"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."

dmix 16 hours ago | parent [-]

sahil also said:

> "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions."

He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and his positives comments were about how the VA already had some open source Github repos and had a previous project to 'reduce claim times from "133 days to under a week"'. He was also critical of how they don't fire people with seniority, regardless of performance (which is enshrined in a reduction-in-force law from 1944) which explains why new and probationary employees were the ones let go when Trump's people took over. https://sahillavingia.com/doge

▲

wredcoll 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, they're hardly blameless.

	▲	dmix 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They never had a proper mandate or real power to do anything, so it was mostly bullshit (see canceling software contracts) and the administration/Elon deserves criticism for pretending otherwise merely for PR. It should have been something that they pushed congress to establish as a new agency or heavily expand the OMB with a wider purpose/budget. That way it would have included careful public monitoring under existing rules and been able to take on DoD/education/healthcare spending which is where 90% of it goes. But everyone knows Congress doesn't want any more people questioning where the money is going. Half their job is gaming the system to push federal money into their states. So DOGE was left with fake data collection jobs while feds fired probationary workers to pretend it saves money.