9 ms·

DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

342 points by ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago

throw0101d 3mo ago
Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accountability_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou... May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspectors_general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...
- dgellow 3mo ago
  Perhaps the current government shouldn’t be in power and everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption
  - mcmcmc 3mo ago
    Perhaps that’s what the 2nd Amendment is for
    - throw0101d 3mo ago
      Movements/causes that use violence are less successful (23%) than those that use non-violence (45%): * https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/ https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-no... * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-9780190244408 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978... At least per historical surveys (600 movements since 1900).
      - thunderfork 3mo ago
        And yet, 100% of states, successful and unsuccessful, use violence for various purposes
  - georgemcbay 3mo ago
    > everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people. And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).
    - TitaRusell 3mo ago
      I never understood the presidential pardon. It's like America is basically admitting it has no faith in their own justice system. Or want a cheat code to skip it lol.
      - georgemcbay 3mo ago
        To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions. But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes. They were, of course, wrong. At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.
        TitaRusell 3mo ago
        Well I am not against pardons but having a single person parsing them out instead of parliament/Congress reeks of the kingly powers that the Founding Fathers correctly opposed. But it is difficult to make a system Trump/asshole proof.
      - lesuorac 3mo ago
  - BurningFrog 3mo ago
    Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.
    - tremon 3mo ago
      Calling the current regime "democratic rule" feels like a stretch. Wouldn't democratic rule first require that the ruler respects other democratic institutions such as the press, the courts, and the Constitution?
      - BurningFrog 3mo ago
        Democratic rule primarily means that those who win elections get to rule. That's really the by far most important aspect!
        tremon 3mo ago
        It really isn't; the most important aspect is that it enables peaceful transfer of power without the leaving group having to fear for their lives. But your perspective does explain a lot about the current state of the USA.
    - bikezen 3mo ago
      Like trying to storm congressional buildings when the democratically decided election was going to be confirmed? then maybe pardoning everyone involved in doing that when it failed the next time coming to power?
    - dgellow 3mo ago
      It’s defending democratic rules to charge corrupt officials. The idea that a democracy cannot defend itself from people pillaging it is absurd
shevy-java 3mo ago
This government is criminal. Why? In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.
- brnt 3mo ago
  It _is_ criminal and illegal. It's how authoritarian coups of democracy works: move fast and break things. It looks like America needs to find out the hard way how much worth breaking it actually accumulated.
asveikau 3mo ago
Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.
- hnuser123456 3mo ago
  The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - daheza 3mo ago
    They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives. https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj6Q=allRecords https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
    - yandie 3mo ago
      This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportation-secretary-bike-lanes-dei https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat... They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
    - 0xy 3mo ago
      NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent. So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage. Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?
stephc_int13 3mo ago
I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing. I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could. That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation. I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- sedawkgrep 3mo ago
  We had a significant reduction in government workforce during the Clinton administration. The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this. One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out. Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.
  - Rapzid 3mo ago
    Yeah, you want to identify and maintain service levels when reducing force. Or establish new service levels. This takes research, coordination, and planning. But the administration fired the people who could have helped with that too.
- HiPhish 3mo ago
  Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
q8zd3 3mo ago
I guess you could say.... They doged the bullet.
michelb 3mo ago
In part because of the destruction DOGE has caused any future democratic ruler will have a very tough time. It’s already neigh impossible to undo most of the damage the Trump party has caused, but it’s absolutely impossible to fix what DOGE destroyed, particularly without the evidence. A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.
- Sohcahtoa82 3mo ago
  > A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators. And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it. If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...
bs7280 3mo ago
One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes. I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.
- estearum 3mo ago
  www.sam.gov knock yourself out
- asdff 3mo ago
  The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.
