DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

throw0101d

Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou... May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...

shevy-java

This government is criminal. Why? In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.

asveikau

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

stephc_int13

I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing. I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could. That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation. I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.

q8zd3

I guess you could say.... They doged the bullet.

michelb

In part because of the destruction DOGE has caused any future democratic ruler will have a very tough time. It’s already neigh impossible to undo most of the damage the Trump party has caused, but it’s absolutely impossible to fix what DOGE destroyed, particularly without the evidence. A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.

bs7280

One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes. I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.

ck2

Needless to mention it was 100% theater and absolute destruction of government was simply the point US Treasury is borrowing $155 billion every month is now paying $24 billion a week in interest * https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-bill... And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization * https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

freejazz

Doge was a scam, of course.

t1234s

Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?

firefoxd

In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere. So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.

madhacker

After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.

lenerdenator

Given that DOGE was itself illegal, my guess is that the records were illegally disposed of. This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.

t0mpr1c3

Oh no. Now we will never identify those millions of dead people that DOGE claimed were receiving social security. At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.

mannanj

Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs? It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.

sp1nningaway

Is DOGE gone though? https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154 I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term. It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.

SubiculumCode

DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff. Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis. To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH. DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).

wnevets

I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID! Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it! [1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

ajmurmann

One of the big issues - assuming good intent - was the dismissing of existing expertise on where the issues really are and jumping to the assumption that everyone in the system is corrupt and ripping off the tax payer. A simplistic model that can feel satisfying to promote on social media but is obviously naive. Jennifer Pahlka has worked on making our government more efficient and gives a much more educated view on what the real issues are. It's always baffling to me how Musk has all the resources one could imaging but loves to talk out of his ass instead of getting himself the maximum-validated information available to argue anyone. https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-mor...

gsky

This American administration is full of criminals