5 ms·

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

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.
- hilariously 3mo ago
  There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 3mo ago
  https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-government-221000191.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover... "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 3mo ago
    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 https://sahillavingia.com/doge
    - wredcoll 3mo ago
      I mean, they're hardly blameless.
      - dmix 3mo ago
        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.
- retornam 3mo ago
  > What's the evidence for that? If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover? Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use? Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government. This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI
  - joe_mamba 3mo ago
    >because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not the answer here.
    - retornam 3mo ago
      What do you think the GAO was setup to do? When was the last time you read a GAO report, if you claim to care about how the government spends your taxes and if they spend it efficiently? DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.
Executor 3mo ago
[flagged]
JKCalhoun 3mo ago
"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…" Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.
- maximilianburke 3mo ago
  >Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway. Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).
  - MengerSponge 3mo ago
    Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.
    - buran77 3mo ago
      > protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
      - solumunus 3mo ago
        Anyone who thought this guy was a genius is probably still frantically applauding.
        MengerSponge 3mo ago
        They saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.
  - chasing 3mo ago
    And racism.
slopinthebag 3mo ago
> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?
- well_ackshually 3mo ago
  They're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient. Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    But if Elons goons are a pack of bumbling morons, it’s possible they simply didn’t find the waste that exists, or they had different goals (I.e. dismantling and looting). That they didn’t really find much isn’t evidence that waste doesn’t exist.
  - ethbr1 3mo ago
    Elon AND Russell Vought's / Project 2025 Let's not fall for the transparent narrative of post-hoc branding DOGE "Elon's thing" so that when there are inevitably Congressional hearing the real architects go uncalled.
- alwa 3mo ago
  Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient. So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place. What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    I don’t have any reason to believe the grantmaking system is particularly inefficient. If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10. But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.
paul7986 3mo ago
DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later. Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026). Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.
- jknoepfler 3mo ago
  Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list. I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Terr_ 3mo ago
    > as a business This is doubly-bad when the guy at the top's "business" has a nearly 1:1 mapping to the governance of North Korea: An unaccountable dictatorship where the head directly owns everything and cannot be fired for incompetence, he executes/fires people on a whim, and meanwhile relatives and courtiers spend most the time sucking-up and backstabbing to end up with the power when he dies. Why would any American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating. P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.
    - 3mo ago
0xy 3mo ago
[flagged]
BatteryMountain 3mo ago
And who does this ultimately benefit?...
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
  The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.
  - ethbr1 3mo ago
    Making their wealth in a democratic society is a temporary embarrassment to a Ellison/Thiel/Musk would-be technocrat.
beanjuiceII 3mo ago
[flagged]
- Rotdhizon 3mo ago
  I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.
  - wredcoll 3mo ago
    > thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. Surely this is easy to prove, right?
    - Rotdhizon 3mo ago
      Anyone who has been in the military can vouch for this. That is the primary angle I'm speaking from. The offices and installations are filled with the kind of people I described.
- lobsterthief 3mo ago
  What’s the sample size here? Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me.
Beijinger 3mo ago
[flagged]
- SubiculumCode 3mo ago
  You are largely misinformed, and if you are going to make such a wild (and defaming) claim, perhaps you'd back it up with some evidence. Not only are they highly skilled, they are completely dedicated. They are straining to meed the needs of researchers right now, with staff volunteering on the weekends, against policy, to help out where they can, because they believe in their mission and are highly motivated and competent at doing it.
  - Beijinger 3mo ago
    Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about. But from another perspective, the reviewers: an idiot and google is a very dangerous combination.
    - Thraway198 3mo ago
      "Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about." Lol.
      - Beijinger 3mo ago
        It is actually a movie quote. The bottom line is very easy: I am not looking for problems.
        Thraway198 2mo ago
        Lmao
    - SubiculumCode 3mo ago
      Convenient.
tetris11 3mo ago
> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish. Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through. The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through
aeternum 3mo ago
>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true. It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar" Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.
- sagarm 3mo ago
  And yet well known grift like corn-derived ethanol continue. Looking forward to cutting some welfare queens loose next go around! And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.
- intended 3mo ago
  You responded to a detailed/narrow example flagged as an example, with a reiteration of the rule. Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient. This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.
  - aeternum 3mo ago
    Could there be any other reasons that DOGE did succeed?

