The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk’s DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following: Pushed a website live to track “savings” that showed no savings for several days and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it. Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn’t know how to get in touch. Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who’s getting Social Security benefits. It doesn’t include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy.