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More than this, DOGE was the Trump 2.0 administration's opening move to tame the bureaucracy that had been one of the cornerstones of the Trump 1.0 'Resistance.' It wasn't just the downsizing of large parts of the bureaucracy, but who took the buyouts, and why.
The USAID takedown was a not-subtle shot across the bow of the largely non-legislatively-defined executive branch what had existed more by convention/inertia than as a statutory-defined structure. The instigating incident where USAID leaders tried to physically stop USAID from accessing facilities and classified information was practically tailor made for the most Trump-favorable legal resolution on established American national security law- that the US President is the ultimate authority of executive branch (classified) information, and that no one beneath the president could overrule the president on accessing the president's information. (The exception to this- US nuclear secrets- are not the president's information, but rather covered by acts of congress.)
The USAID takedown demonstrated that the administration could, and would, take physical custody of US federal government information systems, and that there was no real legal recourse against it. Various inside-the-fed resistance activities from the Trump 1.0 period, such as the national-security channel coordination used in the Russiagate abuses, or the 'fortify the election' meetings that were bragged about after post-Trump-1, or the Pentagon subverting directives to withdraw from Syria, were not going to stay hidden inside federal servers. Similarly, the DOGE requirement that employees justify what they did that week- even taken over by the Departments at DOGE's expense- had a similar effect of demonstrating that federal employees could be required to provide information on their activities.
There was more to the downsizing than just that, of course. The whole DOGE campaign read like a pressure campaign leading up to the downsizing like out of a business 'how to make organizational change' text. But the people most likely to take the buyouts included the people most able to see the writing on the wall about executive branch compliance efforts, and could see the risk to themselves for past or potentially current opposition.
In this framing, the success of DOGE has little to do with DOGE as an organization, or even counter-corruption. It has more to do with changing how, and whether, the executive branch follows presidential directive. In Trump 1.0, it wasn't exactly uncommon for the framing to be that 'the adults in the room' would limit what Trump would do. That wasn't just a matter of secretary-level appointments. It also is far less a factor in Trump 2.0.
It's fine and fair to not like that. It is harder to argue that more bureaucratic insurgency in your favor is a more efficient government organization.
I had a family member take the buyout because they started looking for a different job (since the security and flexibility that is the draw of a federap job is gone), and they scored a way higher-paying job. Like many buyouts, it would have been the case with DOGE that many takers were the capable employees you don't want to lose.
That depends significantly on the 'you' and what 'you' prioritize. For a non-trivial part of the DOGE-coalition, cutting down the employee count is a benefit in its own right, even if all the employees were high performers. Cases like your family members would be a 'win'- after all, that person is making more in the private sector, which 'you' could value/prioritize more than the government sector.
It is way too convoluted to argue that higher private sector pay denotes greater social value and that DOGE was thus correct to push out high performers. This is definitely not the path to government efficiency! A successful DOGE push out would have to be one in which the bad employees who couldnt find new jobs or who thought they would get fired or who were in unproductive jobs outweigh the "bad" cuts. It is probably not the case that literally everything done by one's preferred politician is perfect and awesome.
You misunderstand. The primary argument isn't that the private sector is better social lining- that's the secondary/silver lining argument.
The primary argument is that many of the 'capable employees you don't want to lose' weren't considered 'capable' or 'not want to be lost,' because the people engineering the buyouts had a lived experience where many of the most 'capable' government employees- i.e. those most capable at playing the bureaucratic politics and subverting policy without being caught- had been trying to prevent the policy directives in various ways that were only clearer in retrospect.
Put another way- the people doing the layoffs had a strong, and occasionally warranted, distrust of many of the 'most capable government employees.'
The silver-lining argument comes in as a salve/rationalization that any 'innocents' lost in the buyouts aren't tragically or wrongly harmed, but rather took opportunities for good things even as dead wood was cut.
This is confusing the goals of an market-motivated corporate downsizing with a political-control-motivated government downsizing. The metric of efficiency isn't employee performance or 'productive jobs'- it's whether the institution as a whole advances policy within a relevant time frame.
This is an extension of a common misconception about meritocratic employment systems. What would normally be dismissed pejoratively as 'political reliability' is actually an incredibly important merit in any system. A system staffed by hypercompetent people in productive jobs who use those positions of productive-power to foil you is not, in fact, a particularly meritorious system. An employee who isn't trusted to advance policy is a bad employee, regardless of how well they perform by traditional market performance metrics.
The general employee cohorts that DOGE engaged had already lost trust during the Trump 1.0 administration or before. Removing them was the 'good' cut that outweighs the 'bad' cuts from the policymaker's perspective, because it resulted in institutions (and employee cohorts) that the policy makers did trust to implement and advance policy. That trust in turn allows the policy makers to focus on other issues of policy, rather than prioritize internal HR evaluations.
I think you underestimate how widespread the effects of Doge and changes to working conditions were. My family member worked on the nuts and bolts of building domestic physical infrastructure that you almost certainly believe are a good way for the government to spend resources. It is not the case that Doge-driven changes only affected questionable departments or competent people doing unproductive tasks.
