Surprise, DOGE’s ‘Savings’ Are All Made Up
The point is trauma! And a leg up for Elon, of course.
Every day, new tales of the hinky bullshit Presidential Best Buddy Elon Musk’s DOGE squad has been pulling!
Over the weekend Musk sent out a not-legal-in-all-kinds-of-ways email demanding all federal employees send in an email by midnight tonight with five bullet points of what they accomplished in the past week, because he is either in charge of everything or in charge of nothing, depending on if you believe his Twitter feed or the legal filings from the Justice Department:
Consistent with President realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.
Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
Then he mocked them with a Spongebob meme.
He is the world’s oldest edgelord. The FBI, the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies, Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services departments, Homeland Security and the judiciary all sent their employees messages to ignore the “Dogefather,” who has no actual authority to do anything but whisper in Trump’s ear.
“For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled ‘what did you do last week?’” Darin Selnick at the Department of Defense instructed his employees. Bitter divorced dad of 13 did not like that! “Anyone with the attitude of that Pentagon official needs to look for a new job,” he foot-stomped on Sunday night, followed up with a huff-Xit Monday morning: “Those who do not take this email seriously will soon be furthering their career elsewhere.”
Show some respect to the ketamine-snorting gamer who shitposts at least 100 times a day, he is saving the government so much money! JK, LOL, it turns out Elon’s squad of little pukes who can barely grow pubes have actually been fudging their “savings” numbers, and sometimes just making things up.
Politico’s Jessie Blaeser dove into the “wall of receipts” that DOGE has posted online, and distilled its fudgery into five bullet points:
Contracts that had not yet been awarded
Instances where a single pot of money is listed multiple times — tripling or quadrupling the amount of savings claimed
Purchase agreements that have no record of being canceled, but were instead stripped of language related to diversity, equity and inclusion
Contract savings identified by DOGE that do not match with records they refer to in the Federal Procurement Data System
Contracts where the underlying document is for an entirely different contract
If Musk wanted to make this farce convincing, maybe he should have brought in accountants? Or at least guys in visors and glasses holding calculators who are older than 22?
So what are Big Balls and company actually doing?
“We heard from our colleagues that they’re camped out in the basement,” a purged CFPB lawyer told 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl. “They’ve got papers up on the windows to keep people from looking in. And they’ve been accessing data, certainly.” How transparent! “DON’T COME DOWN HERE, MOM, I’M ACCESSING DATA!”
Whatever it is, they’re doing it without security clearances, or ethics training, or anything else you’d hope somebody would have before they start poking around in classified data, and they reportedly only leave to pick up lunch, before scurrying back to their subterranean hidey-hole.
CBS also got some of the only known footage of the “college dropout” squad walking into the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau with their little backpacks, “along with what appeared to be a bodyguard.” Three hours later, Musk Xitted “CFPB RIP 🪦 ”.
Who is paying them? Who is paying the bodyguard? Are they doing it all just for the glory of love? Nobody knows!
Anyway, how are those dozen-something lawsuits going? Mixed bag!
Wins for sanity: a temporary restraining order was granted Friday to stop attempts to cancel “DEI contracts,” and a federal judge reinstated Cathy Harris as leader of the Merit Systems Protection Board. There is still a halt on Trump’s order to freeze all federal spending, and the CDC and HHS were ordered to restore those health webpages that DOGE (or somebody) deleted. A federal judge Monday morning granted a TRO filed by the American Federation of Teachers, former federal employees and federal student aid recipients and six military veterans to block DOGE from accessing their personal and student loan data.
Losses: USAID putting employees on leave, allowed. Firing Treasury employees, allowed. Some temporary restraining orders denied because they can’t show harm yet, including states wanting a TRO against DOGE poking around the Treasury, California students wanting a TRO from DOGE nosing around in their student loan data, and Department of Labor employees, HHS employees and CFPB wanting a TRO to get DOGE out of their personal data. Guess everybody will just have to wait until some irreparable harm gets done. (Have you frozen your credit yet? Freeze your credit!)
And what is the actual point of these erratic cuts?
Trauma is for sure at the top of the list. Remember the now-head of OMB, Russell Voight, getting a raging boner and slobbering at the thought of how traumatized he hopes federal employees will be?
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
What a Christian.
And, there is the “culture war” part, virtue-signaling that they are cutting pretend things like condoms to Gaza, and “woke” words.
But of course, all of this helps out Elon himself most of all. How nice to have nobody to regulate his exploding rockets, self-immolating cars or the pollution his companies dump, nobody at the CFPB to defend consumers after they inevitably get ripped off on his new digital payment platform “X Money”! PLUS he gets to see whatever documents his competitors have filed with the government as well, down to the last penny of their taxes. That is worth way more than the couch change he spent to buy his way into Trump’s heart!
In better news, this morning an AI video of Trump giving Elon Musk an epic toe job reportedly played on loop on screens throughout the HUD building. No one could figure out how to turn it off, and security had to go around unplugging individual TVs to make it stop.
Look, you gotta take your joy where you can these days!
[NY Times archive link / Politico “DOGE shared its receipts — and some of them don’t match” / Politico “Wondering what DOGE is up to? Check the court docs” / Daily Beast / ProPublica / Axios / Forbes]
Dispatches from the land of Email bullshit:
So my agency is currently being run by a toadie, who was originally fired for leaking to the dogies and suddenly made commissioner a week later when a real employee resigned. We are one of the few being told initially to respond.
In the course of the day I’ve now had SEVEN email responses from the flunkies at HR clarifying that responses are voluntary and failure to respond does not count as a resignation.
I had something typed out I was planning to send encrypted, just to ensure it was an actual human being reading the sensitive details of my administration work and not say a third tier AI software from a failing social media site.
I’m going to hold off and pray I get a paycheck two weeks from now
From the New Yorker:
You Have Reached the U.S. Government
We are currently unable to answer your call, because everyone has been fired except Bob. If this is Melania, press 183 if you wish to accept the buyout.