  - tremon 3mo ago
    People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
    - gruez 3mo ago
      >The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency. What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?
- j2kun 3mo ago
  People do this all the time https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/updated_interactive_us_federal_government/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up... https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html
ck2 3mo ago
Needless to mention it was 100% theater and absolute destruction of government was simply the point US Treasury is borrowing $155 billion every month is now paying $24 billion a week in interest * https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-billion-every-month-fiscal-year-24-billion-a-week-interest-debt/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-bill... And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization * https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militarization-since-9-11/ https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
freejazz 3mo ago
Doge was a scam, of course.
t1234s 3mo ago
Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?
- colonelspace 3mo ago
  I don't know. Did they?
firefoxd 3mo ago
In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere. So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.
- SirFatty 3mo ago
  Until the last two words, I assumed you posted in the wrong story :-D
- shagie 3mo ago
  Also in the 90s... I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up. One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote. find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \; ... or something to that effect. It worked. So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available. ... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too? Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel. Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again. (and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)
  - seanhunter 3mo ago
    With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.
- CableNinja 3mo ago
  Replace ini with himem.sys "That takes up so much space!" Worked until reboot. And thats the start of my dive into IT
madhacker 3mo ago
After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.
- gruez 3mo ago
  How exactly did "looting" take place? The trump administration did a bunch of cuts and he personally benefited from being in office, but that's not the same as looting, which implies embezzlement of government funds.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - fzeroracer 3mo ago
    Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-security-data-breach-doge-2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...
    - dgellow 3mo ago
      Also, Russian IPs accessing systems: https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/04/user-russian-ip-address-tried-log-nlrb-systems-following-doge-access-whistleblower-says/404574/ https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/04/user-russian-i...
  - iAMkenough 3mo ago
    I read "looting" as installing a non-controlled StarLink terminal to silently pilfer protected data about Americans without going through existing infrastructure and leaving an audit trail.
lenerdenator 3mo ago
Given that DOGE was itself illegal, my guess is that the records were illegally disposed of. This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.
- Executor 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thiht 3mo ago
    So talking about the crimes Trump and his clique commit is Trump derangement syndrome, how convenient
  - tomhow 3mo ago
    Please don’t use HN for ideological battle. You’ve not commented here in over a year (and have posted only 25 comments in a decade, most of them ideologically-flavored), and you now chime in with three inflammatory comments in this one thread. If you want to participate here, please read the guidelines and make an effort to contribute in a way that's consistent with HN’s intended spirit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
t0mpr1c3 3mo ago
Oh no. Now we will never identify those millions of dead people that DOGE claimed were receiving social security. At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.
mannanj 3mo ago
Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs? It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.
sp1nningaway 3mo ago
Is DOGE gone though? https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154 https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154 I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term. It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.
SubiculumCode 3mo ago
DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff. Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis. To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH. DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).
- flockonus 3mo ago
  > DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Wish we could see the evidence for that.
  - vel0city 3mo ago
    Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.
  - moomin 3mo ago
    A weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.
  - jasonlotito 3mo ago
    DOGE's record.
  - tadfisher 3mo ago
    > What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.
wnevets 3mo ago
I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID! Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it! [1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
- archagon 3mo ago
  Death and suffering on an unfathomable scale will be the ultimate legacy of these people. I wish they would be confronted with their crimes in front of a tribunal, but they’ll probably get away with what they did, at least in a legal sense.
  - doom2 3mo ago
    It should also be the legacy of voters that chose this and I don't think I'll soon forget or forgive it.
- Havoc 3mo ago
  oh it's much worse. Projections are around 14 million mark. i.e. something around the region of a 100 Hiroshimas https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o
