If you go to the doge website right now, there's a Libs of TikTok tweet shown on the main page. It reads:
The US government only recognizes two sexes: Male and Female. This needs to be changed immediately
There is absolutely a crusade going on, but I certainly wouldn't call it moral.
Following Trump’s second term, the fresh-money establishment saw an opportunity to challenge the old guard. Setting aside their differences, they chose to unite.
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-defense-contr...
>The group, which could announce strategic partnerships next month, would seek to bring Silicon Valley-style disruption to an industry dominated by so-called "prime" contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
They were soon joined by other tech moguls—Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates—who once opposed Trump but now see AI as their chance to wrest power from the old establishment.
The difference between sports and politics is that sports are always a duel, while politics, despite appearances, is always a three-player game.
I'm just saying it's not that deep. There is not a meaning or moral that needs to be understood, there is no reasoning that could make them change their ways.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[1] Ok, I admit, nobody but me has actually made the intersection between the two yet.
Design for Prevention (2010) ISBN 978-0-937063-05-7
Friends in High Places (1990) ISBN 937063-06-1
Have Fun at Work (1988) ISBN 0-937063-05-3
The New Plague (1986) ISBN 0-937063-03-7
POSIWID is mentioned in the first three works; engineer William L. Livingston authored the latter three.
In other words, there’s no point in arguing about the purpose. If you want the system to do something else, you have to change the system.
For a more traditional phrasing: "actions speak louder than words."
But the projects that are being funded today don’t resemble the ones in the 60s-80s. And thats not to suggest it previously was unbiased and now is politicized, but the parties and their values have changed. So that old bureaucratic organization has a new mission
Giving out crops promoted the idea that market capitalism brought prosperity. That isn’t enough for liberalism which has moved up Maslows hierarchy to meaning and purpose. Physical aid is merely a means for bringing the true goods - social justice, equity, inclusion, education, etc.
Or what to call the side-effects of a system going away.
One of the statistics I read was that the average American judges foreign aid at 31% of the Federal budget instead of the true 1%. In one way, that’s remarkable efficiency: 31x perception. In another way, it gives bad actors in the government an advantage: by cutting a measly 1%, you can rely on uninformed Americans to give you credit for 31x cuts.
seems to be some sort of pathology
Ukraine would have been rejected slightly more politely by Harris. You're elevating a rhetorical difference to obscure that AIPAC primarying two democrats over their stance on israel gave republicans the house.
It sure would be nice to not have just a rhetorical difference over our most shame-ridden ally. But yea, Putin is dog walking trump into checks notes pushing for cutting military and nuclear stockpiles. Disgusting.
I hate Trump, but it's this conspiratorial crap about Putin while refusing to acknowledge AIPAC that makes me know moderates/centrists/maddow-watchers will always cave to ignorance and fear.
Straight from the russofascist playbook.
You can trivially look up donations. It's difficult to link to just AIPAC so I'll just put this here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/09/aipac-republican-do...
Mind you, this is still a stronger case for another state blatantly interfering in our elections than the what $36 million to the NRA and a small buy of facebook ads (~$100k, which is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to domestic interests). And this alleged "kompromat" (good grief, read better propaganda)
I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.
I strongly feel like these guys see what happened in Russia and see it as a success: the "weak" soviet union was replaced by a "strong" Putin-controlled Russia. The collapse in living standards, lawlessness, etc, was acceptable collateral damage.
It is kind of funny that the people who complain about the "deep state" with some kind of goal actually create something similar with an actual goal.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
Were those full-time employees or contractors of some type?
Normally I would just look this up myself, but things have been moving so quickly that the info I find is all over the place and I haven't found a short list of sources to trust.
My understanding was that they "offered" early retirement, not sure how much of an option it was versus a demand. I had also heard they cancelled a lot of contract work, I wouldn't consider that being fired but yeah it does still impact people similarly.
That was an earlier wave, but things are moving so quickly it's understandable people are getting confused. The two hundred thousand terminated I referred to above are (roughly) all the employees in their probationary period (which is typically two years, but it varies by position) across the whole federal public sector workforce.
If we were to include contractors (e.g. USAID contractors), more than two hundred thousand people have been terminated by executive action since the start of the administration.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/15/trump-purges-real-w...
