DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
by SubiculumCode
11 subcomments
- 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).
by asveikau
22 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by stephc_int13
4 subcomments
- 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.
- 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-hund...
- 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.
by madhacker
1 subcomments
- After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.
- 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.
- 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.
by sp1nningaway
0 subcomment
- Is DOGE gone though? 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.
- Bold of them to assume they kept records (aside from random Signal chats) in the first place...
- This American administration is full of criminals
- 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-mor...
by throw0101d
1 subcomments
- Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed?
* 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._inspec...
- first, eliminate record-keepers.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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-bill...
And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
- 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-politic...
- 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.
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- 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.
- Wonder if the remember to delete all the public data they pilfered.
- Doge was a scam, of course.
by jauntywundrkind
1 subcomments
- 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.)
by lenerdenator
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- the comments on this website are sometimes indistinguishable from r politics
by bcjdjsndon
0 subcomment
- Thinkudur chiddrun
- Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?
- I guess you could say....
They doged the bullet.
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