I want answers for myself and for how Trump and the Bad News Gang he brought to the White House justify the damage they're doing. I mentioned before an interview with the woman who (in the Obama years) established the United States Digital Service (USDS). Pahlka and her staff were the adults in the room, helping agencies shift to more workable technology. Huge job. Lots of layers of accountability with a legislative component. It seems the Musk approach is to throw out all of the people who know how things work and he's going to do something to the existing technology to replace all of them. It is clear to all that this ass-backwards approach just breaks things.

Nepotism has always been a feature of government, but not on the huge scale it was when the "spoils" system was in place. (Quick example: Hegeseth has put his inept brother in a job at the Pentagon. Two fools after the appointment of one.)

It has been mentioned before that during the Clinton administration they managed to reduce the size of government. DOGE, meet REGO. 32 years before Elon Musk, Al Gore did it

REGO was not a completely original idea either. Ronald Reagan, for instance, had empaneled the Grace Commission, which sought advice on how to cut waste and government inefficiency from more than 160 corporate executives and issued a 47-volume set of recommendations.

The difference with REGO, according to Elaine Kamarck, is that Gore’s team was able to follow up on their recommendations and get multiple pieces of legislation passed into law.

Today, Kamarck is the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. But back in 1993, she was running the REGO effort with Gore at the White House.

“We passed a lot of laws, we cut regulations, and we cut the workforce,” Kamarck told me of the effort, which started as a review process and morphed into a major effort that lasted throughout Clinton’s presidency.

The Grace Commission was a huge embarrassment for Reagan and in his second term he didn't mention it much and the government grew huge.

This is the critical part of the Clinton/Gore effort:

At the same time, by the end of the REGO effort, the federal workforce was reduced by 351,000 positions, federal agencies had been reorganized and reams of red tape had been cut.

The red tape, the Sludge it's now referred to, was caused by regulations that were part of oversight, to be sure everything was done by the book and it involved layers of supervision. By surgically addressing that - legislatively - so the layers could be reduced, they were able to remove all of those redundant positions. (Chances are a lot of those people were able to move into openings in other agencies that weren't redundant. There are always openings begging to be filled for jobs that really do need doing.)

Musk has no interest in a fix that will stay in place, he's all for the drama (and grabbing the data as fast as he can).