8 ms·

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders o

by jdross 2y ago

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great to make a difference” Versus whatever the media is reporting

demosthanos 2y ago
Where are you getting these stories from? Are you claiming to know people and to have received firsthand accounts, or is this stuff written down somewhere where the rest of us can see it and read it?
- jdross 2y ago
  These are people I personally know working “at DOGE” (appointed in departments, but under DOGE umbrella)
  - drawkward 2y ago
    This sounds a lot like the old "my uncle works at Nintendo" rope-a-dope.
    - sinker 2y ago
      Sounds like the classic Joe Rogan "I know a guy." rumor peddling.
      - drawkward 2y ago
        Sounds like "My Canadian girlfriend"
  - IAmGraydon 2y ago
    >appointed in departments, but under DOGE umbrella What does that mean?
    - pests 2y ago
      Trump/Elon is asking for embedded doge teams in every agency / department composed of various doge specialists and agency personnel. From what I’ve heard.
Aurornis 2y ago
> Versus whatever the media is reporting Where? The lack of transparency from DOGE has been a pain point even for advocates. I haven’t seen anything more than generic “we’re doing good work, trust us” PR The media is reporting the history of some of these people and their actual actions. Of course these people aren’t going to discuss their past membership in script kiddie DDoS groups or their highly racist Twitter rants.
- jdross 2y ago
  Honestly it seems to me like a shock and awe PR campaign combien md with a daily grind. It’s been like 15 days, what thoughtful work do you think it’s being announced that happens that fast from a cold start (including hiring!)
  - drawkward 2y ago
    We are discussing the government of the wealthiest nation the planet has ever known, not some garage startup. They require different approaches.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    Wait. "It hasn't been enough time to produce thoughtful communication" cannot possible coexist with "it has been enough time to justify shuttering entire organizations, firing shitloads of workers, calling people back from overseas, and telling the entire government to take voluntary layoffs." I'd say that writing up some clear communication is considerably easier than distinguishing useful and efficient government organizations from overstaffed organizations or organizations that are operating outside of their mission.
  - LastTrain 2y ago
    You JUST SAID two comments up that you had personal knowledge of thoughtful work going on.
dlivingston 2y ago
I assume you're hearing this online. Can you link to some accounts or articles?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ttpphd 2y ago
Gullibility is a thing, which is why we demand people go through channels of accountability, including security clearances.
- jdross 2y ago
  For what it’s worth two of my friends did have to get appointed positions including these clearances
  - apical_dendrite 2y ago
    Getting a security clearance, particularly a high-level clearance takes a long time. They send investigators to interview people you've worked with, check records, etc. It can take over a year for a normal person. The only way I see these people getting clearances this quickly is if they just skipped the background investigation, on orders from senior people in the Trump administration. And there's just no way they would have given Big Balls a clearance through the regular process.
tayo42 2y ago
What the media is reporting isn't relevant. We have Elons own word where he is saying he shut downtown various departments, intends to or canceling payments, having people arrested. Others are trying to cause a scene on social media by sharing cut out spreadsheets.
- drawkward 2y ago
  [flagged]
bearjaws 2y ago
If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is. To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration. She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined. They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people. Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does. FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.
- vimy 2y ago
  Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency. From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations. Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46 https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46
  - bearjaws 2y ago
    You need to understand when he says "irrespective of whether its in national interests" he means helping immigrants and asylum seekers, who are here legally even. They listen to orders from many parts of the government, some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time. Their money comes from who again?
  - caspper69 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 2y ago
      Please don't cross into personal attack (as you did in this post and unfortunately also elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994959). ... and please stay within the site guidelines, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. I realize this material is provocative and super activating but that's what this principle, for example, is intended to cover: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
archagon 2y ago
Regardless of what the media is reporting, the head of DOGE is gleefully gloating about all the departments he’s “deleting” on Twitter. No hint of collaboration, just attack after attack. And he keeps framing federal workers as the enemy.
giarc 2y ago
If that were the case, why lock out democratic law makers from the building(s)?
crazygringo 2y ago
This would be great if true. Unfortunately, from what we know of the people they've hired, they have little to no experience in doing that. They're not being transparent, we have no idea what metrics they're using, etc. If the team was meant to actually do what you claim, it would look very different in terms of its hiring, and there's no reason it would have to be operating so secretively.
- jdross 2y ago
  I’m just telling you what I know from personal friends doing individual work in specific departments. The mandate is “find $X million per day” and they do, and it’s a lot of work, and it doesn’t happen overnight like big PR things
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Again, I'd love to believe you. But what you're saying is totally incompatible with closing USAID and the indiscriminate buyout package offered to employees that are of critical importance. You're not providing any actual evidence, meanwhile the actions we know are actually taking place are totally contrary to the kind of careful thoughtfulness you're describing.
apical_dendrite 2y ago
