Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.

Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.

After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”

Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.

As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.

  • InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
    15·
    3 days ago

    One of many troubling issues with all this and the way it was handled is that these cuts were made too hastily. My former employer is a federal contractor whose income was some mix of federal, state, and private. Had there been sufficient time to reallocate staff and resources towards state and federal private funding, they/we would have had time to change our strategy and pursue those other lines of funding – likely avoiding the massive monthly layoffs that have been going on in 2025. But that takes time, which was not something anybody had with the sudden, drastic, and unprecedented cancellation of federal contracts that did not leave any room for a smooth transition It was just lost jobs and shattered lives with little to no benefit for working class people.

    It may just be my circle, but my friends and colleagues who managed to keep their jobs pretty much all complain about how they’re dealing with burnout now because they have an untenable workload but also the work environment is so stressful because everybody’s still under threat of more layoffs. This is happening both in federal work as well as private industry.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    283·
    4 days ago

    Many Americans may not realize this, but the actions of DOGE were effectively the destruction of their generational inheritance; decades and generations of taxpayer dollars to build an effective machine for doing the work of government.

    That won’t be rebuilt in a month or a year or even a decade. Its multi-generational damage which has been done.

    • JohnnyFlapHoleSeed@lemmy.world
      83·
      4 days ago

      The only way to recoup losses from the damage done will be an effective 99%+ tax on income, from any source, on amounts over 10 million.

      That and treason charges, followed by executions

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        40·
        4 days ago

        I mean I’m all for the guillotines coming out. I think we should have brought them out on January 7th 2021 and start taking serious making things right then.

        But even a modest wealth tax (like every red cent after a billion becomes the states or off with your head).

        Like no amount of money can mend a broken heart? What was destroyed isn’t something you can just throw money at to fix. There was a breach of trust between the smartest people in our society (NASA, NIH, etc…) and society itself, in the sense that the elected government is a reflection of society.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      134·
      4 days ago

      But just think of all the data that Elon Musk got to mine out of the government, to feed to his AI.

      Won’t anyone think of the billionaires?

    • SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish
      121·
      3 days ago

      It is part of why I want the Blue States to break off from the Confederates and build a fresh government. If you are going to replace what was broken, it should be only for people who appreciates what was lost. The MAGA are just going to bring out the chainsaw again…

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        That’s the conclusion I came to after they decided SNAP was expendable too. The federal government is good for literally nothing. We’ve already been conquered by Russia and this is what it looks like.

  • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
    6·
    3 days ago

    I hope they were able to negotiate higher pay to come back too and some kind of signing bonus since their last deal was broken

  • CptOblivius@lemmy.world
    14·
    3 days ago

    DOGE was nothing more than an entity to fleece the American people of resources and information…and likely to scrub some information that might incriminate certain individuals.

  • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
    34·
    4 days ago

    DOGE couldn’t have possibly worked, ever. I think everybody knows a situation where there’s an employee who is contributing far more than their own manager knows. So the point is that even if you asked everybody’s immediate managers to decide who to lay off, you’d have huge mistakes being made.

    A central bureaucracy like DOGE is so much farther removed from that situation that it’s not even funny. There is simply no way that it has the expertise to conduct layoffs, and it was obvious from the beginning. Companies facing layoffs know that they will lose unreplaceable employees, but they have to do so due to immediate financial pressures, nothing like what the government faces.

    So, DOGE was either a stupid idea created by absolute morons, or it was a cover for bad actors who never intended to do what they claimed. Or a little from column a, and a little from column b.

    • FlexibleToast@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      4 days ago

      Also, the methodology was awful. Offer buyouts for people to leave. That means the people who are the best at their job and most confident in finding a new job left.

    • QuantumDuck@lemmy.world
      4·
      3 days ago

      It was never meant to “work”. It was all about causing chaos while they executed one of the largest data breaches in history. Remember the reports of Elon’s crackers locking people out while they downloaded data to external drives from government computers?

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
    321·
    3 days ago

    Efficiency-obsessed weirdos don’t understand redundancies. All they see are inefficiencies, and think people can just make up for them in harder times by just “working harder”, which for these weirdos just become a new baseline for even more cuts.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      8·
      3 days ago

      You give him too much credit for seeing inefficiency. It was simply “gov is too expensive. We need massive layoffs”.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      don’t understand redundancies

      names agency after a program where every user has to download everyone else’s transactions

    • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
      15·
      3 days ago

      For a man who is obsessed with space travel and claims we need to go live on Mars. He doesn’t understand how much redundancy is critical to survival in space.

      Imagine a sci-fi spaceship… you are light-years away from civilization and any repairs. What if something goes wrong on your ship? Well? There had better be at least a half dozen back up systems to guarantee that you will survive instead of being fucked.

      You cannot apply just-in-time supply chain logic to space travel. YOU WILL DIE!

      No wonder SpaceX hasn’t been able to get out of low-earth orbit.

      • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        3 days ago

        His only obsession is social acceptance and adoration, he doesn’t even want to go to Mars for whatever good it will do, he wants to go live somewhere where he’s the defacto “owner” of the whole goddamn planet. So people will be trapped working for him. And so that everyone else thinks he’s soooo cool for doing a space travel.

        He isn’t going to Mars at least. I was worried for a while he might pull it off, but I’d be shocked if it happens before he overdoses or dies of pathological levels of cringe and ignorance.

  • FlexibleToast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    67·
    4 days ago

    I’ve seen it first hand. I work as a consultant in public sector. Every where we go now the teams are crippled because people took the buyouts and left. Network teams that were 7 people reduced to 2 that are barely keeping things together. I’m sure NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, etc… love selling all these consulting hours now.

    • bluemellophone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      3 days ago

      I was at a military industry conference a month or so ago, with several flag level officers giving talks. The total amount of lost years of experience and senior leadership in the military and intelligence agencies is staggering. It is going to take generations to recover.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
      37·
      4 days ago

      I’d bet some of those ex government employees are back doing the same job as IBM contractors for 3x the cost.