Just four months into the administration, Musk abruptly announced his exit. Six months later, it was reported that Doge was no more. Musk has even said he wouldn’t do it again.
“That was all complete bullshit from the beginning,” Elaine Kamarck, a former White House official and expert on government reform, told the Guardian. “The fact that they even said it and then had to go roll it way, way, way back into the low hundreds of billions, tells you they didn’t know what they were doing.”
Kamarck created and managed the National Performance Review, which aimed to improve efficiency and reduce costs, during the Clinton administration.
“What they did was they sowed chaos to no avail,” said Kamarck. “Doge was done in an incredibly careless way, without regard for what the agencies did and whether and moreover, whether or not Americans liked what they did.
“You can cut the government. I did it in the Clinton administration,” she added. “We cut the government by 420,000 people, but we did it over a period of seven years, and we did it in the context of mission and what we no longer needed to do, etc.
“In other words, we had a plan that works with the mission of the agency. This business of coming in and moving fast and breaking things which they like to do in Silicon Valley just doesn’t work in the government.”
Many Doge staffers are now reportedly embedded inside federal agencies across government. Many of the issues it posed around transparency, and the impact of sweeping decisions, are still being fought over in court.
“Doge has been operating with minimal transparency but maximal authority,” said Donald K Sherman, executive director and chief counsel of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Doge in February, alleging that it had failed to comply with recordkeeping and transparency laws.
“There’s pretty significant misalignment in terms of how the administration claims Doge has been beneficial to the American public, and what information it wants the American public to have access to about Doge’s operations,” said Sherman. “We’ve spent months litigating because this administration does not want the public to know what Doge is doing, how Doge is operating.”
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