DOGE Now Trying To Use Grok AI To Loyalty-Purge And The IRS Is Giving Your Info To A 'Third-Party Vendor'
And other updates from the goon squad wrecking the government!
Let us now check in with the latest doings of the DOGE teams, that private goon squad of the world’s richest ketamine enthusiast, which are now installed in just about any government agency you can name, chaotically and secretively destroying everything they touch like a swarm of termites.
Yesterday the Supreme Court blocked a California judge’s order to re-instate 16,000 government probationary employees that DOGE had fired, until the lawsuit plays out. The Court could have also just done nothing and not gotten involved while the lawsuit played out, but for a third time in a week they’ve intervened. Now, instead, those employees are on paid leave, getting paid to do nothing. Efficient!
It’s not a great sign for how the Supreme Court will handle any of the other more than 20 lawsuits that have been filed against DOGE, should they cross the transom. Remember when Trump thanked the justices and Chief Justice John Roberts in front of everybody? Yeah.
And now Reuters reports that DOGE is snooping on government employees and using AI to find DISLOYALS. And Wired says they’re planning to give a third-party company access to everybody’s IRS data, after firing the people who really DO look for tax fraud, all day long. Meanwhile, they answer to no one, not even the putative acting administrator Amy Gleason, who recently said in a group chat she has no involvement with what the DOGE teams are doing, and has nothing to do with the layoffs.
For a bunch of people who feel entitled to access to the tiniest government-known details about anyone, DOGE itself sure is mighty shy about who they are and what they are up to. By design! DOGE is so secretive that finding out anything is like trying to figure out what’s going on at a construction site by sorting through its garbage. And the teams are using Signal to circumvent records and transparency requirements about what they’re up to, while at the same time the government is ignoring journalists’ Freedom of Information Act requests, even after a judge ruled that DOGE is covered by FOIA.
One thing DOGE is NOT doing: saving much money. Their Twitter money-savings reports are riddled with errors, and IRS officials predict a 10 percent drop, or more than $500 billion-with-a B, in revenue, after the administration fired 10,000 IRS employees, and is moving to fire 20,000 more. And, says NPR, even if DOGE was telling the truth about the “savings” it has found, those “savings” still add up to less than half of what Musk says is his goal. And are five times less than the revenue the government is projected to lose from those IRS cuts.
And, instead of continuing a plan to modernize the IRS’s information systems, DOGE put 50 senior IT staffers on leave, including the ones who look for actual fraud. Instead, Wired reports DOGE is staging a “hackathon” this week in Washington DC to develop a “mega API” (Application Programming Interface) so a third-party vendor can access everybody’s IRS data.
Nosing through private information to figure out who might have donated to lefty causes now seems to be the only use the new government has for the IRS. Because Donald Trump thinks income taxes are a mistake, and instead he’s going to make the entire budget from tariffs, which he will put into an External Revenue Service, which does not yet exist. And then maybe he will convert it all into Bitcoin, or something. And then he’ll send everybody $5,000, ha ha ha! Just kidding, Trump floated that he’d “look into” sending everybody a “DOGE dividend,” but now Musk is hedging that such a thing would be “somewhat up to Congress.” LOL! Because NOW he and Trump need permission from Congress for something!
Oh, and another thing DOGE has done: Somehow it’s weaponized the US Marshals Service as its personal police force, busting in to agencies and changing their locks, which is WAY outside of their usual duties of transporting prisoners, protecting judges, and tracking down fugitives, Tommy Lee Jones-style. Or perhaps the squad of goons are Elon Musk’s security guards who have been deputized, and are only claiming to be US Marshals? Exactly who is sending federal law enforcement to act against other federal agencies is again not clear, and the government is ignoring questions and being sued for information.
And enemies lists! Of course they’re making enemies lists. Republicans LOVE enemies lists. And Reuters has uncovered DOGE deploying Musk’s Grok AI to sniff out DISLOYALTY to Trump or Musk in government employees’ communications. The ghost of Erich Ernst Paul Honecker is jealous!
Our Liz Dye in 2023: “imagine the chaos if Republicans were allowed to come in and fire every IRS agent, financial regulator, transportation inspector, and HUD staffer, and replace them with donors' kids?”
Well, imagine no more! Hey, whatever happened to Trump’s old loyalty-checking love tester, that handsome Johnny McEntee? Guess there’s no more need for him to sniff around for anybody with a Taylor Swift picture in their cubicle any more, or for people who wince at the Confederate flag. Nobody appreciates a good, old-fashioned, artisanal, hand-compiled enemies list any more, guess now he has been replaced by a robot.
But Grok AI is still not sophisticated enough to be able to tell you if Encanto 2 is a real movie, so probably this DOGE AI is another list of forbidden keywords, like searching everybody’s email for “ELON + SUCKS BALLS.”
We can only guess! For official word of DOGE doings, all we have is that error-ridden Xitter feed with announcements of jobs eliminated, and secondhand reports of the identities and doings of the twentysomethings/Musk employees with hair-raising conflicts of interest, and the lawsuits.
And on Monday, a federal appeals court put on hold an injunction that had blocked DOGE from accessing private data at the Treasury and Education departments and the Office of Personnel Management, and the appeals court will hear oral arguments on May 5. Though in separate cases the Social Security Administration is at least blocked from sharing SSA data, and a case against the Office of Personnel Management from disclosing data to DOGE continues. Assuming Big Balls has not already put it all on some cloud.
That’s the plan, move fast, break everything (and we do mean EVERYTHING), and dare courts to stop it. And the Roberts Court does not seem inclined to. And though Elon may be peacing out to the private sector, his little minions have no plan to go anywhere.
[Wired / SF Chronicle / FedScoop / Reuters]
On top of everything else, it's still amazing how much confidence they have in AI.
Roberts might think he can still play it cute, but SCOTUS has long passed the point of no return on Trump . . . as soon as it finds a reason to rule against him, he will defy the court order and practically dare everyone to stop him . . . bet on it 🤬