Brian Barrett writes:

Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk’s DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following:

• Pushed a website live to track “savings” that showed no savings for several days, and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it.
• Published classified information on that same website.
• Got called out for accidentally inflating that savings amount by $7,992,000,000, and doubled down on their inaccuracy before they fixed it.
• Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn’t know how to get in touch.
• Basically the same deal, except with the US Department of Agriculture employees working to protect the country from a looming bird flu crisis.
• Rehired a 25-year-old engineer with a stack of racist tweets to his name.
• Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who’s getting Social Security benefits. (Okay, that was all Musk.)

That’s just a sampling. It doesn’t include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that arbitrarily spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy. It doesn’t include the opportunity cost of tossing hundreds of government contracts and programs into a bonfire.

This is just the truly dumb stuff, the peek behind the veil of DOGE, the confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems. When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It’s the federal government; how hard can it be?

This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable confidence that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things. [Continue reading…]