  - 93po 3mo ago
    It's horrible that there are 14 million children now in graves because of Elon Musk. He's literally worse than Hitler. I also don't understand how he spends all his time. SpaceX and Tesla are successful but Elon doesn't contribute to that at all, he's clearly not actually doing anything in those organizations. So where does his time go? I guess he's secretly just been doing actual work and actually contributing at DOGE this entire time, finding countries he doesn't like and murdering as many people as he possibly can. I bet he jokes about it with Trump while paying prostitutes to pee on Obama's bed.
- jayGlow 3mo ago
ajmurmann 3mo ago
One of the big issues - assuming good intent - was the dismissing of existing expertise on where the issues really are and jumping to the assumption that everyone in the system is corrupt and ripping off the tax payer. A simplistic model that can feel satisfying to promote on social media but is obviously naive. Jennifer Pahlka has worked on making our government more efficient and gives a much more educated view on what the real issues are. It's always baffling to me how Musk has all the resources one could imaging but loves to talk out of his ass instead of getting himself the maximum-validated information available to argue anyone. https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-more-effective-ft-jennifer-pahlka https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-mor...
gsky 3mo ago
This American administration is full of criminals
- baggachipz 3mo ago
  I can't think of one person in this administration who is not a criminal.
markhahn 3mo ago
first, eliminate record-keepers.
jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America. The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)
- 0xy 3mo ago
  The Biden administration authorized use of Signal, so I'm not sure how you think this is any kind of 'gotcha'. Both sides routinely use Signal and encourage its use. CISA said in December 2024 that Signal "better protected [government] officials".
  - javagram 3mo ago
    The use of Signal or other disappearing message apps for government communications violates records keeping laws (that date from the age of memos) unless the user diligently screenshots and archives all messages. All written communication for government business is supposed to be saved. The CISA document you referenced doesn't seem to be clear on this point, although it is marked as not applying to sensitive communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mobile-communications-best-practices.pdf https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo... It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.
    - jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
      I remember Hillary's email server as being an outrage because it might not have been secure. It didn't seem like she was actively deleting all the emails illegally. Which if you then reflect on Bush II, well, they did delete all the emails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv... I also think it's so many cases like this last week, with OMB saying agencies can run whatever internal surveys they want and they don't have to report to the public. None of it is upstanding, up front. This seems so far beyond any "both sides" or "it's been like this". https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decentralized-fevs-fewer-questions-and-less-transparency/414609/ https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decen...
fareesh 3mo ago
[flagged]
- SilverElfin 3mo ago
  Yep. A lot of snark and shallow dismissals. And no acknowledgment of the fact that even if DOGE was unsuccessful, that doesn’t mean the government is efficient or without fraud. There probably still is a lot, and DOGE didn’t receive the support and cooperation it needed either.
  - Sabinus 3mo ago
    That's not the impression I get at all. A bit of extremely understandable rage at the Trump admin's ignorance and arrogance, but if you CTRL-F for "Chesterton's fence" you'll get that acknowledgement you're looking for.
  - freejazz 3mo ago
    > that doesn’t mean the government is efficient or without fraud Don't really see anyone suggesting that.
tokai 3mo ago
Wonder if the remember to delete all the public data they pilfered.
chadd 3mo ago
The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy. Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it. Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.
xg15 3mo ago
Bold of them to assume they kept records (aside from random Signal chats) in the first place...
msie 3mo ago
So, is there a blacklist out there of all the DOGE goons? I remember a picture of a couple of grinning DOGE goons at a California facility trying to unleash a lot of water to help with the California fires except that it wouldn't help at all. Ah, found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/musk-doge-california-water-wildfires-b2711228.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
yalogin 3mo ago
Some folks I know in academia have their funding cut and so a good stream of research is stopped. Wonder how prevalent it is across academia.
bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
Thinkudur chiddrun
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
  Thinkudur chiddrun
elAhmo 3mo ago
Yet there are people still giving money to Musk, using X, Grok and other products which are run by a guy who decided to kill millions of kids worldwide. I know your acquaintances are on X and it is 'ecosystem that is hard to leave', but sometimes it takes a bit of courage to stop contributing to vicious people. And by using his platforms, you are directly doing that.
sharts 3mo ago
Queue the Elon fambois
thewileyone 3mo ago
Property of Elon Musk
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
DOGE is one of the worst shitshows to happen to the US Gov in a long time (ever?), and in the end, there was zero accountability (it was also possibly a very cleverly executed shitshow for the purpose of stealing a bunch of gov data)

