Tag: DOGE

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ideological culture public opinion too much government

Looking for Work

public sector, civil service, private sector, jobs, employment, DOGE

“Social sector” workers — described by Forbes as “nonprofit organizations and the social sector at-large” — have been losing jobs because of budget cuts and corruption cuts.

Many newly unemployed are unhappy about having to job-hunt. Some complain about having to take jobs from profit-making businesses. Others lament sparse communication from prospective employers.

“When asked about barriers to finding employment, 85% of respondents cited lack of employer response as their primary challenge,” Aparna Rae’s not-very-shocking-at-all Forbes article elaborates. “The irony is stark: a sector built on human dignity subjects job seekers to dehumanizing ‘digital hiring mazes’ where qualified candidates are ghosted after final-round interviews. The disconnect between mission and practice erodes the sector’s moral authority.”

Wow. Dehumanizing to have to . . . look for work (or customers)? Worse because your last job was all about dignity — unlike all those grubby profit-sector jobs or, for that matter, jobs with nonprofits that rely only on voluntary private donations?

“I want to be seen and recognized as a human,” explains one representative job seeker. “The lack of communication and impersonal nature of the hiring process is demoralizing and makes job seekers feel devalued.”

Job hunting can be tough. It’d be nicer if qualified candidates who have been considered but lose out to other qualified candidates were always notified. Sure. But how does failure to do so represent a “disconnect” between mission and practice, and how does it “erode the [nonprofits’] moral authority”?

Job seekers might feel less demoralized if they didn’t take the impersonal aspects of the search so personally.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt national politics & policies

Elon’s Out

Elon Musk, DOGE, Trump, deficit, debt

“Elon Musk says he is ‘disappointed’ by the price tag of the domestic policy bill passed by Republicans in the House last week and heavily backed by President Trump,” explains CBS News. 

The “price tag” is indeed a whopper, if by price we mean what Donald Trump’s ballyhooed “Big, Beautiful Bill” (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act orBBB) added to the debt: an expected $3.3 trillion over ten years.

“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Mr. Musk claims, laughing, in an upcoming CBS News Sunday Morning interview — a portion leaked as a teaser by CBS on Tuesday. “But I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”

An opinion shared by many — just not those “in government.”

Which is apt, since Musk is out. He expressed his “personal opinion” as he was exiting the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The exit isn’t the big story. We knew from the beginning that Musk’s time at DOGE was not going to last forever. 

Which highlights the up-in-the-air aspect of DOGE’s mission and future.

Note that Musk is capable of artful politics. His official statement appeared on X: “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President [Donald Trump] for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.” 

This rosy view of his exit may mask much muck. “Musk made himself a total pariah,” first-ousted Trump strategist Steve Bannon told The Free Press. “He had access, admiration, unlimited resources — and by his own actions toward people, blew it all.”

How did he blow it? By actually doing something?

Musk concluded his official exit statement by hazarding that DOGE’s “mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” That’s precisely what’s in doubt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment election law Voting

DOGE vs. Illegal Voting

DOGE, Government Efficiency, dog, bureaucrats, Washington D.C.

Only five people. What’s the big deal?

The Justice Department is prosecuting five recently stumbled-upon cases of illegal voting.

The Washington Times reports that the fraudsters include a Ukrainian mother and daughter, a Jamaican woman, and a Colombian man “who had been deported three times [and who] stole and lived under the identity” of an American citizen.

“I don’t think five cases is evidence of a systems-wide problem,” says Omar Nourelden of Common Cause. Surely too few to justify investigations or voting requirements that might curb voter fraud if only there were any.

One wonders how journalists like John Fund found material for investigative works like Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, published in 2004, or Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote, published in 2021.

The story quoting Nourelden mentions the Department of Government Efficiency’s referral of 57 cases of illegal aliens voting in the 2024 election. So that’s more than five recent examples. And DOGE isn’t done yet.

Willful negligence in conduct of elections is part of the problem. Specific fraud by specific persons is part of the problem.

Nourelden and others object to voter ID. They also criticize as invasive the new efforts by DOGE to find evidence of fraud, that rarity of our political life. (Of course, non-DOGE government personnel already have access to the voting and registration records.)

If there’s no big problem, DOGE won’t find a big problem. Let it hunt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies tax policy

DOGE Does the IRS

DOGE, dog, meme, watch dog, who watches the watchers?

A note of caution going into today’s subject: let us try to bite our tongues; no expressions of schadenfreude; no sarcastic “Boo-hoos” or the like.

The IRS has been grossly inefficient for a very long time, as now uncovered in a Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] investigation.

Courtesy of Laura Ingraham, we learn that the Internal Revenue Service is “35 years behind” in its scheduled upgrades, and “already $15 billion over budget.”

“You’ve heard the sob stories,” says Ms. Ingraham. “And they are quite entertaining at times. But the [presumably non-Fox legacy news] media — they continue to spread this story: ‘DOGE is some dark and mysterious organization; you know, embedding itself into departments like some jack-booted thugs, just intimidating staff, threatening those that don’t comply.’ OK. We’re asking, what is the truth?” 

So she interviewed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Treasury’s DOGE adviser, Sam Corcos.

