DOGE is Done: Where Did Its Records Go?
DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
The Department of Government Efficiency has officially ended without a public accounting of its actions. Despite claims of transparency, the administration is hiding records by exploiting legal loopholes and deleting digital footprints. This systematic erasure prevents oversight of Elon Musk's influence and sets a dangerous precedent for privatizing government power while dismantling our democratic accountability infrastructure.
If the DOGE model succeeds, there's no telling how many shadow agencies may follow — and how many government decisions taxpayers could be locked out of.
- SubiculumCode
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).
- firefoxd
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.
- stephc_int13
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.
- wnevets
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...
- bs7280
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.
- asveikau
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.
- madhacker
After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.
- chadd
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.