342 points by ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago

Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accountability_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou... May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspectors_general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...

dgellow 3mo ago
Perhaps the current government shouldn’t be in power and everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption
- mcmcmc 3mo ago
  Perhaps that’s what the 2nd Amendment is for
  - throw0101d 3mo ago
    Movements/causes that use violence are less successful (23%) than those that use non-violence (45%): * https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/ https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-no... * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-9780190244408 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978... At least per historical surveys (600 movements since 1900).
    - thunderfork 3mo ago
      And yet, 100% of states, successful and unsuccessful, use violence for various purposes
- georgemcbay 3mo ago
  > everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people. And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).
  - TitaRusell 3mo ago
    I never understood the presidential pardon. It's like America is basically admitting it has no faith in their own justice system. Or want a cheat code to skip it lol.
    - georgemcbay 3mo ago
      To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions. But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes. They were, of course, wrong. At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.
      - TitaRusell 3mo ago
        Well I am not against pardons but having a single person parsing them out instead of parliament/Congress reeks of the kingly powers that the Founding Fathers correctly opposed. But it is difficult to make a system Trump/asshole proof.
    - lesuorac 3mo ago
- BurningFrog 3mo ago
  Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.
  - tremon 3mo ago
    Calling the current regime "democratic rule" feels like a stretch. Wouldn't democratic rule first require that the ruler respects other democratic institutions such as the press, the courts, and the Constitution?
    - BurningFrog 3mo ago
      Democratic rule primarily means that those who win elections get to rule. That's really the by far most important aspect!
      - tremon 3mo ago
        It really isn't; the most important aspect is that it enables peaceful transfer of power without the leaving group having to fear for their lives. But your perspective does explain a lot about the current state of the USA.
  - bikezen 3mo ago
    Like trying to storm congressional buildings when the democratically decided election was going to be confirmed? then maybe pardoning everyone involved in doing that when it failed the next time coming to power?
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    It’s defending democratic rules to charge corrupt officials. The idea that a democracy cannot defend itself from people pillaging it is absurd

shevy-java 3mo ago

This government is criminal. Why? In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.

brnt 3mo ago
It _is_ criminal and illegal. It's how authoritarian coups of democracy works: move fast and break things. It looks like America needs to find out the hard way how much worth breaking it actually accumulated.

asveikau 3mo ago

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

hnuser123456 3mo ago
The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- daheza 3mo ago
  They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives. https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj6Q=allRecords https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
  - yandie 3mo ago
    This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportation-secretary-bike-lanes-dei https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat... They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
  - 0xy 3mo ago
    NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent. So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage. Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?

stephc_int13 3mo ago

I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing. I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could. That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation. I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
sedawkgrep 3mo ago
We had a significant reduction in government workforce during the Clinton administration. The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this. One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out. Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.
- Rapzid 3mo ago
  Yeah, you want to identify and maintain service levels when reducing force. Or establish new service levels. This takes research, coordination, and planning. But the administration fired the people who could have helped with that too.
HiPhish 3mo ago
Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

q8zd3 3mo ago

I guess you could say.... They doged the bullet.

michelb 3mo ago

In part because of the destruction DOGE has caused any future democratic ruler will have a very tough time. It’s already neigh impossible to undo most of the damage the Trump party has caused, but it’s absolutely impossible to fix what DOGE destroyed, particularly without the evidence. A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.

Sohcahtoa82 3mo ago
> A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators. And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it. If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...

bs7280 3mo ago

One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes. I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.

estearum 3mo ago
www.sam.gov knock yourself out
asdff 3mo ago
The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.
- tremon 3mo ago
  People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    >The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency. What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?
j2kun 3mo ago
People do this all the time https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/updated_interactive_us_federal_government/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up... https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html

ck2 3mo ago

Needless to mention it was 100% theater and absolute destruction of government was simply the point US Treasury is borrowing $155 billion every month is now paying $24 billion a week in interest * https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-billion-every-month-fiscal-year-24-billion-a-week-interest-debt/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-bill... And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization * https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militarization-since-9-11/ https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

freejazz 3mo ago

Doge was a scam, of course.

t1234s 3mo ago

Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?

colonelspace 3mo ago
I don't know. Did they?

firefoxd 3mo ago

In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere. So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.