Unfortunately this kind of comes with the territory when granting power to an authority - jobs can be created, they can also be taken away.
Whether this is "right" for our country is probably a matter of perspective, but I do feel for everyone impacted directly. This is a pretty shitty situation to find yourself in and I don't know what the job market will look for them short term - if its anything like tech the last year or so its pretty miserable.
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
Is he? I mean this as an honest question, things have moved quickly enough that its hard to keep up.
My understanding that they have been temporarily closing offices or stopping work. I wouldn't consider that as "literally closing agencies" though, at least for me that reads as closing them down permanently rather than temporarily closing the doors.
I don't ask this to defend what they're doing at all. I think we could be much worse off if they're only gutting the agencies without closing them completely.
The executive branch has been given an immense amount of authority over the last half century or so, if that is used to rebuild different agencies technically still fulfilling congressional mandates for USAID or CFPB we could be in for a rude awakening.
Authority is fine when you agree with it, but as soon as the wrong person has that same power you may find you wish it was never granted in the first place.
Most of them were pretty weakly defined and they were given legal precedent to define what their own authority was (unless specifically defined by Congress). The departments could be kept with more clear definitions of what they need to do and what success looks like.
That isn't clear yet from what I've seen. Destroying or knee capping departments is one thing rebuilding them as private or functionally private organizations is another level.
If they are planning to do this I don't think we've seen any direct signs of it yet, though I don't know how it could be anything other than fascism at that point.
Because they are, in fact, obviously constitutional. The mechanism for eliminating them contemplated by the constitution is for congress to pass a law eliminating them.
If you disagree with my view on this, perhaps you'll be persuaded by voluminous case law over decades upholding the constitutionality of all of these Federal government agencies in face of challenges of precisely the kind you're motioning toward.
At this point I feel like anyone who disagrees with this should explain how things work in the alternative. If the executive can just unilaterally declare laws invalid, how does anything get done? Why pass laws at all?
There is gray area when Congress says we need a department to manage our education system, for example, and sets a budget. Congress is only approving the spending there, at least to me that means it can be spent but doesn't have to be spent in full.
Now it is the executive branch's job to execute on that department. I think it would be a stretch for them to just not create the department. Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though, and it is reasonable for someone coming in to say that what was done in the past isn't meeting Congress's request.
That isn't to say Trump is making a legitimate or reasoned argument in that vein, but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department. With congress defining little to no metrics for success that battle seems largely to be in the eye of the beholder.
You are welcome to imagine an alternate legal system from first principles, but please do not present it as U.S. law. The question of whether president has to "[spend] in full" has been settled by legislation and litigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
> Their job is to properly and effectively implement what congress asked for though
No it is not. Their job as laid out in the Constitution is to faithfully implement the laws. Not "properly and effectively", where what's proper and effective are determined by them. "Faithfully" is the word used in the Constitution.
They are to implement the laws for Congress, and if the executive finds those laws sloppy and wasteful and not proper, he doesn't get to just not do them. Again, I ask you, why pass laws at all if the executive can just decide to not do them?
> but the power is there at which point you have a weird legal battle attempting to decide who can make a better case for the success of any specific department
There is no battle -- it's there in a plain reading of the Constitution, and the impoundment act of 1974 makes explicit. And even what you say is true, there should be more of a process for the Executive branch to do these things; because the power is so broad, in the spirit of checks and balances they should be conferring with the Congress rather than asserting blanket and unchecked authority.
Sure, we can debate semantics here if you want. I'm fine swapping in "faithfully execute" into my prior comment though, that's basically what I meant without going word for word constitutional.
My point remains though. "Faithful execution" is in the eye of the beholder and is up for debate. One person may see the Department of Education as faithfully executing the congressional mandate while another could see it as poorly run, inefficient, or point to our education level relative to other countries. Both would have good arguments to make.
Further, I don't read Congress's power to approve the budget as part of the mandate for a department. Congress isn't saying "spend XX billion and build an education department," they're saying "build an education department and don't spend more than XX."
That can surely be debated in a legal context, but I think you would be hard pressed to find many average people that would read a budget as a "spend every penny" mandate. Many corporations operate this way, and while in my experience people will spend their full budget to avoid a decrease next year they are also well aware of the absurdity of that.