This doesn't even line up with what Elon is saying publicly. Mike Flynn searches a public database for grants to organizations with the word "Lutheran" in them and then Elon tweets that they're all illegal and will be canceled. How is that a thoughtful process for identifying wasteful spending? Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a real problem for people - people have complained for years about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely like government by whim. And if they really think there are great people in these departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work, and many of them are going to have to make these huge life changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes, disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies that did RTO gave much more notice.
- brandonagr2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - demosthanos 2y ago
    > in 25 states Will the program advance into other states after the dissolution of the organization that created it? Will it be kept up to date? Or will it quietly disappear in the name of efficiency?
  - apical_dendrite 2y ago
    Any confusion here is on Elon. He was responding to a tweet that featured a screenshot from the IRS website about Direct File. The tweet said "18F, the far left government wide computer office that was recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax program. Direct File puts the government in charge of preparing people's tax returns for them". To which Musk responded "That group has been deleted". If you google "Elon musk free file" you'll see dozens of articles with headlines like "Elon Musk creates confusion about IRS' Direct File". It's unclear to me what the impact of "deleting" the group that built that product is. It's unclear whether Elon wants to delete that product and not just the team that built it, and given that they are suddenly shutting down whole agencies without regard for the fallout, it's unclear whether he will get rid of it. It's a hell of a way to run a government.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
So why is their boss tweeting out outrageous lies about what they've found? Don't they feel any moral compunction to say publicly, actually that is a complete misrepresentation of what we've found?
- mistrial9 2y ago
  the entire situation, on all sides, is misrepresenting and has been for decades.
Fauntleroy 2y ago
Maybe you could point some of the media to these primary sources you're citing.
bbqfog 2y ago
The people working in DOGE are the absolutely last people on earth I would trust to tell me what was going on. Just assume they have copies of all sensitive data they've encountered and that data has already been spread via them getting hacked, bribed, just posting it to brag...
reneretord 2y ago
[dead]
TrackerFF 2y ago
There are some real problems with this way of doing this. First, if you go to any department and find N different leaders/managers/etc. and ask them to pick what projects to cut...you'll get a whole range of different answers. There's a lot of bias involved, and a lot of internal politics going on. There's always internal fights for the resources. Second, if these kids are actually executing orders - meaning that they'll have the authority to do recommendations (based on their interviews with the people mentioned above), how would they even know if the recommendations are sound? It can take years for managers to become knowledgeable enough with the ongoing project and products. If you were DOGE, and wanted to "game" this process, you could really just: Identify the most critical voices in some organization, preferably those on the way out, and ignore the rest. Then you give these 18-year olds the mandate to recommend cuts based on those talks. And tell them that the ones that can cut most "fat" wins.
- jdross 2y ago
  “These kids” I’m talking about are in their 30’s and 40’s and making recommendations to department heads which almost all seem to be approved
UncleMeat 2y ago
Suppose they are indeed working 18 hour days. So they've done six weeks of work in two weeks. Do we believe that six weeks of ordinary work is sufficient to make the claims that Musk is making and take the actions that Musk is taking? "We are working really hard" doesn't give me any more confidence in the speed that things are happening. Heck, being absolutely exhausted sounds like a great way of making mistakes. If I heard that the team designing and building a bridge I use to commute was work 18 hour days in order to move fast I'd be quite a bit more concerned about that bridge.
walls 2y ago
[flagged]
IAmGraydon 2y ago
>the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE I see. And you know these people? Where are you hearing these "stories"?
tomrod 2y ago
I have a few questions regarding your story versus what the public understands. I see you have been positively harangued for your comment, please view my questions as honest dialectic. 1. What is the metric these folks are using to identify fraud, waste, and abuse? 2. Given that we have had independent OIGs for ages, why was fraud, waste, and abuse not previously reported? 3. Given that Congress folks are running every 2-6 years and shine like a shiny button (and get a lot of political cred) when championing substantive removal of fraud, waste, and abuse, why have no Congress people similarly exercised their Constitutional role of oversight for any of these agencies for decades? 4. Why do the agencies targeted tend to have overlap with investigations into or run-ins with Elon Musk's companies? 5. Why do forensic accountants take a long time to flag and identify fraud, waste, and abuse, even when working with compliant insiders, versus Musk's DOGE taking minutes to hours to identify fraud, waste, and abuse? 6. How is labeling groups with different ideas, such as Lutheran Family Services in the service of immigrants and refugees as terrorists, conducive to the identification of fraud, waste, and abuse? Which law enforcement office led the review of this group in particular to make this designation, which Mr. Musk and others decided to (potentially libelously) use to inflame public opinion against them? I have no doubt that DOGE folks probably feel pretty proud of the work they are doing. That doesn't mean they are actually having the outcomes they are commissioned for -- improving efficiency. Having worked some within government support, process bottlenecks are regulatory or otherwise required by statute. People spend time really considering the decisions and improving them incrementally.
LastTrain 2y ago
Let's hear more then. Name some names, departments.
drawkward 2y ago
I'm sorry, but why should we believe you? Do you have any evidence of your claim at all? Without evidence, yoh are normalizing what has been a shocking and unconstitutional approach to auditing that has very little resemblance to how actual auditing is done. Perhaps the hostility comes from the combination of unconstitutionality, unaccountability, unelected nature of Mr. Musk, and your "trust me, i know a guy" claims.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by jdross 2y ago

