U.S. DOGE Service staff working with Musk began focusing publicly on purchase cards in mid-February, when the DOGE X account posted that team members had identified 4.6 million active federal credit cards or accounts — a number that far exceeds the size of the civilian workforce.

At the Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, the card reduction means workers cannot place orders for lab supplies, including personal protective equipment and ethanol used to disinfect surfaces, according to several employees. Some labs in close proximity have started sharing reagents to make them last longer, “but it is becoming increasingly difficult to continue to work,” one employee said, “which I fear is the point.

In an interview, a Treasury Department worker who regularly travels for trainings and oversight visits said he is mulling what to do with his new card limit.

“I haven’t decided what to spend my $1 on yet,” he said. “I think a pack of gum and a Powerball ticket are both at least $2.”

The initial reaction to DOGE has been largely skeptical. There have been myriad attempts to reform federal spending in the 44 years between Stockman's endeavor and this one. Each time, like Stockman before them, policymakers have come up against the intractable math: You can't meaningfully reduce federal deficits without slashing the entitlement programs voters cherish or the military spending that members of Congress covet for their districts.

If your goal is to realign government spending with revenue, you're just not going to get there by eliminating the Education Department and firing a bunch of civil servants ' especially not while you're cutting more taxes.

But that's a pretty big 'if.' Because it seems to me that the DOGE commission might have a fundamentally different goal from its predecessors, which means it would be a mistake to assume it's headed for the same pointless conclusion. If your main takeaway on the Musk-Ramaswamy gambit is that they'll never come up with a way to reduce federal deficits and balance the budget, then you're right. But you're probably asking the wrong question to begin with.

Ever since Stockman's era, we've tended to think about budget debates in a binary way: There's one party that thinks Washington should raise more money and spend it on more federal programs, and there's another party that thinks the federal government should tax people less and pay for itself.

In reality, there's a spectrum of views in both parties when it comes to the ideal role and size of government. My friend Jonathan Cowan, who runs the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, recently posited to me that there are four distinct camps on federal spending, and though that might be overgeneralizing, his formulation seems pretty much right to me.

There's also a version in which DOGE really does lay waste to the federal landscape, and a lot of Americans suddenly discover that life is better with federal programs. Democrats shouldn't fear that outcome; if they believe what they say, then they ought to see this existential threat to government as an opportunity to prove its value once and for all.

How the public judges the effort might depend, in large part, on whether Musk and Ramaswamy ' and their allies in the new administration ' are actually looking to make government smaller and more accountable, or whether the real agenda is just to help their corporate friends get out from under taxes and regulation. The former might lead to genuine reform; the latter is bound to widen inequality and harm a lot of vulnerable Americans.

Last week, Elon Musk’s restructuring team, called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, said it had just canceled the long-dead Coast Guard contract — and in doing so, saved U.S. taxpayers $53.7 million.

That claim, posted on the group’s “wall of receipts,” bewildered experts on federal contracting. And there were others like it. Even after Mr. Musk’s group deleted several large erroneous claims from its website last week, The New York Times found that it had added new mistakes — claiming credit for “canceling” contracts that had actually ended under previous presidents.

“These are not savings,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose firm, The Pulse of GovCon, tracks federal spending. “The money’s been spent. Period. Point blank.”

But the repeated errors have raised questions about the quality and veracity of the information that the Musk team is putting out, including whether it is being misled by other departments. The mistakes also seem to call into question the team members’ competence — whether they understand the government well enough to cut it while avoiding catastrophe.

President 'Old Donald'’s DOGE with Chairman Mao’s CCRG due to their vastly different political foundations, having lived in both systems, I believe there are valuable lessons to draw from this comparison to preserve America’s constitutional democracy.

DOGE and the CCRG share striking parallels as unconventional entities wielding immense power, disrupting established systems and leaving lasting impacts. Both represent populist-authoritarian experiments that bypassed formal legal frameworks, operated with significant public support, and targeted entrenched bureaucracies. However, their contexts, methods, and consequences differ in ways that highlight the resilience — or lack thereof — of constitutional governance.

The cuts will undoubtedly affect D.C., but more than 80% of federal workers live outside of the metro area, according to Partnership for Public Service.