The impoundment law itself was/is controversial and this will surely be challenged in court on those grounds. The question still remains, though, whether any miscarriage of the law us found in departments being shut down. Its too early, mainly because they at least appear to be acting rashly, but that doesn't mean these departments have been faithfully executing to date.
The semantics here are everything, it's the debate. What does the Constitution mean and what was the purpose of America? We've reached ground zero here.
To me, the purpose of America is a government for the people made possible by checks and balances -- separating powers so that they can't be abused, and giving the people ultimate choice.
Maybe you disagree, because that's not what you are suggesting. If we give in to your reading of the Constitution, the executive has the most power of all branches, which shifts power away from the people in a dramatic way.
I've asked you three times now, and you have evaded the central question -- if the executive can pick and choose laws to enforce, defund departments at whim, what is the point of laws at all?
I suspect you haven't answered it directly because you'd have to admit your reading of the Constitution implies a monarchy. And that's why we are debating semantics now, depending on how the words are interpreted we either have a system of checks and balances, or we have unbalanced unchecked power in the executive branch.
> The impoundment law itself was/is controversial
Yeah, it was controversial among people who didn't want to follow the law, and instead wanted to use their power to go around it. The concept of checks and balances is not popular with the people being checked.
Who in their right mind opens up RDP and Citrix servers to public internet in DoE and nuclear research laboratory networks?
Time is running very short. Foreign powers must be assumed to already hold all possible information about the US government, including nuclear secrets, warfare capabilities, emergency plans, and kompromat of all personnel and political oversight.
It won’t be long before the US nuclear arsenal mysteriously disappears.
You can use Shodan yourself to verify.
The corruption era is very simple: the government won't be allowed to directly provide a service that someone else could make $$$$ by being a middleman for.
It's somewhat ludicrous to have to "file taxes" in the computer era in the first place, but there's a large ideological resistance to both taxes and the government that in some of the more paranoid wings of the country that is well-exploited by the rent-seekers here.
As a comparison, in my country you could submit your own tax return using government supplied desktop software since 1999, and in 2015 that software was replaced with a web product. 1 in 3 people submit their own tax returns using this product.
[0] https://thisisunpacked.substack.com/p/irs-direct-tax-filing-...
Time will tell but there's evidence that some government staff grew inexplicably wealthy while in office which would suggest corruption. Corruption in government is terrible for the average citizen, ask anyone from a country that suffers from a lot of it.
I really fail to see why auditing government spending is a bad thing?
But you know what? All of these agencies are regularly audited. Every year, reports are all published. This is how it works https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/financial...
Elon is operating an ideological mission conducted unprofessionally and with complete contempt for any public oversight.
Those are a bunch of weasel words. You're giving a certain impression yet being vague enough that it's impossible to assess, argue or discuss the validity of that claim.
What evidence? Who are those 'some' staff? What's inexplicably wealthy?
There's a vast difference between government high-ups getting paid well and making money (as high-ups in any large organization might) and government organizations and their leadership and staff being generally corrupt.
Of course corruption is never impossible, partially because it can take forms that may be difficult to discern as such. But it's again impossible to assess that claim without substance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/trump-orders-...
It's barely started and the corruption is everywhere. It's blatant and out in the open, and it's disgusting.
I'm going to a protest today. I encourage others to do the same.
I am not a Trump voter. I agree with the outcome they have stated - reduce stupid spending - but I have no idea thats the true motivation, the true goal and I disagree with the manner in which they are doing it. Just because you agree with the dictator doesn't make it right?
Heck, the Trump admin wants to get rid of income tax entirely, so they're hardly the natural allies of the tax prep industry.
If Elon wanted he could fund an opensouce alternative to Turbotax.
I am willing to bet 1k that Intuit's 2024 TurboTax Online and other Consumer Group revenue of $4.4 billion will remain above 4B in 2025.
I might buy that line of thinking for a corporation but the direct file program was about individuals. Elon gleefully tweeted about how that had been deleted. That's a direct give away to TurboTax and H&R Block.
The issue isn't direct file vs TurboTax.
