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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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The ... obvious?

There was the DOGE website where they overstated the amount of money they were saving by cancelling contracts by at least 2x in a way that was obvious if you looked at where they claimed to be getting the data and knew how to read. They eventually had to reduce the number. And details that emerged later showed they saved much less than they claimed to. If they had saved as much as they've claimed, it'd show up in overall spending numbers in a way it just hasn't.

There was all the drama over Elon. The thing where he said he'd fire any government employee who didn't write him an email even though he didn't have the authority to do so (discussion before). The claim that "20 million people were receiving Social Security benefits past age 100", which was totally false, because he didn't understand how to interpret the database.

And then eventually:

Exclusive: DOGE 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter

WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump's pledge to slash the government's size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.

"That doesn't exist," Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE's status.

It is no longer a "centralized entity," Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.

This wasn't a complete list, just from memory, but DOGE just didn't work. Which is a shame, because I like the broad concept as I said at the time. But it just didn't.