The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug

 

 

By Brian Barrett

WIRED

 

 

Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk’s DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following:

• Pushed a website live to track “savings” that showed no savings for several days and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it.
• Published classified information on that same website.
• Got called out for accidentally inflating that savings amount by $7.992 billion, and doubled down on their inaccuracy before they fixed it.
• Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn’t know how to get in touch.
• Basically the same deal, except with the US Department of Agriculture employees working to protect the country from a looming bird flu crisis.
• Rehired a 25-year-old engineer with a stack of racist tweets to his name.
• Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who’s getting Social Security benefits. (OK, that was all Musk.)

That’s just a sampling. It doesn’t include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that arbitrarily spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy. It doesn’t include the opportunity cost of tossing hundreds of government contracts and programs into a bonfire.

This is just the truly dumb stuff, the peek behind the veil of DOGE, the confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems. When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It’s the federal government; how hard can it be?

This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.

It doesn’t work like that. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time; when he turned to baseball in 1994, Jordan hit .202 in 127 games for the AA Birmingham Barons. (For anyone unfamiliar with baseball stats, this is very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.) Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.

Just look at all of those firings. DOGE has targeted so-called probationary employees first, often without regard for their skill or the necessity of their roles. Do you know what a probationary employee is? It’s people who have been in their position for less than a year, or in some cases less than two years. That means new hires, sure, but also experienced workers who recently transferred departments or got promoted.

Not only does DOGE not seem to understand this, it has given no indication that it wants to understand. These are the easiest employees to fire, legally speaking, so they’re gone. It even changed the length of the probationary period—from one year of service to two—in order to super-size its purge of the National Science Foundation.

It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we’ve repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.)

And if you don’t believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE’s costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration.

Worse still, none of this will actually help DOGE make a dent in its purported mission. What’s efficient about firing people you have to scramble to hire back? What are the cost savings of a few thousand federal employees compared to the F-35 program? What are we even doing here, actually?

There are two possible explanations for this mess. One is that Musk and DOGE have no interest in the government, or efficiency, but do care deeply about the data they can reap from various agencies and revel in privatization for its own sake. The other is that a bunch of purportedly talented coders have indeed responded to a higher civic calling but are out here batting .202.

Musk did have a rare moment of self-awareness late last week, during an Oval Office appearance with his 4-year-old son and President Donald Trump. “We will make mistakes,” he said, “but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

So far he’s half right.