DOGE Demanded 'Barney' PowerPoint To Explain TB, Guess That Was Still Too Hard To Follow

And more of DOGE's secretive ways revealed!

“Can you say ‘malaria’?”

Don’t you forget about DOGE! Turns out Elon Musk’s secretive sleeper cells of loyalist idiots were more numerous, secretive, and somehow even stupider than we already knew, and new reports from the Washington Post and in a forthcoming book from a whistleblower, “Into The Wood Chipper” (Wonkette affiliate link), plunge the depths!

To quickly recap, DOGE busted into government agencies within months of Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration, with Elon Musk vowing to cut $1 trillion in waste and fraud. Instead, DOGE cut $1.4 billion at most, a bit short, and cost at least $77 million to administer. Meanwhile, the layoffs to the IRS are projected by the Yale budget lab to cost the government about $863 BILLION in lost revenue. Found the waste and fraud!

And as Elon Musk Xitted at the time, DOGE fed the entirety of USAID “into the wood chipper.” You know, the US government’s international humanitarian aid agency that distributed food and vaccines to millions, but also kept tabs on whether foreign leaders in Hungary, Honduras, or El Salvador were misusing funds. And also which government contractors might be ripping off taxpayers, or, say, deciding to take international defense issues into their own hands by disabling Starlink in Crimea.

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What? USAID Was Investigating Musk's Starlink? You Don't Say!

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Of course DOGE also went and used ChatGPT to find and mass-delete any kind of grant with a “DEI” keyword in it using the prompt,

“Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”

All administered by a team of doofuses unable themselves to define what DEI even was, determining material like documentaries about female Holocaust victims and Klan massacres were “inherently discriminatory” and yanking their already legally contracted grant money with no notice.

All while citizens’ private data was reportedly being ported to Russian servers, for purposes still unknown, as DOGE lawyers have been working night and day since day one to delay and keep the lid on as much information as possible, including simply names of people involved. And Elon Musk then and still is successfully refusing to sit for a deposition or answer any questions about exactly WTF-all he and his dumbshit almost-all-boy wonders got up to.

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REFRESH!

Surprise, DOGE’s ‘Savings’ Are All Made Up

Elon Musk Admits DOGE Will Fall Short Of A Trillion In Cuts By Nearly A Trillion

Hey, What Is A Russian Server Doing With DOGE Logins?

See You In Hell, DOGE :)

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But new deets in the Washington Post story expound on DOGE’s scope (bigger!) and MO (sketchier and stupider!). New information in response to a lawsuit from American Oversight uncovered many more minions than were known: “188 people whom it identified as being part of DOGE, including career civil servants at the former U.S. Digital Service and contractors at an HR firm,” and that number does not include the 19 WaPo had previously known about, and included one previously unnamed member, Alexander Glaubach, a former tech investor, who has since launched an artificial intelligence start-up for environmental permitting projects.

The WaPo story also revealed more on the furtive way recruits were onboarded, which sounds more like an Al Qaeda sleeper cell or flophouse fraternity than any kind of government job posting and application process. Recruits were tapped through disappearing Signal messages via someone they knew, like how Nate Cavanaugh got recruited by Steve Davis, the CEO of Elon Musk’s Boring Company.

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SEE ALSO!

DOGE Boys Stood Athwart History, Then Their Robots Deleted It

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Then once in — if they were not in already, a la Leland Dudek, a low-level SysOp drone elevated to Acting Commissioner at the Social Security Administration — the DOGEsters both kept fellow civil servants in the dark about who they were actually working for and were also themselves kept in the dark about what other cells were doing. Sometimes literally, in those blacked-out guarded rooms, subsisting off of Muscle Milk!

Like normal people who aren’t not doing anything wrong.

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Big Balls Descends

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Whistleblower Nicholas Enrich fills in the details of the stupid in a new excerpt from his book Into The Wood Chipper on The Handbasket, describing a meeting with USAID Chief of Staff Joel Borkert, deputy administrator Ken Jackson, Adam Korzeniewski, the White House liaison to USAID, and others, none of whom had any idea what USAID actually did, and did not even bother to Google and find out before showing up to close the place down.