demosthanos 2y ago

Where are you getting these stories from? Are you claiming to know people and to have received firsthand accounts, or is this stuff written down somewhere where the rest of us can see it and read it?

jdross 2y ago
These are people I personally know working “at DOGE” (appointed in departments, but under DOGE umbrella)
- drawkward 2y ago
  This sounds a lot like the old "my uncle works at Nintendo" rope-a-dope.
  - sinker 2y ago
    Sounds like the classic Joe Rogan "I know a guy." rumor peddling.
    - drawkward 2y ago
      Sounds like "My Canadian girlfriend"
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  >appointed in departments, but under DOGE umbrella What does that mean?
  - pests 2y ago
    Trump/Elon is asking for embedded doge teams in every agency / department composed of various doge specialists and agency personnel. From what I’ve heard.

Aurornis 2y ago

> Versus whatever the media is reporting Where? The lack of transparency from DOGE has been a pain point even for advocates. I haven’t seen anything more than generic “we’re doing good work, trust us” PR The media is reporting the history of some of these people and their actual actions. Of course these people aren’t going to discuss their past membership in script kiddie DDoS groups or their highly racist Twitter rants.

jdross 2y ago
Honestly it seems to me like a shock and awe PR campaign combien md with a daily grind. It’s been like 15 days, what thoughtful work do you think it’s being announced that happens that fast from a cold start (including hiring!)
- drawkward 2y ago
  We are discussing the government of the wealthiest nation the planet has ever known, not some garage startup. They require different approaches.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  Wait. "It hasn't been enough time to produce thoughtful communication" cannot possible coexist with "it has been enough time to justify shuttering entire organizations, firing shitloads of workers, calling people back from overseas, and telling the entire government to take voluntary layoffs." I'd say that writing up some clear communication is considerably easier than distinguishing useful and efficient government organizations from overstaffed organizations or organizations that are operating outside of their mission.
- LastTrain 2y ago
  You JUST SAID two comments up that you had personal knowledge of thoughtful work going on.