It's whether most individuals should have to file at all.
A few tweaks around employment income and capital gains, and you can do away with filing altogether for most people.
You’re just being obtuse. We can stop now.
The history of lobbying on behalf of the tax prep industry is easy enough to find.
Is drawing a line through Trump's well-professed love of sycophants and people who make him money and that lobbying and motivation, to their current actions, so far fetched to you?
I think taking a wait-and-see approach to things like "Trump wants to get rid of income tax entirely" would be wise until we see where the implementation ends up. In the meantime lets talk about what has actually been done to date.
However it would be pretty insane to argue that a citizen of a country should need to pay money for someone to fill out a basic tax return to pay taxes…
The rest of us hate it.
Complex political issues sometimes just come down to "I want my side to look good and I want the other side to look bad". In a system that treats Silicon Valley billionaires very differently to someone selling lumber in rural Ohio, sometimes that naked tribalism is the only thing that truly unites people in political parties.
Some people hate the IRS self-filing system because it works, and because the "other side" is taking credit for it.
On the other hand, creating an office whose sole objective is to destroy other functioning parts of the government and make it less useful to people? Totally moral.
Don't ask me, I'm not a conservative.
American Conservatives don't believe the government is evil, they believe that not having control over the government is evil. The slash and burning of agencies and departments isn't just due to a deep seated hatred, it's a need for control. And in order to have control you need consolidation.
American Conservatives have no problems with state governments vastly overreaching their authority or punishing cities. They have no issue with potentially taxing workers more to issue tax breaks for corporations. And they have no issue using the government to punish, stalk or harass dissidents.
Governments don't have a particularly good track record, so why give them the benefit of the doubt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
According to Rummel, democide surpassed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.
A government that is as weak as possible at least possesses less organizational capacity for murdering you when things inevitably go off the rails.
The state does not have an actual monopoly on violence, and never has. It merely provides a threat of organized, systematic retribution to try to prevent private-party violence. But that illegal violence still happens. Just at a lower rate than it would otherwise.
Remember that the alternative is not paradise, it is not a system that is "on the rails", it's everybody trying to murder you to get ahead. And in that world having a gun doesn't protect you - guns favor the one who shoots first. Does a tiny village from the past where everybody knows everybody and depends on everybody have that problem to a high degree, or need a large government? No. But that's not the world we live in.
Why is your starting point not the default for most reasonable people - that the government is literally people from that society trying to manage their own affairs and to help each other when possible?
Doesn't seem particularly hard to justify that assumption right about now.
Because the government (at both state and federal levels) has been not this for several decades now. Legislative capture is wild stuff.
> Why is your default assumption that government will "go off the rails"?
It kind of is right now...
... but then again, I'm not a conservative ...
This take should lead to less government POWER and involvement in individual lives though and doesn't match with policy that empowers an astronomically sized "defense" budget, lawmakers deciding how every woman everywhere should deal with pregnancy and health issues that affect pregnancy, or giving unbridled, unreviewed access to every citizens personal and financial data to unelected, unaccountable oligarchs.
I actually agree with your take - I have a lot of conservative views like you described about how government is inherently hard and flawed and risky so we should use it sparingly.
We've seen so much flying in the face of this recently that I make a point of not calling republicans conservative anymore, not to be pithy but just to try to bring some grounding to these culture war arguments.
1. To people saying that the government should have a direct way to file taxes. This is an outdated way of thinking. Most ordinary people shouldn't have to file taxes at all. Withholding is sufficient for income taxes and taxes on liquid investments.
2. 18F was an openly partisan organisation. They were likely disbanded not to kill the products they produced, but rather for their inability to remain politically neutral.
It’s normal in many countries to not have to file until your tax situation becomes more complicated.
For most people, your employer handles your income tax on your behalf, your stock broker handles your capital gains tax etc.
It’s an XY problem, and direct file is like the faster horse.
The UK’s Government Digital Service is similar. They’ve got some good examples of doing unglamorous but impactful work -e.g. replacing dozens of different payment processing systems with one quality one, the same thing for sending physical letters, etc.
I also don’t buy Elon’s messaging that a database upgrade will save social security, or whatever.
