less that he has taken any time to review any of their hundreds of reports on government waste.
Maybe Musk doesn’t think they do a very good job, but it would still be worthwhile to at least look at what they have done in recent years. Ignoring GAO’s research would be like going on tirades against vaccines without making even a minimal effort to familiarize yourself with the evidence on their effectiveness and risks.
Musk and his DOGE team might also want to have consulted with the inspector generals (IG) at the various departments and agencies, who have the job of uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse. Instead of consulting with these people, Musk and Trump had them all fired. It’s probably worth mentioning in this context that some of these IGs were investigating Musk’s companies.
If they had done minimal homework, maybe Musk and his DOGE team might have avoided repeatedly making fools of themselves, for example when he started screaming about millions of dead people getting Social Security.
This is a topic that has been extensively reviewed by GAO and others. A small number of people do continue to get Social Security checks after their death because the death is not immediately reported. The Social Security Administration gets back most of these payments. It would be great if the amount of loss can be reduced, but it’s first necessary to have a clue about what is going on. Millions of dead people getting Social Security exist only in Elon Musk’s head, not in the real world, as Mr. Arithmetic showed last week.
Instead of approaching government waste in a way that we might expect a serious person to do it, Musk sent his team of DOGE boys to various agencies to conduct mass firings. Incredibly, it seems that they often did not even take a few minutes to learn what the agencies did before the mass layoffs.
The best example here is when they did mass layoffs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently without the knowledge that this agency is entrusted with keeping our stockpile of nuclear weapons secure. When they discovered this, they had to run around and try to track down and rehire the essential employees they had fired, a task made more difficult by the fact that they had deleted their government e-mail accounts.
There is a similar story elsewhere. For example, they offered across the board buyouts to government employees, giving them an incentive to quit or retire early. They apparently didn’t know that some key agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration, which overseas air traffic, was already short-staffed.
Even their pattern of firing shows incredible incompetence. They have laid off all “probationary” employees at many government agencies. In many cases, these are young energetic people anxious to do serious work at places like the National Institutes of Health or the National Park Service. We will lose a lot of great talent as a result of these layoffs.
Even worse, many employees are classified as “probationary” after they have gotten a promotion. This means that many exceptional workers who were moving up the career ladder because of their good work, are being dumped by Elon Musk and the DOGE team for their efforts.
Then we have the DOGE boys’ dodgy accounting. It seems their “savings” of $55 billion involved more accounting errors than actual savings. Now that many of these errors have gone uncorrected, even after being called to their attention, it looks more like some of the fraud they are supposed to be combatting.
And now we are seeing the trip by Musk and Trump to Fort Knox to inspect our country’s gold stock. The rationale for this is that some loony right-wingers got in their heads that the gold has been stolen. This clown show is likely to cost at least $10 million dollars in travel and security just to humor the loony tunes. That would be roughly a year’s pay for 100 federal employees that DOGE has fired.
In spite of the ostensible commitment to transparency and eliminating waste, we know almost nothing about DOGE’s $30 million budget. Is it going to salaries? Weren’t the “super-high IQ” DOGE boys supposed to be working for free? Maybe Elon Musk is just putting the money in his pocket. That would increase his net worth by 0.007 percent. We may never know.
As we know the, DOGE coin started as a joke and it looks like Elon Musk is intent on continuing the joke. Maybe we should insist on a little truth in advertising and have a small name change to DOGI, the Department of Government Incompetence.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