dlivingston 2y ago

I assume you're hearing this online. Can you link to some accounts or articles?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ttpphd 2y ago

Gullibility is a thing, which is why we demand people go through channels of accountability, including security clearances.

jdross 2y ago
For what it’s worth two of my friends did have to get appointed positions including these clearances
- apical_dendrite 2y ago
  Getting a security clearance, particularly a high-level clearance takes a long time. They send investigators to interview people you've worked with, check records, etc. It can take over a year for a normal person. The only way I see these people getting clearances this quickly is if they just skipped the background investigation, on orders from senior people in the Trump administration. And there's just no way they would have given Big Balls a clearance through the regular process.

tayo42 2y ago

What the media is reporting isn't relevant. We have Elons own word where he is saying he shut downtown various departments, intends to or canceling payments, having people arrested. Others are trying to cause a scene on social media by sharing cut out spreadsheets.

drawkward 2y ago
[flagged]

bearjaws 2y ago

If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is. To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration. She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined. They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people. Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does. FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.

vimy 2y ago
Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency. From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations. Watch here: https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46 https://x.com/defiantls/status/1888533363117449619?s=46
- bearjaws 2y ago
  You need to understand when he says "irrespective of whether its in national interests" he means helping immigrants and asylum seekers, who are here legally even. They listen to orders from many parts of the government, some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time. Their money comes from who again?
- caspper69 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack (as you did in this post and unfortunately also elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994959). ... and please stay within the site guidelines, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. I realize this material is provocative and super activating but that's what this principle, for example, is intended to cover: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

archagon 2y ago

Regardless of what the media is reporting, the head of DOGE is gleefully gloating about all the departments he’s “deleting” on Twitter. No hint of collaboration, just attack after attack. And he keeps framing federal workers as the enemy.

giarc 2y ago

If that were the case, why lock out democratic law makers from the building(s)?

crazygringo 2y ago

This would be great if true. Unfortunately, from what we know of the people they've hired, they have little to no experience in doing that. They're not being transparent, we have no idea what metrics they're using, etc. If the team was meant to actually do what you claim, it would look very different in terms of its hiring, and there's no reason it would have to be operating so secretively.

jdross 2y ago
I’m just telling you what I know from personal friends doing individual work in specific departments. The mandate is “find $X million per day” and they do, and it’s a lot of work, and it doesn’t happen overnight like big PR things
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Again, I'd love to believe you. But what you're saying is totally incompatible with closing USAID and the indiscriminate buyout package offered to employees that are of critical importance. You're not providing any actual evidence, meanwhile the actions we know are actually taking place are totally contrary to the kind of careful thoughtfulness you're describing.

apical_dendrite 2y ago

This doesn't even line up with what Elon is saying publicly. Mike Flynn searches a public database for grants to organizations with the word "Lutheran" in them and then Elon tweets that they're all illegal and will be canceled. How is that a thoughtful process for identifying wasteful spending? Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a real problem for people - people have complained for years about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely like government by whim. And if they really think there are great people in these departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work, and many of them are going to have to make these huge life changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes, disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies that did RTO gave much more notice.

brandonagr2 2y ago
[flagged]
- demosthanos 2y ago
  > in 25 states Will the program advance into other states after the dissolution of the organization that created it? Will it be kept up to date? Or will it quietly disappear in the name of efficiency?
- apical_dendrite 2y ago
  Any confusion here is on Elon. He was responding to a tweet that featured a screenshot from the IRS website about Direct File. The tweet said "18F, the far left government wide computer office that was recently taken over by allies of @elonmusk, is also the same agency that built Elizabeth Warren's "Direct File" tax program. Direct File puts the government in charge of preparing people's tax returns for them". To which Musk responded "That group has been deleted". If you google "Elon musk free file" you'll see dozens of articles with headlines like "Elon Musk creates confusion about IRS' Direct File". It's unclear to me what the impact of "deleting" the group that built that product is. It's unclear whether Elon wants to delete that product and not just the team that built it, and given that they are suddenly shutting down whole agencies without regard for the fallout, it's unclear whether he will get rid of it. It's a hell of a way to run a government.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

So why is their boss tweeting out outrageous lies about what they've found? Don't they feel any moral compunction to say publicly, actually that is a complete misrepresentation of what we've found?

mistrial9 2y ago
the entire situation, on all sides, is misrepresenting and has been for decades.