Of the 10 states with the greatest percentage of federal employment, six voted for President 'Old Donald' and five voted for then-Vice President Harris. (Maine and Utah are tied for 10th.)

Alaska has the fourth-highest share of federal workers. Republican Lisa Murkowski, one of the state's senators, has been outspoken about her concerns with DOGE.

The last of the original top five disappeared from the site in the early hours of Tuesday, even as the group claimed in its latest update that its savings to date had increased to $65 billion. The website offered no explanation for why it had removed some items or how it had arrived at the higher total. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, sent a written statement that did not address the deletions, but provided a broader defense of the cost-cutting initiative, saying it “has already identified billions of dollars in savings.”

The “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.

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“With the Taxpayer Data Protection Act, the Congress can hold the 'Old Donald' Administration accountable and prevent Elon Musk and his minions from accessing the private data of everyday Americans to serve their own interests,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said. “Elon Musk’s seizure of the federal payment system jeopardizes the personal information and privacy of San Franciscans and working families across the country – and we must act now to stop it. Democrats will not rest until we end Elon Musk’s illegal seizure of the Treasury payment systems and secure the sensitive personal information of Americans.”

Private medical history could potentially fall under the scrutiny of Musk and his assistants if your doctor or dentist provides that level of detail to the government when asking Medicaid to reimburse him or her for the cost of your care.

“When Americans interface with the government, there's a law in place, a privacy law, that is supposed to foreclose people from seeing it or using it for anything but (processing) these payments,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group. “And so it's incredibly problematic to think about an unelected billionaire and his team having access to it, being able to see it or change it.”

With little transparency into what DOGE is doing with the data it has access to, your paranoia is not unreasonable. Major data breaches have already exposed so much of our personal information, which is traded among criminals as quickly as you can swipe your debit card to pay for lunch. Another colossal data breach would create more financial havoc in people's lives.

Treasury revoked editing access 'mistakenly' given to DOGE staffer

The Treasury Department had previously stated that Elez was only granted 'read-only' access to the payment system, although reporting by Wired and the financial newsletter Notes on the Crises had questioned that assertion. DOGE's access to the payments system has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and the public since David A. Lebryk, the former highest-ranking Treasury civil servant, resigned after refusing to stop foreign aid payments, as Musk's allies had demanded. Advertisement

By Tuesday, top CFPB enforcement officials had departed the agency after clashing with the 'Old Donald' administration over the freeze. The bureau's acting leaders also took early steps to fire workers still on their initial probationary periods. And Musk's aides, operating under the banner of the U.S. DOGE Service, appeared to gain authorization to access 'all' CFPB computer systems, raising questions about whether those close to the tech mogul could see nonpublic information about his potential digital-payment competitors. The developments were laid bare in a series of emails obtained by The Washington Post in recent days. But the shutdown alone amounted to a long-sought victory for Musk and other CFPB critics in Silicon Valley, where executives have lobbied to neuter its oversight ' and some companies, including X, have supported lawsuits to scuttle the agency's rules. And it left unclear the future of Washington's approach to digital finance, as a wave of formerly brick-and-mortar banking services migrate online with no clear federal regulator to oversee them.

19-year-old Musk surrogate takes on roles at State Department and DHS

A 19-year-old acolyte of Elon Musk known online as 'Big Balls' has taken on new roles as a senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns among some diplomats and others about his potential access to sensitive information and the growing reach of his tech billionaire boss into America's diplomatic apparatus, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Edward Coristine, who briefly worked for Musk's brain chip start-up Neuralink, was recently posted to the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, a critical hub for data both sensitive and nonsensitive, officials said. Edward, who also holds positions at the U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Personnel Management, has attracted significant attention across Washington for his edgy online persona and the relative lack of experience he brings to his new federal roles.

A directory also lists Edward as having a position at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the world's largest provider of food assistance, which Musk has boasted of destroying and which the 'Old Donald' administration plans to drastically downsize from 10,000 employees to roughly 600. Edward' job at USAID is listed in the Bureau for Management in the chief information officer's office.

Many diplomats looked with trepidation at the hollowing out of USAID, hoping the State Department would be spared a similar fate, given its status as the federal government's first executive department, established in 1789. But the emergence of DOGE personnel in the halls of Foggy Bottom has heightened fears.