I spoke for about five minutes, focusing primarily on our infectious diseases work and hoping to keep the attention of people who seemed to have no experience—or interest—in global health.

When I finished, the room was silent, the political appointees looking at one another in what appeared to be disbelief. The silence was broken by Ken Jackson, who chuckled softly and shook his head. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” he said. “This is the story that needs to get out there.”

Joel, also smiling, chimed in next, echoing Jackson’s amazement. “I had no idea you did all this,” he said. “As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My first thought was to explain that no global health programming supports abortions. Providing or promoting abortions with foreign assistance funds is illegal, and we had robust systems in place to ensure that no U.S. funds were used to support abortions. But obviously, arguing with Joel would get me nowhere. Mostly, I was shocked to hear how unapologetically ignorant our new leaders were about USAID’s work. Just the night before, they had triumphantly announced that nearly the entire agency was being placed on administrative leave, clearly without having a clue as to what we did.

Then Enrich went on to explain,

“Some of the studies are testing new treatment regimens for drug-resistant tuberculosis. [...] Interrupting treatment midstream risks the development of new, even more drug-resistant strains that could be untreatable. For an airborne infectious disease, that is a serious national security risk.”

Adam thought for a moment and then responded, noting that the political appointees at USAID were “not health people.” It would be hard, he surmised, for nonexperts to understand this issue. And so he suggested that we draft a simple, “Barney-style” set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television. He recommended that we use the term “Super TB” instead of “drug-resistant TB” to describe the mutations that can develop when treatment is interrupted, because it might be more likely to “catch their attention.”

Dear Lord. Adam had another suggestion too:

“One thing I thought of while you were talking,” he added, gesticulating wildly with his hands to conjure the image in his mind. “If you can make one of those maps like they have in Outbreak, where it shows the red growing over time as the disease spreads? You know, like the zombie apocalypse? That would be great, very effective.”

Another Trump staffer seemed concerned about malaria and asked Enrich to have his people pull together data on it, not realizing that the malaria division staff had already all been shut off from USAID’s network.

At this, [USAID chief of staff] Joel’s exasperation with DOGE’s meddling boiled over, and he shouted at the room: “See, this is why, just because it might work at Twitter does not mean you can do it here!”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. If the political appointees in this room—tearing down USAID without any comprehension of the consequences—felt that DOGE’s tactics were reckless and destructive, we were in deeper trouble than I had realized.

Following another long silence, Joel summarized what we needed to do next. My description of our lifesaving work had been helpful, and we would need to develop “a very simple way to describe it to the secretary,” he told us. “To be clear, we’re not looking for a laundry list of everything you want to do, you’re going to have to cut things, it’s going to have to be draconian. You’re only going to get things that are priority number one, that is all we’re going to be able to do, so don’t even send up the things that are priorities number two, three, or four.”

Of course in the end, the Barney cartoon did not work and USAID got priorities zero and all fired, even though Susie Wiles was “aghast.” Then batshit crazy Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was put in charge of (not) worrying about infectious diseases. The cuts to humanitarian aid have already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and could lead to millions more; Trump and Musk apparently get off on that.

DOGE and Musk have aggressively been fighting any form of oversight from the jump and still do, even as it’s ostensibly been rolled into Russ Vought’s purview at OMB.

Cuts to 13 percent of the Social Security workforce have left millions on disability in the lurch, unable to find anyone to help them as regional SS offices are shuttering. Where all that private data DOGE was siphoning off eventually wound up, and what it was exactly for, we may never learn. And Trump supporters are still waiting on those DOGE refund checks, which are surely in the mail, next to the tariff refund checks and the Republican health care plan.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

[Washington Post gift link / “Into The Wood Chipper” affiliate link / The Handbasket / The Real News]