Fauntleroy 2y ago

Maybe you could point some of the media to these primary sources you're citing.

bbqfog 2y ago

The people working in DOGE are the absolutely last people on earth I would trust to tell me what was going on. Just assume they have copies of all sensitive data they've encountered and that data has already been spread via them getting hacked, bribed, just posting it to brag...

reneretord 2y ago

[dead]

TrackerFF 2y ago

There are some real problems with this way of doing this. First, if you go to any department and find N different leaders/managers/etc. and ask them to pick what projects to cut...you'll get a whole range of different answers. There's a lot of bias involved, and a lot of internal politics going on. There's always internal fights for the resources. Second, if these kids are actually executing orders - meaning that they'll have the authority to do recommendations (based on their interviews with the people mentioned above), how would they even know if the recommendations are sound? It can take years for managers to become knowledgeable enough with the ongoing project and products. If you were DOGE, and wanted to "game" this process, you could really just: Identify the most critical voices in some organization, preferably those on the way out, and ignore the rest. Then you give these 18-year olds the mandate to recommend cuts based on those talks. And tell them that the ones that can cut most "fat" wins.

jdross 2y ago
“These kids” I’m talking about are in their 30’s and 40’s and making recommendations to department heads which almost all seem to be approved

UncleMeat 2y ago

Suppose they are indeed working 18 hour days. So they've done six weeks of work in two weeks. Do we believe that six weeks of ordinary work is sufficient to make the claims that Musk is making and take the actions that Musk is taking? "We are working really hard" doesn't give me any more confidence in the speed that things are happening. Heck, being absolutely exhausted sounds like a great way of making mistakes. If I heard that the team designing and building a bridge I use to commute was work 18 hour days in order to move fast I'd be quite a bit more concerned about that bridge.

walls 2y ago

[flagged]

IAmGraydon 2y ago

>the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE I see. And you know these people? Where are you hearing these "stories"?

tomrod 2y ago

I have a few questions regarding your story versus what the public understands. I see you have been positively harangued for your comment, please view my questions as honest dialectic. 1. What is the metric these folks are using to identify fraud, waste, and abuse? 2. Given that we have had independent OIGs for ages, why was fraud, waste, and abuse not previously reported? 3. Given that Congress folks are running every 2-6 years and shine like a shiny button (and get a lot of political cred) when championing substantive removal of fraud, waste, and abuse, why have no Congress people similarly exercised their Constitutional role of oversight for any of these agencies for decades? 4. Why do the agencies targeted tend to have overlap with investigations into or run-ins with Elon Musk's companies? 5. Why do forensic accountants take a long time to flag and identify fraud, waste, and abuse, even when working with compliant insiders, versus Musk's DOGE taking minutes to hours to identify fraud, waste, and abuse? 6. How is labeling groups with different ideas, such as Lutheran Family Services in the service of immigrants and refugees as terrorists, conducive to the identification of fraud, waste, and abuse? Which law enforcement office led the review of this group in particular to make this designation, which Mr. Musk and others decided to (potentially libelously) use to inflame public opinion against them? I have no doubt that DOGE folks probably feel pretty proud of the work they are doing. That doesn't mean they are actually having the outcomes they are commissioned for -- improving efficiency. Having worked some within government support, process bottlenecks are regulatory or otherwise required by statute. People spend time really considering the decisions and improving them incrementally.

LastTrain 2y ago

Let's hear more then. Name some names, departments.

drawkward 2y ago

I'm sorry, but why should we believe you? Do you have any evidence of your claim at all? Without evidence, yoh are normalizing what has been a shocking and unconstitutional approach to auditing that has very little resemblance to how actual auditing is done. Perhaps the hostility comes from the combination of unconstitutionality, unaccountability, unelected nature of Mr. Musk, and your "trust me, i know a guy" claims.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]