jacob_harris

Thank you for the feedback.

I called certain members of the DOGE staff wreckers, because that is precisely what they've been deployed to do. For instance, if you read about DOGE's activities at USAID or CFPB or the National Endowment for the Humanities or USIP, you see a pattern of some DOGE staff coming in under the pretense of "IT modernization" and then immediately seizing control of systems to suspend all employee access and cancel grants. I think "wrecker" does cover that pretty well, but I will grant it's a loaded term. I am currently working on a major revision to better tie actions/positions/etc. to certain major DOGE projects to make it more obvious.

As for the other point, DOGE has purposefully done a lot to avoid oversight and scrutiny. If you want privacy, you should not work for the federal government as your position and work will be public. DOGE has used this evasion and ambiguity to lie about its actions publicly and try to wriggle out of accountability in the courts and Congress (the whole question of "who is running DOGE?" continues to be unclear). Giving names and locations both provides clarity into what DOGE is doing, reveals patterns (as in the way in which specific DOGE staff at GSA were sent to small independent agencies) and provides info for FOIA or other public-serving transparency measures.

I have purposefully avoided ever giving addresses or photos, and I scrupulously only use public sources for my information to avoid the risk of it seeming like a harassment list, but I'm not going to hide information about activities that should be public and transparent and accountable.

Thank you for the feedback!

I decided to not tackle the lies about "savings" because the math was so bad and it was quite frankly being covered much better by other organizations and sites. I also don't want to perpetuate the idea that this was about efficiency, since that and "IT Modernization" were more like a cover for DOGE's other activities.

I would like to add more graphics and charts, but I have been struggling a lot with how murky and noisy the data is. Charts communicate a certainty that I don't feel entirely comfortable presenting. One possibility might be to use them for timelines (like I do for the CIOs on the Enablers page), but if you have other suggestions, I'm always open to hear them! Thanks!

It sounds like you are proposing some of the oversight already done by the Government Accountability Office.

I hear where you are coming from, but the whole point of the Constitution is that a king does not get to determine how the budget is allocated. Congress has the sole power of the purse, and the responsibility and blame for how money is appropriated belongs there. Congress could potentially enact measures lke this to sunset expenditures unless they are re-authorized, but I think that would likely turn out to be a chaotic disaster in its own right, given that Congress currently is struggling to pass budgets.

In any event, I think hungry children is a problem, and I don't need the media to tell me that, so that's my perspective.

I've heard of one professor summarizing it as "would you want to take an airplane flight that has only exactly the amount of fuel needed to get to your destination? What about if the fuselage didn't have any extra rivets? Really, you need more than one engine?"

Maximizing efficiency is a canard when government is supposed to be there as a backstop for disasters and economic downturns. Unlike businesses, governments can't choose who they serve as customers, and often have to be there for the neediest and most vulnerable. The Founders understood this (there are several states that call themselves Commonwealths for instance), but a strident faction has been trying to replace "we're all in this together" with "you're on your own, sucker"

There definitely has been a pattern of shoddy behavior, but it's been difficult to find a smoking gun of DOGE exfiltrating the data at many agencies. I am looking to see if there are more revelations to come out of DOGE's activities at SSA for instance.

That said, lack of evidence isn't necessarily exonerating. DOGE's MO has often been to take over the CIO and/or front office of the agency to ensure there is nothing to monitor them. It's basically like if the CEO of the bank sends all the security guards home and lets robbers in through the side door. You can't prove they took anything necessarily (my bank metaphor falls flat here, because data can be copied but if money were stolen, you could count it), but also it IS often shady as hell too.

Far from it. There has already been ample reporting on how inflated and distorted DOGE's savings are (for instance, they made rudimentary errors in understanding how blanket purchase agreements work and also counted the whole amounts of contracts as savings when they canceled ones that were already mostly disbursed). You can probably search for coverage by ProPublica or David Farenthold if you want to see what I mean, but I would guess you don't want to.

Instead, I have been focusing my efforts on tracking DOGE's staffing in agencies and their activities and system access there. DOGE has not been transparent at all. Rather, they have abused the Vacancies Act and government detailing to hide their activities and skirt many of the laws around government ethics, privacy and data security in the process. And they have been doing a lot of damage in the process, claiming to be doing "IT Modernization" but doing many things outside of the scope of the Executive Order that established them and also the separation of powers that gives Congress the power over appropriations.

This has been unfortunately necessary since DOGE has worked to really avoid any transparency or accountability. If FOIA or legal filings have more information, I do add them, but I always provide the source citation for you to know.

It is biased. I do not think we can "both sides" the impact of DOGE here and I think the site makes its case for why it should be seen as a destructive force.

It's very common for politicians to point to federal staffing levels as some sort of measure of waste and bloat, but those numbers have been increasingly deceptive since the era of Reagan. Essentially, government has grown in its budget and scope but staffing numbers have not matched that increase because many agencies have instead staffed projects and roles with contractors instead.

This is worst in all accounts: there is no accurate count of how many contractors work for the federal govt (vs. federal employees), they generally are more expensive to hire than staffers and they get trained up on the public's dime and then walk out the door to other projects meaning the agency doesn't benefit from their upskilling like they would if they were internal employees.

With 18F, USDS and digital services within agencies, the government had been trying to reverse its dependency on external contractors to ship code. DOGE eliminated many of those people – you could argue one of its goals was to make government more dependent on vendors and contractors. There is now a new Tech Force initiative, but it seems like it's mainly a way for companies like Palantir to embed junior staff within agencies to find new places to sell software.