“We,” Corcos said, including himself in the IRS’s very “they” themness, “process about the same amount of data as a midsize bank. A midsize bank has 100 to 200 people in IT and a $20 million budget. The IRS? It has 8,000 IT employees and a $3.5 billion operations and maintenance budget. I don’t really know why yet.” But he does notice that 80 percent of that budget goes to “contractors and software licenses.”

“DOGE advisers have found billions in waste just by asking questions,” explains Ingraham’s report. Secretary Bessant blames the power of special “entrenched interests” that “keep constricting themselves around the power, the money, and the systems. Nobody cares.”

“Inertia” is also a word often heard on this subject.

Democrats have been complaining about the president’s cutting of the IRS budget, and number of employees. But if most of the force is just spinning gears, the cuts could hardly be said to hurt the “service.”

And you’d think that the most pro-government party in our political system would want this key function of government — everything rests on taxes, they admit — to be efficient, do the assigned jobs well.

But for some reason that does not seem to be the case.

Shocking, I know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability too much government

Federal Self-Service

DOGE, corruption, spending, waste, fraud

Even government agencies that perform an identifiable function should be eliminated if they are not performing a proper function of government.

But what about an agency that exists primarily “to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees”?

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is one of the agencies getting the ax under the Trump administration, at least until some judge tries to resurrect it.

Nominally, FMCS existed to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. But aside from doling out grants to unions and applicants with a tenuous connection to unions, its overriding purpose was to enable employees to splurge on themselves at the expense of taxpayers.

That’s what Luke Rosiak discovered during a year-long investigation.

One FMCS official pretended to take a years-long “business trip” so that taxpayers would foot the bill for his living expenses.

Employees unblocked government credit cards to circumvent protections against abuse, then used them to fund personal expenses. One leased a BMW with the card.

Junkets to resort locations supposedly to drum up interest in the pointless agency were really just a way of enjoying government-funded vacations.

One employee told Rosiak: “Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

Yes, we can.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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budgets & spending cuts too much government

How Audits Work in Real Life

DOGE, panic, civil service, public servants, control

Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are panicking. 

O, the prospect of any significant shrinking of the federal behemoth!

Any significant rooting out of the corruption that benefits them. . . .

Many combat this horror by flinging every fallacy in the book. Like the notion that Elon Musk and his team are unqualified. They ask, is Musk a certified public accountant? 

He’s only a mega-successful serial entrepreneur, not an accountant.

Monster Hunter Nation’s Correia45 answers a slew of the fallacies, not in the most genteel manner. Cover your ears if you click in.

First, there’s nothing odd about an internal audit, which “is what Donald Trump (the man in charge) is doing now, by having his people (DOGE) audit the executive branch he runs. CEOs and owners do this all the time.”

Nor need you be a CPA to contribute. That’s essential for only certain types of accounting, which “isn’t even close to what DOGE is doing.”

Correia45, an accountant, has been on teams that included programmers, lawyers, machinists. Machinists because, when auditing a factory, “I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were b******t or not.”

Another thing: I can certainly think of reasons to have smart energetic young people on an auditing team. 

But, contra some assumptions (based on the fact that 20-somethings are “who got doxxed first”), young people are not the whole team. Newsweek’s list of known DOGE staff includes persons ranging in age from 19 to 67.

And so DOGE goes. Godspeed. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fire or Promote the Best?

DOGE, government waste, corruption, spending, debt

Things looked bad recently for Leland Dudek, an employee of the Social Security Administration.

Dudek almost got fired for helping the DOGE team understand how SSA’s systems work so that DOGE could zero in on wasteful or fraudulent payments.

On social media, Dudek wrote: “At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation. They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE . . .

“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. . . . I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. . . . I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

An investigation? Administrative leave? For helping, as an executive-branch employee, the head of the executive branch to find and extirpate waste and fraud? SSA managers may have been confused about whether Donald Trump really is the president.

The suspense didn’t last long.

Dudek was not fired. Instead, the SSA commissioner was fired and Dudek became acting commissioner. 

“There are many good civil servants,” says Senator Mike Lee, “who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement [and] who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”

Could we have at long last found the cure for dimwitted obstructionism? A certain reality TV star had words for it: “You’re fired!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Elon & Vivek to Cut Government?

Will it happen this time?

Even the most profligate taxers and spenders sometimes talk about making our federal government “more efficient” or about “cutting waste.” Commissions are set up, reports issued, and then — we still see the same runaway trajectory.

This time, former President and President-Elect Donald Trump has announced that two heavy hitters, entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will be heading up a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to do the job. They’re already planning and hiring.

Trump says that DOGE is determined to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”

The project of cutting wasteful expenditures is the same going-nowhere notion that we have seen before. If we get actual demolition of merely destructive agencies — which would require congressional cooperation, I believe — this would be great.

I can provide a list. But that would make me a part-timer in this endeavor, and “We don’t need more part-time idea generators,” DOGE says.

“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”

Let us see what happens. Trump would have to push this forcefully and continually, getting his supporters to forcefully and continually pressure Congress, to get enough done fast enough to actually reduce Leviathan. And he’ll have a lot of other stuff to cope with.

But . . . boy, do we need it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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