Brian Barrett writes:

If you’ve felt overwhelmed by all the DOGE news, you’re not alone. You’d need too much cork board and yarn to keep track of which agencies it has occupied by now, much less what it’s doing there. Here’s a simple rubric, though, to help contextualize the DOGE updates you do have time and energy to process: It’s worse than you think.

DOGE is hard to keep track of. This is by design; the only information about the group outside of its own mistake-ridden ledger of “savings” comes from media reports. So much for being “maximally transparent,” as Elon Musk has promised. The blurriness is also partly a function of the speed and breadth with which DOGE has operated. Keeping track of the destruction is like counting individual bricks scattered around a demolition site.

You may be aware, for instance, that a 19-year-old who goes by “Big Balls” online plays some role in all this. Seems bad. But you may have missed that Edward Coristine has since been installed at the nation’s top cybersecurity agency. And the State Department and the Small Business Administration. And he has a Department of Homeland Security email address and, by the way, also had a recent side gig selling AI Discord bots to Russians. See? Worse than you think.

Even if that feels like old news, remember that it’s actually still happening, every day a fresh incursion by Big Balls and his cohort of twentysomething technologists. (In fairness, they’re not all young; some of them are old enough to present conflicts of interest so flagrant that they literally lack modern precedent.)

Similarly, you’ve likely heard that the United States Agency for International Development has been gutted and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been put on ice. All true, all bad. But here’s what that means in practice: Fewer people globally have access to vaccines than they did a month ago. More babies are being born with HIV/AIDS. From here on out, anyone who gets ripped off by payday loan companies—or, say, social media platforms moonlighting as payments services—has lost their most capable defender.

Keep going. The thousands of so-called probationary employees DOGE has fired included a significant number of experienced workers who had just been promoted or transferred. National Science Foundation staffing cuts and proposed National Institutes of Health grant limits will combine to kneecap scientific research in the United States for a generation. Terminations at the US Department of Agriculture have sent programs designed to help farmers into disarray. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration canceled a meeting that would have given guidance on this year’s flu vaccine composition. It hasn’t been rescheduled.

Don’t care about science or vaccines? The Social Security Administration is reportedly going to cut its staff in half. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is going to be cut by as much as 84 percent. Hundreds of workers who keep the power grid humming in the Pacific Northwest were fired before a scramble to rehire a few of them. The National Parks Service, the Internal Revenue Service, all hit hard. So don’t make any long-term bets on getting your checks on time, keeping your lights on, buying a home for the first time, or enjoying Yosemite. Don’t assume all the things that work now will still work tomorrow. [Continue reading…]