One of the best examples of this is passport renewal. In the US until very recently you were unable to do this online, either having to print and mail in a form or go in person to an office.
Another example is the work of 18F to allow Americans easy direct filing of their taxes without the need (or cost) of a third party.
It is and was a pretty significant one, now less important compared to a literal seig-heiling nazi running the government.
Last time literal seig-heiling nazis ran a government, it wasn't great.
This is not what Elon is saying or doing or planning to do.
I use many SOPs daily. The principle is that if you can forget everything about it but the name, obtain the documentation, and relearn it, you should do about the same thing as without.
Though you can find SOPs similar to modern from 1950s USSR docs, the U.S. Navy ones like folding SOP or military shower SOP are especially pragmatic.
From the docker file:
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.shEdit: Whoops sorry, morning fog
Is that possible? Every commit id includes the hash of the parent commit forming a chain.
Understandably everyone is upset about what "DOGE" is doing. But on top of those harms, the killing of USDS (or at least ending its core mission) is also a real harm.
Although overshadowed by Kubernetes elsewhere in the industry, I suspect that Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)--which the US General Services Administration's (GSA) internal digital transformation consultancy, 18F, adopted[0] in 2015 significantly influenced the software delivery philosophy of the federal government by making trivial heretofore disastrously cumbersome provisioning, staging, and deployment processes. The step away from hand-provisioned virtual machines to elastic, accommodating environments may have made agile development possible in federal offices, bringing our government into the 21st century, only fifteen years late.
I distinctly remember the switch from "here's your VM" to "here's my code," and--as an application developer--I never want to go back.
0. See: https://cloud.gov
"Internal team, what's your current greatest pain point?" -> Make that easier / faster / better
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.
It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible.
I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
I can't remember at time in at least the last 15 years when the site has not worked flawlessly serving data about new and historical seismicity from all over the globe in a way that allowed the user to customize the view to fit their own needs.
I agree with a couple of posters that think this may be an effort to rename the GoM to the GoA since all the place names are missing from the Ocean map and the places names that are present on the USGS topo map are full of stupid errors that suggest that they modified naming of water features and it broke something for their map layer.
As an oil and gas industry person I have to chuckle to think about all the things that have to happen for that industry to ever come into compliance with this bullshit renaming. There are thousands of wells in databases globally named with a Gulf of Mexico nomenclature. That's just the wells. Each of them likely has multiple dozen products with a GoM tag to identify the well it belongs to. There are probably millions of line miles of seismic data from dozens of large and small seismic data acquisition projects, all of which use GoM nomenclature since the standard nomenclature in the industry relates things to a Client, Line, Area, Survey or similar parameters so that if it happened in the Gulf it will have GoM in the name somewhere and in the metadata associated with the project since that is how you geolocate things in the industry. You reference it to an actual physical location known to less than a cm in many cases.
Sounds like a lot of busy work for anyone in the industry and possibly an opportunity for a consultant to step in and handle all the renaming that will need to happen if there is any effort to comply. They'll need to know multiple databases upside down and sideways since each operator manages things their own way. And they'll need to be comfortable sitting idle while the IT guys sort out access permissions for every legacy file and folder once they discover where the data management division has them stored. You'll also be the fall guy if some of the data gets corrupted but, shit happens. Sounds like a sweet gig.
Give us the inside view from your office chair.
I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename, and was interested in understanding whether you had inside info about whether it was the people in DOGE. You have a lot of insightful info in your response, but none that looks like a smoking gun to me like "I know someone at USGS who saw it being done", so to me it looks like an accusation that might not stick. That's all. But we're on the same side here.
Thanks for your clarifying reply as it helps to understand where you're coming from.
>I just think that there are lots of incompetent people in government to begin with who could have messed this up in an attempt to rename
As I mentioned earlier up in the thread when you raised concerns about things breaking all the time due to incompetence, this site has a long history of delivering timely information to global users without breaking. When massive changes like the ones that we observe happen which affect how information is delivered those things are routinely announced in advance and users are provided an opportunity to use the "upgraded" version of the service and submit observations about usability, etc so that there is ample time to take user input before it goes live, replacing the old method of data delivery and/or display.