SirFatty 3mo ago
Until the last two words, I assumed you posted in the wrong story :-D
shagie 3mo ago
Also in the 90s... I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up. One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote. find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \; ... or something to that effect. It worked. So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available. ... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too? Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel. Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again. (and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)
- seanhunter 3mo ago
  With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.
CableNinja 3mo ago
Replace ini with himem.sys "That takes up so much space!" Worked until reboot. And thats the start of my dive into IT

madhacker 3mo ago

After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.

gruez 3mo ago
How exactly did "looting" take place? The trump administration did a bunch of cuts and he personally benefited from being in office, but that's not the same as looting, which implies embezzlement of government funds.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- fzeroracer 3mo ago
  Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-security-data-breach-doge-2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    Also, Russian IPs accessing systems: https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/04/user-russian-ip-address-tried-log-nlrb-systems-following-doge-access-whistleblower-says/404574/ https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/04/user-russian-i...
- iAMkenough 3mo ago
  I read "looting" as installing a non-controlled StarLink terminal to silently pilfer protected data about Americans without going through existing infrastructure and leaving an audit trail.

lenerdenator 3mo ago

Given that DOGE was itself illegal, my guess is that the records were illegally disposed of. This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.

Executor 3mo ago
[flagged]
- thiht 3mo ago
  So talking about the crimes Trump and his clique commit is Trump derangement syndrome, how convenient
- tomhow 3mo ago
  Please don’t use HN for ideological battle. You’ve not commented here in over a year (and have posted only 25 comments in a decade, most of them ideologically-flavored), and you now chime in with three inflammatory comments in this one thread. If you want to participate here, please read the guidelines and make an effort to contribute in a way that's consistent with HN’s intended spirit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

t0mpr1c3 3mo ago

Oh no. Now we will never identify those millions of dead people that DOGE claimed were receiving social security. At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.

mannanj 3mo ago

Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs? It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.

sp1nningaway 3mo ago

Is DOGE gone though? https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154 https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154 I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term. It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.

SubiculumCode 3mo ago

DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff. Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis. To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH. DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).

flockonus 3mo ago
> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Wish we could see the evidence for that.
- vel0city 3mo ago
  Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.
- moomin 3mo ago
  A weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.
- jasonlotito 3mo ago
  DOGE's record.
- tadfisher 3mo ago
  > What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

wnevets 3mo ago

I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID! Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it! [1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/ https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

archagon 3mo ago
Death and suffering on an unfathomable scale will be the ultimate legacy of these people. I wish they would be confronted with their crimes in front of a tribunal, but they’ll probably get away with what they did, at least in a legal sense.
- doom2 3mo ago
  It should also be the legacy of voters that chose this and I don't think I'll soon forget or forgive it.
Havoc 3mo ago
oh it's much worse. Projections are around 14 million mark. i.e. something around the region of a 100 Hiroshimas https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o
- 93po 3mo ago
  It's horrible that there are 14 million children now in graves because of Elon Musk. He's literally worse than Hitler. I also don't understand how he spends all his time. SpaceX and Tesla are successful but Elon doesn't contribute to that at all, he's clearly not actually doing anything in those organizations. So where does his time go? I guess he's secretly just been doing actual work and actually contributing at DOGE this entire time, finding countries he doesn't like and murdering as many people as he possibly can. I bet he jokes about it with Trump while paying prostitutes to pee on Obama's bed.
jayGlow 3mo ago

ajmurmann 3mo ago

One of the big issues - assuming good intent - was the dismissing of existing expertise on where the issues really are and jumping to the assumption that everyone in the system is corrupt and ripping off the tax payer. A simplistic model that can feel satisfying to promote on social media but is obviously naive. Jennifer Pahlka has worked on making our government more efficient and gives a much more educated view on what the real issues are. It's always baffling to me how Musk has all the resources one could imaging but loves to talk out of his ass instead of getting himself the maximum-validated information available to argue anyone. https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-more-effective-ft-jennifer-pahlka https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-mor...

