Sorry, Elon, Al Gore Was Not The Original DOGE. You Idiot.
Another page from the Fake Outrage Playbook.
Right-wing fans of Donald Trump and de facto President Elon Musk have discovered yet another example of the most outrageous hypocrisy on the part of Democrats since that time Joe Biden petted a search dog in Maui and libs did nothing to stop him.
The new supposed hypocrisy stems from some right-wing idiots rediscovering the fact that during the Clinton administration, then-Vice President Al Gore led a “Reinventing Government” commission (formally called the “National Partnership for Reinventing Government,” often shortened to “ReGo”). And that commission sought to streamline government operations and cut down on waste, exactly like Elon Musk’s DOGE thing!
But instead of calling Gore’s ReGo project a “constitutional crisis,” nasty Democrats and Big Corporate Media cheered it for cutting waste and inefficiency! Even after it resulted in the elimination of some 380,000 jobs!!!!!!!1!! But when Elon Musk does the very same thing, all we hear about is laid off workers and starving children and the “nuclear stockpile” not being “kept safe”! — What a bunch of deranged hypocrites!
Here’s the slumming DOGE billionaire being amazed at the hypocrisy a few days ago, insisting that
What DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s.
The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!
As you can see, Musk was responding to a long Twitter post insisting that Democrats and the media should “set aside their irrational opposition” and support Ketamine Hitler, “just as they once backed Bill Clinton and Al Gore.” It included a collection of snippets of Clinton and Gore talking up their work, including the screenshot bit here where Clinton discussed his executive order to cut 100,000 federal jobs. See? Just like Elon! Except, oops, the post above the video leaves it to potential viewers to notice Clinton saying the staff reductions would be decided by the agencies in a process that would be spread over four years. Details, details.
We won’t go into all the details of how Reinventing Government is different from Musk’s wrecking crew, because while there are plenty, they mostly stem from a single key distinction: ReGo was a carefully thought out government process that stayed within the law, involving both Congress and the agencies that were going to be affected.
At no point did Al Gore invite a team of unvetted employees of Clinton’s biggest campaign donor to simply run roughshod through federal agencies, firing thousands of people at whim and declaring them corrupt. Really, he didn’t!
You might as well say that military medical teams in combat zones are pretty much the same as the Cleveland Torso Murderer, since both removed limbs from people. (Or maybe it’s Harry Houdini who’s like the killer, since both worked a lot with trunks.)
Reinventing And Blowing Shit Up Are Different
Let’s just start with a great big obvious difference, which matters a lot: Al Gore was elected to office, unlike some prancing dipshit billionaires we could name here (Gore also leaned into his woodenness, as a decent white man who can’t dance should).
Now, as Subpresident Trump has amply demonstrated in just one month (happy anniversary, fuckface), being elected doesn’t guarantee you’ll act within the law, but Gore’s efforts were, from the start, very much in line with how previous government commissions worked. The effort started right after Clinton and Gore took office, in March 1993, with an almost relentlessly normal process called the “National Performance Review,” even though the abbreviation sometimes confused Car Talk fans. It was a six-month review that included both government agencies and input from the public, which resulted in a formal report that made some 400 recommendations for making the federal government more efficient, through things like computerizing many processes, possibly combining some agencies, and yes, cutting staff.
That’s where the Muskovites all scream “hypocrisy!” because isn’t that exactly what Our Two Presidents say DOGE is doing? You know, if you ignore the comprehensive review, input from agencies and the public, and the very existence of a formal report that members of the public and Congress could read. Heck, lucky duckies with access to Al Gore’s Inter-Net could download the report (in sections) at home via modem, or read it at a university library computer!
ReGo Was Not Rocket Surgery (And Wasn’t Done With A Chainsaw)
Also, Clinton and Gore took a slightly different approach than Musk when it came to enacting the report’s recommendations. As we say, they didn’t just dispatch a bunch of Nazi-friendly incels to lock the doors at agencies, demand access to classified files, arbitrarily fire federal workers and lock them out of their workstations, or refuse to let members of Congress into agency buildings.
Instead, Clinton gradually implemented many of the report’s recommendations over time, with Gore serving as a kind of team lead to meet with Congress and speak to the public, taking care that government services wouldn’t be interrupted, which again reflects the fundamental difference between ReGo and Doge, which was that Team Clinton saw agencies and Congress and the public as partners in making things work better, not as enemies, perpetrators of fraud, or even “traitors” who must be rooted out to allow the co-emperors to rule without opposition. Heck, a lot of the ReGo recommendations became legislation that was passed by Congress, which is a hell of a lot different from Trump’s insistence that nothing can constrain his power.
Hey, remember all the lawsuits and court orders finding that ReGo had overstepped the bounds of executive authority? Of course not, and hooray, for once that’s not because we’re all old and don’t remember why we went into the kitchen just now. It’s because Clinton and Gore went by the book and did it right, with Congress, resulting in four straight years of budget surpluses. It also gave us that dumb line at the 1996 State of the Union address where Clinton, trying to out-Reagan Reagan, proclaimed “The era of big government is over.”
Then Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took the House in 1994, declared Democrats literal demons who hate America, fucked everything up, and put us on the road to endless tax cuts, higher debt, Citizens United, and the fascist dystopia where we currently reside, where their rightwing heirs to lunacy insist with straight faces that there’s no difference at all between Gore and Musk, O The Hypocrisy!
Or as Jim Hoft, still the Stupidest Man on the Internet, put it at his personal disinformation factory the other day, mostly just repeating shit from the same account Elon boosted:
Hilariously, or at least HOLLOW MORDANT LAUGHTER-ly, right now in 2025 marks the very first time any right-wing pundits have pretended — in extremely bad faith — to respect Clinton and Gore’s reform efforts. But that’s only because it’s rhetorically convenient, in an online trolling way, for them to do so. As with their endless attempts to insist Martin Luther King hated affirmative action, they’re now pretending there’s no difference between an effort within government to streamline operations, and Trump’s desire to drown democracy in a bathtub.
[CNN / Liberal OC / Newsweek]
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Using “AI” to fire government employees is totally like Al Gore rhythms, so see, both siiiiiides.
Clinton-Gore raised taxes in 1993, even on the wealthy.
Their work to make government more efficient was not a cover to balance a tax cut for rich fuckwads.