These changes happened between breakfast that morning and early afternoon with no announcements to users that anything on the site would be changed. All these display options disappeared and in their place we initially had a single layer with no place name information at all. A user would need to know some geography in order to be able to figure where the new quakes were occurring.
Sadly enough, that means that some users would see a nice map overlay with dots on it but would not know where those events occurred due to deficiencies in their education.
Since that first set of deletions, another layer was added, the USGS Topo layer and that layer has since been updated to rename a large body of water to Gulf of America and that is the label that appears when the site loads. There are place names, roads, terrain, rivers, etc in that layer so it is easier for even the non-geography nerds to determine where an event occurs relative to their own location.
Other changes have happened and from the changes it is reasonable to conclude that the persons making the changes did not have experience using the GIS software that enables all these useful displays. With that in mind it becomes increasingly unlikely that regular USGS employees made these changes since there obviously are people there at the agency who have all the skills needed to quickly change things without breaking them and the normal process of notifying users of upcoming site changes was not followed.
Overall I think it is unfortunate that you have so little trust in federal government employees. I have a dog in the hunt so I have a window into how things work at the federal level. My spouse has had a decades long career in a federal agency and I can tell you that the individual people in the agency are not usually the problem.
Every time there is a new administration that new administration has the opportunity to nominate new leadership for all the departments. You already know this and have seen it in action. The positions are seen as an opportunity to promote the agenda of the new administration and to reward those who helped them be elected. Too often we see people installed as agency heads who have no background domain experience or worse, they have experience in sectors that did not benefit from following agency guidelines about handling federal monies. They are there to shake things up and they bring a list of things that must be changed to fit the new agenda.
The agency employees have to adjust everything that they do to fit the new agenda and this causes inefficiencies in the system as all existing employees have to be trained on how the new director wants the agency to work and on the new director's guidelines and agenda. I can say that it is increasingly common for an agency to need to educate new directors about what they are constitutionally allowed to do so that some of the new agenda does not force nor does it allow anyone downstream to break any existing laws.
Governments are large. Any time something gets large there is the possibility that inefficiencies develop.
The decision to describe government employees as incompetent is inaccurate in general though I'm sure there are exceptions. You think there are "lots" of incompetent people in government and at any description of "lots" between a couple and thousands you are likely correct.
Don't paint them all with the same brush. Maintaining a government position involves annual training and recertifications, deciphering the meaning behind small changes in the text of rules and guidelines that they must follow, and understanding how to manage groups of people efficiently so that everyone stays engaged in their assigned tasks and meets targets assigned by agency "leadership".
My own definition of "lots" based on years of observations and conversations with someone inside a large federal agency is that the least competent are frequently found at the top of the agency and they bring their own group of managers into the agency in order to pivot to their new agenda. Those lower on the food chain must attempt to adjust or seek a transfer to an agency with less induced dysfunction or to a private entity.
I don't personally think that rate of competence in federal workforce is worse than any other big organization, especially outside of politically appointed leadership. Massive leadership changes can still create operational disruption by offering the opportunity for career brownnosers to demonstrate their fealty by empowering them to force their zeal onto others. I wonder if something like that happened here, where some MAGAt within USGS staff decided to skip a bunch of review process either to make themselves look good or out of fear that they'd look like they're resisting orders.
Isn't renaming a place rather common? Even nations were recently renamed (Swaziland, Macedonia).
Therefore the software (database included) managing the data (used by the USGS earthquake's) probably offers a way to rename a place.
Is there any documentation exposing how to perform such a renaming? Is it up to date and accessible (or did someone modify/hide it in order to annoy DOGE)? Was it not strictly followed by the person(s) who tried to rename this Gulf? Are all technical thingies associated to such a renaming free of major bugs?
If all answers to those questions are "yes" then the person(s) who tried to rename is the sole culprit.
If there is a single "no" then at least another person should be put into scrutiny.
Trying to sea-lion your way through this convo after the person replying to you gave a detailed breakdown of the situation is gross. Don't be a sycophant.
There is no problem from their point of view, they are succeeding from their perspective, and musk's, and trump's and every other anti-america neo nazi shitlicker who got them there.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/thousands-fired-trump-musk-...
The way the government has been run the past decades doesn't work, demonstrably. Every important metric has worsened.