gsky 3mo ago

This American administration is full of criminals

baggachipz 3mo ago
I can't think of one person in this administration who is not a criminal.

markhahn 3mo ago

first, eliminate record-keepers.

jauntywundrkind 3mo ago

The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America. The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)

0xy 3mo ago
The Biden administration authorized use of Signal, so I'm not sure how you think this is any kind of 'gotcha'. Both sides routinely use Signal and encourage its use. CISA said in December 2024 that Signal "better protected [government] officials".
- javagram 3mo ago
  The use of Signal or other disappearing message apps for government communications violates records keeping laws (that date from the age of memos) unless the user diligently screenshots and archives all messages. All written communication for government business is supposed to be saved. The CISA document you referenced doesn't seem to be clear on this point, although it is marked as not applying to sensitive communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mobile-communications-best-practices.pdf https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo... It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.
  - jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
    I remember Hillary's email server as being an outrage because it might not have been secure. It didn't seem like she was actively deleting all the emails illegally. Which if you then reflect on Bush II, well, they did delete all the emails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv... I also think it's so many cases like this last week, with OMB saying agencies can run whatever internal surveys they want and they don't have to report to the public. None of it is upstanding, up front. This seems so far beyond any "both sides" or "it's been like this". https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decentralized-fevs-fewer-questions-and-less-transparency/414609/ https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decen...

fareesh 3mo ago

[flagged]

SilverElfin 3mo ago
Yep. A lot of snark and shallow dismissals. And no acknowledgment of the fact that even if DOGE was unsuccessful, that doesn’t mean the government is efficient or without fraud. There probably still is a lot, and DOGE didn’t receive the support and cooperation it needed either.
- Sabinus 3mo ago
  That's not the impression I get at all. A bit of extremely understandable rage at the Trump admin's ignorance and arrogance, but if you CTRL-F for "Chesterton's fence" you'll get that acknowledgement you're looking for.
- freejazz 3mo ago
  > that doesn’t mean the government is efficient or without fraud Don't really see anyone suggesting that.

tokai 3mo ago

Wonder if the remember to delete all the public data they pilfered.

chadd 3mo ago

The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy. Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it. Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.

xg15 3mo ago

Bold of them to assume they kept records (aside from random Signal chats) in the first place...

msie 3mo ago

So, is there a blacklist out there of all the DOGE goons? I remember a picture of a couple of grinning DOGE goons at a California facility trying to unleash a lot of water to help with the California fires except that it wouldn't help at all. Ah, found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/musk-doge-california-water-wildfires-b2711228.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

yalogin 3mo ago

Some folks I know in academia have their funding cut and so a good stream of research is stopped. Wonder how prevalent it is across academia.

bcjdjsndon 3mo ago

Thinkudur chiddrun

bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
Thinkudur chiddrun

elAhmo 3mo ago

Yet there are people still giving money to Musk, using X, Grok and other products which are run by a guy who decided to kill millions of kids worldwide. I know your acquaintances are on X and it is 'ecosystem that is hard to leave', but sometimes it takes a bit of courage to stop contributing to vicious people. And by using his platforms, you are directly doing that.

sharts 3mo ago

Queue the Elon fambois

thewileyone 3mo ago

Property of Elon Musk

insane_dreamer 3mo ago

DOGE is one of the worst shitshows to happen to the US Gov in a long time (ever?), and in the end, there was zero accountability (it was also possibly a very cleverly executed shitshow for the purpose of stealing a bunch of gov data)