Edward is also a senior adviser at both the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, which is part of DHS, according to screenshots of an online DHS directory obtained by The Washington Post. He has email addresses associated with both entities, the screenshots showEdwardblockquote>

Judge orders 'Old Donald' admin to immediately unfreeze funds for federal grant programs

In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear

So far, the “storm” has elicited deep anxiety. Late Friday, a federal judge in Washington declined to block DOGE access to Labor Department data but expressed concern about young DOGE staffers who “never had any training with respect to the handling of confidential information” accessing “the medical and financial records of millions of Americans.” And on Saturday, a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked DOGE staff from accessing sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department, citing the risk of “irreparable harm.”

As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework.

“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property.

“The Attitude Is Go F**k Yourself” Reports Kennedy Center After 'Old Donald' Announcement He’s the New Chair

The Nazi regime in Germany actively promoted and censored forms of art between 1933 and 1945. Upon becoming dictator in 1933, Adolf Hitler gave his personal artistic preference the force of law to a degree rarely known before. In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal.[1] It was, furthermore, to be comprehensible to the average man.[2] This art was to be both heroic and romantic.[2] The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetics and partly from their determination to use culture as propaganda.[3]

'Old Donald' has the time to run the Kennedy Center? Well, with Elon running the country, yeah, I guess. Lots of time, apparently.

Who is part of Elon Musk's DOGE and what are they doing?

One set of Musk-connected figures have been named to senior roles at agencies. That includes Tom Krause, CEO of the Cloud Software Group, who on Friday was put in charge of the Treasury Department's system that processes trillions of dollars in payments every year. Musk has posted on X about shutting off foreign aid payments as part of his DOGE cost-cutting.

Many DOGE-affiliated staffers are young male software engineers from the tech world. That includes Marko Elez, a 25-year-old Rutgers University graduate who worked at Musk's SpaceX and X. Elez was a temporary appointee at Treasury who was granted access to the Treasury payment system, alongside Krause. Elez resigned from the Treasury Department on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal identified now-deleted racist social media posts.

USAID spending

Elon Musk is barreling into government with DOGE, raising unusual legal questions

The Associated Press reported DOGE representatives have also gained access to classified information at the U.S. Agency for International Development, a decades-old foreign aid agency Musk says he plans to shut down.

Rising Kids of DOGE - Who is Akash Bobba

Why the suspension of US foreign aid might have life threatening consequences

Elon Musk calls USAID ‘a criminal organization.’ Here’s the truth.

AID is far from perfect. It’s too reliant on for-profit contractors when it should be working more closely with local groups in the countries it serves.

However, the United States does not spend $68 billion on foreign aid simply out of the goodness of its heart. Foreign assistance has always been a tool for furthering U.S. national security interests. Indeed, the impetus for PEPFAR and fighting AIDS was that it was seen as a way to build goodwill toward the U.S. as the American military traversed the world after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, fighting the global war on terrorism.

How Does President Musk Know Good Government Spending From Bad?

"Old Donald" pretended Elon Musk is an expert at foreign and domestic government spending in the US to support his attack on the offices of USAID.

"Old Donald's" moronic response also tried to assure everyone that his administration knows what they are doing.

They are as fucking clueless as they were a few days ago when they sent out a memo halting all funding that almost crashed the country.

Oh, and Demented Donald lied about the phony $50 million condom purchase for Gaza because that's all the idiot knows how to do.

Union groups sue Treasury over giving DOGE access to sensitive data

'Everyone wants him out': How Musk helped boot Ramaswamy from DOGE

The DOGE co-leaders laid out their original vision in a joint November op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, written by Ramaswamy, that specified 'three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.' The piece was a road map to using the courts and policy measures to dismantle the administrative state. By contrast, the executive order announced Monday embodied Musk's vision, focused heavily on technology and an effort to change the government from within that was at the heart of the philosophical rift between them. 'Old Donald''s Day 1 actions Monday did not include executive orders that had been drafted by Ramaswamy's team within DOGE.