That was neither the claim nor the assumption, and entirely within the estimation.
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Dominic Cummings recently tied the western establishment to getting rid of political patronage and its replacement with meritocracy. The non partisan merit based system will end up selecting for a certain reasonably effective person that will share the same world view and whose policy cannot be controlled democratically.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd dispute Dominic Cumming's framing as provided.
Political patronage networks are- and have remained- an integral part of the western political establishments over the last centuries, hence the political appointments for American cabinet ministries and why european parliamentary democracies negotiate coalitions on the basis of which party gets which postings. Those postings come with influence, not impartiality, and a large part of the influence comes from the power to appoint or promote personnel to key positions.
Similarly, it's not exactly hard to see partisan-by-proxy systems throughout the bureaucracies. Yes Prime Minister is more famous than FDR's opposition to public-sector unions, but they both point to a that nominally apolitical agencies do not necessarily remain apolitical or interested in enacting government policy. The main reason in the US that there haven't been multiple-centuries-old one-party political machines in various states is that there was a civil war less than two centuries about that reshaped the political map. Even then, urban-center political machines in the state capitals that dominate state politics aren't exactly new or novel.
But aside from that, one of the key points of meritocratic reforms is that they were only able to advance when the meritocrats were perceived as, well, non-partisan and honest. When they lose that honesty and start being perceived as partisan, they just get recategorized as 'special interests' in the same way that treason doth never prosper.
To return to a point about professions- one of the key distinctions of professions from a craft of trade is the autonomy and deference to the professional provided on the basis of public trust. The doctor gets deference from the patient, and the mayor, because they maintain a collective level of trust across the profession. They maintain that level of public trust as a consequence of not only their personal actions, but how they hold their fellow doctors to account for violations. Without it they lose the ability to be a profession.
Professional government workers- meritocratically selected administrators, if you prefer- are much the same. The ability to retain trust is a key merit for the professional, and thus something an honest meritocracy will prioritize exceptionally highly.
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This is an important part. Everyone is interpreting DOGE as if it was this one-off endeavor that can be judged on its own terms. As far as the admin is concerned it was just phase one. There were some big successes and some big failures and a lot of lessons learned. Now they're on phase two (or three, or whatever). There are a lot of internal debates about how to proceed. There are a lot of insiders who would even agree with my analysis and who openly talk of DOGE "failing". But on the whole I don't think the DOGE mission really finished. History will see the entirety of Trump's term and judge everything as one continuous effort.
For example, there's the question of fraud. Elon made some big gobsmacking headline-grabbing allegations of fraud that everyone eventually discredited as hyperbole. He made different statements at different times so it's hard to judge what exactly to even discuss. At one point, he claimed that there were $50 Billion in fraudulent payments made annually by the federal government. At another point he estimated $233B-$521B, which is apparently based on a GAO figure he might have misinterpreted. I believe at one point he claimed the entire federal deficit could be solved by prosecuting fraud and abuse, which would be somewhere on the order of
$2T. Everybody agreed that all of this was preposterous and that Elon's vast exaggerations poisoned the well on enthusiasm for DOGE.But if I go to the White House fraud report page (www.whitehouse.gov/fraud), they are currently claiming to have stopped $260 Billion in Fraud and $72 Billion annually. Not bad? Maybe someone can do the math and determine that the White House is lying or exaggerating. But I don't see any news outlets noting that the official position from the White House is that, essentially, Elon was right. And I thought DOGE was a failure.
This stuff compounds in all sorts of non-obvious ways. For example I guess that the new Anduril Arsenal-2 navy shipyards contract in Baltimore would not have happened without this kind of post-DOGE restructuring. Military contracts seem like the kinds of things that were always happening on autopilot, wouldn't it have happened anyways, maybe my guess is wrong. But in reality government contracting rules are deeply inscrutable and it takes a significant amount of work for politicals to exercise any authority over them. So I strongly suspect that the next generation of war spending is all going to be downstream of DOGE in ways that are hard for outsiders to see.
Not really, but in a way that is hard to explain. It is a deeply opaque system by design and is very resistant to change. FedGov Procurement is a monster, and it's incredibly inefficient, layered with fraud, abuse, waste and a ton of other shit. Government TPOCs are often retarded or petty kings, sometimes both. Anduril is just joining the big boys in playing the game, probably hired enough former big defense guys and ex-gov strategic hires to get told how the sausage gets made. Honestly, this is one of those things you just need to spend 5 years of your career in to properly hate. But I can promise you, any thought you have about FedGov competency in the procurement process is hopeless copium, put it in the locker along with your cellphone and keys before you come into the SCIF.
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I'm not so sure about that. The USN is... well, not desperate, but they're having to scale up construction massively for tbe AUKUS program, and I feel like they'd have thrown money at anyone with a decent plan and a lobbyist or two in DC.
AUKUS is a symptom, not the cause. The root of the ship-building spinup is China. AUKUS is more of a bet/trade on short-medium term constraints for medium-longer term capacity gains.
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