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MAGA was pillaged from 2 sides in 2024 - the technocrats and the neocons; The technocrats, were a mix of recently politically homeless 'elites', with a sense of social liberalism, and economic conservatism (to a point), and mostly anti-woke (some of course, had been instrumental in enabling woke). They cozied up to Trump and Trumpism in a variety of ways, but in reality are a mix of opportunistic and somewhat aligned politically. Basically all were Obama liberals, and would have been quite to the left of Clinton.
Vivek is the worst and most transparently slimy of this crowd, and boy isn't it great to see his grift collapse. Here's a guy who's presidentail campaign was a super strained argument that he was an even bigger Trump ally than Trump himself, and relied on word games like "God is real" as a major campaign plank, to appeal to Christians, while simultaneously asking them to agree with it in a form that was transparently a unitarian platitude. Point being, tortured epistomological games worded in ways meant to trick the dumb voters is neither new, nor successful trick of Vivek's.
His Governorship run is just a leftover plate spinning from when early in Trump II it looked like the technocrats had won. Elon had DOGE, Vance came from Thiel, SV had trump's ear... The neocons had attached themselves to DeSantis (who, was an otherwise viable actually America First, populist conservative successor), and helped sink in by attaching their stink to him, while he went up totally unprepared to skip Trump in line.
But alas, DOGE was a failure, Vance turned out to be more MAGA than SV (yay), and the neocons won the current administartion in the end with Iran; Vivek is a dying gasp of the silicon plot.
At some point I think this is worthy of a larger conversation. I'm of the contrarian opinion (I know it's contrarian) that DOGE succeeded. Massive federal layoffs, ongoing deregulation. The gutting of USAID was significant. The actual DOGE employees all got assimilated into other departments or projects and have mostly all become more powerful. DOGE's successor program Tech Force is quietly achieving a lot of the same goals without attracting almost any attention.
My supposition is that most of the "DOGE failed" narrative is pushed by a liberal media and Republican MAGA critics who want it to have failed, while the actual people involved are fairly satisfied with the work they were able to do and very satisfied to continue doing the same work under other names with almost no scrutiny because "DOGE failed".
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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