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.
hilariously 3mo ago
There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.
sjsdaiuasgdia 3mo ago
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-government-221000191.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover... "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 3mo ago
  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 https://sahillavingia.com/doge
  - wredcoll 3mo ago
    I mean, they're hardly blameless.
    - dmix 3mo ago
      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.
retornam 3mo ago
> What's the evidence for that? If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover? Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use? Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government. This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI
- joe_mamba 3mo ago
  >because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not the answer here.
  - retornam 3mo ago
    What do you think the GAO was setup to do? When was the last time you read a GAO report, if you claim to care about how the government spends your taxes and if they spend it efficiently? DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.

Executor 3mo ago

[flagged]

JKCalhoun 3mo ago

"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…" Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

maximilianburke 3mo ago
>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway. Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).
- MengerSponge 3mo ago
  Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.
  - buran77 3mo ago
    > protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
    - solumunus 3mo ago
      Anyone who thought this guy was a genius is probably still frantically applauding.
      - MengerSponge 3mo ago
        They saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.
- chasing 3mo ago
  And racism.

slopinthebag 3mo ago

> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?

well_ackshually 3mo ago
They're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient. Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  But if Elons goons are a pack of bumbling morons, it’s possible they simply didn’t find the waste that exists, or they had different goals (I.e. dismantling and looting). That they didn’t really find much isn’t evidence that waste doesn’t exist.
- ethbr1 3mo ago
  Elon AND Russell Vought's / Project 2025 Let's not fall for the transparent narrative of post-hoc branding DOGE "Elon's thing" so that when there are inevitably Congressional hearing the real architects go uncalled.
alwa 3mo ago
Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient. So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place. What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  I don’t have any reason to believe the grantmaking system is particularly inefficient. If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10. But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.

paul7986 3mo ago

DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later. Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026). Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.

jknoepfler 3mo ago
Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list. I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  > as a business This is doubly-bad when the guy at the top's "business" has a nearly 1:1 mapping to the governance of North Korea: An unaccountable dictatorship where the head directly owns everything and cannot be fired for incompetence, he executes/fires people on a whim, and meanwhile relatives and courtiers spend most the time sucking-up and backstabbing to end up with the power when he dies. Why would any American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating. P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.
  - 3mo ago

0xy 3mo ago

[flagged]

BatteryMountain 3mo ago

And who does this ultimately benefit?...

ndsipa_pomu 3mo ago
The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.
- ethbr1 3mo ago
  Making their wealth in a democratic society is a temporary embarrassment to a Ellison/Thiel/Musk would-be technocrat.

beanjuiceII 3mo ago

[flagged]

Rotdhizon 3mo ago
I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.
- wredcoll 3mo ago
  > thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. Surely this is easy to prove, right?
  - Rotdhizon 3mo ago
    Anyone who has been in the military can vouch for this. That is the primary angle I'm speaking from. The offices and installations are filled with the kind of people I described.
lobsterthief 3mo ago
What’s the sample size here? Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me.

Beijinger 3mo ago

[flagged]

SubiculumCode 3mo ago
You are largely misinformed, and if you are going to make such a wild (and defaming) claim, perhaps you'd back it up with some evidence. Not only are they highly skilled, they are completely dedicated. They are straining to meed the needs of researchers right now, with staff volunteering on the weekends, against policy, to help out where they can, because they believe in their mission and are highly motivated and competent at doing it.
- Beijinger 3mo ago
  Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about. But from another perspective, the reviewers: an idiot and google is a very dangerous combination.
  - Thraway198 3mo ago
    "Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about." Lol.
    - Beijinger 3mo ago
      It is actually a movie quote. The bottom line is very easy: I am not looking for problems.
      - Thraway198 2mo ago
        Lmao
  - SubiculumCode 3mo ago
    Convenient.

tetris11 3mo ago

> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish. Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through. The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through

aeternum 3mo ago

>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true. It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar" Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.

sagarm 3mo ago
And yet well known grift like corn-derived ethanol continue. Looking forward to cutting some welfare queens loose next go around! And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.
intended 3mo ago
You responded to a detailed/narrow example flagged as an example, with a reiteration of the rule. Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient. This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.
- aeternum 3mo ago
  Could there be any other reasons that DOGE did succeed?