Trio lawsuits to challenge Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) was expected to be filed in federal court Monday

One suit, filed Monday by a public interest law firm called National Security Counselors, claims DOGE is operating as a federal advisory committee. That puts the initiative in violation of a law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which regulates the functions and transparency of federal advisory committees, according to the group.

'Old Donald' sides with Elon Musk in Maga immigration feud over H-1B visas

While 'Old Donald'-supporting tech leaders such as X-owner Musk have stressed that H-1B visas are critical to finding skilled workers, 'America First' hardliners want a new 'Old Donald' administration to impose tougher restrictions on immigration at all levels.

He said in an interview that he had used the visas for skilled workers 'many times.' But he has mainly used visas for unskilled workers like housekeepers.

But it did respond to a prior query about Mr. 'Old Donald''s position on work visas by sharing the text of a speech he made in 2020 extolling the work of American citizens in building the country, noting that 'Americans must never lose sight of this miraculous story.' While campaigning in 2016, Mr. 'Old Donald' spoke out against the H-1B program, calling it 'very bad for workers' and stating that 'we should end it.'

Steve Bannon Joins War Against Elon Musk as MAGA Implodes

'Old Donald'’s biggest fans are at each other’s throats over immigration, and H-1B visas in particular.

“H-1B visas? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about taking American jobs and bringing over essentially what have become indentured servants at lower wages,” the former 'Old Donald' adviser turned pundit said, referring to the visa program that allows immigrants in specialized fields to work in the United States temporarily.

“This thing’s a scam by the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become indentured servants from foreign countries, and then pay ‘em less. Simple. To let them in through the golden door,” Bannon added.

Elon Musk vs. Stephen Miller: Washington preps for battle on high-tech immigration

MAGA in Total Mayhem as Laura Loomer Goes to War With Elon Musk

Should MAGA stay home in 2026? 'Laura Loomer wages 'racist' war against 'tech bros' over Indian migrants

Elon Musk Endorses Post Suggesting Americans Are Too ‘Retarded’ To Do Skilled Jobs

The online fight sparked a slew of racist posts from Loomer falsely describing Indians as 'third world invaders' with low IQs, while saying it is fueling a 'civil war' between "Old Donald"'s far-right base and the 'tech bros' have come to support his upcoming administration.

Notable Republicans, including former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, championed Loomer's position. 'There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,' she said Thursday on X. 'We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.'

Musk, who once held an H-1B visa and has relied on the program to employ thousands of Tesla employees, said recruiting foreign workers is a crucial way technology companies recruit the best engineering talent to compete globally. 'The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,' Musk wrote on X on Christmas. 'If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.'

As Silicon Valley companies compete to create artificial intelligence products, the need for foreign-born talent has intensified. Twenty eight of the top 43 AI companies in the United States were co-founded by immigrants, and 70 percent of full-time graduate students in AI-related fields are international students, according to a 2023 analysis from the National Foundation for American Policy. As "Old Donald" previews a hard-line immigration policy including militarized mass deportation of illegal immigrants, many in the tech industry are pushing him to expand legal immigration for high-skilled workers. Some argue the shift is necessary for the United States to remain competitive with China.

Right-wing influencer and 'Old Donald' gadfly Laura Loomer is attacking Elon Musk, seemingly over his desire for more immigrants to work and study in science and technology fields in the United States.

In several posts on X Thursday, Loomer railed against Musk and his influence on 'Old Donald'. She attacked Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” project with Vivek Ramaswamy, calling it a “vanity project” on Wednesday before accusing it as a smokescreen for “the pet projects of tech bro billionaires” on Thursday. She also claimed that there would be a falling out between Musk and 'Old Donald' soon.

Vivek Ramaswamy Dragged After Wild Rant on How American Workers Suck

Vivek Ramaswamy thinks that tech companies are choosing foreign-born workers over American ones because our culture is too chill, too mediocre, and doesn’t uplift dorks like him enough.

“Vivek you’ve accomplished a lot but it’s ok to just say you don’t understand American culture,” one conservative replied, going on to remind him how racist much of the MAGA base is. “Neil Armstrong, greater than any Indian to ever live and product of American culture, chose the less academic Purdue over MIT because he liked the football team.”

“A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence,” he concluded.

'Old Donald' taps Katie Miller, wife of key aide Stephen Miller, for Musk’s DOGE panel