Trump and Musk attacked the bureaucracy without understanding what it actually did, doing much damage.
Musk could have focused on helping upgrade the government’s technology, something badly needed, instead, he just destroyed a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand.
While doing DOGE, Musk repeatedly made false statements. It seems like he had to be lying, but, Musk’s close friends claim that he never lies, meaning, Musk just easily deludes himself into believing a lot of false shit. Being a great businessman and technologist doesn’t mean you aren’t incompetent and massively deluded about other topics.
With the chaos DOGE caused, rather than saving money, DOGE cost the American people.
The bureaucracy is mostly filled with loyal law followers. If you want to break the law, it makes sense to destroy the bureaucracy.
Under Trump, datasets disappear. Rather than the government keeping data to help understand society and help inform decision makers and the American people, Trump has pushed the government to keep and create data for the purpose of making Trump look good.
Many public servants are there out of a sense of public spiritedness, and the Trump administration treats them not simply like employees who need to be cut for good reasons…but like the enemy and some of the administration seems to get enjoyment out of cruelty.
One DOGE guy went into DOGE to fix government, and then he took an interview with a journalist and said that government wasn’t as inefficient as he thought, then he was fired.
The US military may be in deep shit if a new drone war starts. Inertia, bureaucracy, and fear of making the wrong choice are limiting the American military’s adaption, and this could lead to many many more dead Americans if the US gets into a modern drone war.
Previously, the IRS delivered a public report telling us how many due taxes went unpaid. Under the Trump administration, the IRS is now no longer delivering this report.
Federal agencies are understaffed thanks to Trump and DOGE.
In 2025, due to DOGE, federal employees were paid $9.5 billion to not work.
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In 2025, due to DOGE, federal employees were paid $9.5 billion to not work.
When the government hires private contractors to deliver welfare, often these companies essentially steal people’s benefits through a variety of mechanisms.
When the government makes applying for welfare hard, they mostly just waste a lot of people’s time and make it so people who qualify for benefits do not get them because the application is too burdensome. Such qualifications don’t boost employment, they just make poor people suffer more.
It’s easier to get subsidies that mostly go to those with higher incomes.
When you make qualifying for benefits difficult, you make it harder to track fraud. The biggest fraudsters are organized actors that know how to get around complex requirements. More fraud is doctors and wealthy people cheating on payments and tax subsidies, than poor people cheating to get food or healthcare.
We can hope that Trump’s corruption and authoritarian tendencies are gone with him, but the damage done to the government’s ability to implement policies that help those in need, protect people from the powerful, and invest in the future…this destruction will be difficult to rebuild.
Trump and Patel have moved the FBI relatively more toward politics and optics and away from the criminal justice mission.
FBI agents were pulled away from their work to focus on immigration, despite that ICE got massive funding and a mass of new ICE agents.
FBI agents determined that people were peacefully protesting and that there was nothing to investigate. The Trump administration ordered them to investigate anyways.
Some FBI agents were pushed out or forced to quit on principle. These were trained agents doing their jobs well, now out of the agency.
The way Trump runs the bureaucracy is similar to how many dictators run their bureaucracies. He hires, promotes, and fires based on loyalty, not competency. Overtime, this makes agencies less effective, less principled, less competent, more corrupt, and more loyal to the dictator. This is how many dictators have ineffective governments, and their people suffer as a result.
It seems that Trump got overconfident from the military’s dazzling success in Venezuela. That, combined with Trump gutting the bureaucracy that actually knew a lot about Iran, led to a war against Iran that’s harder to win than Trump expected.
“USCIS currently has 11.3 million pending applications, “the largest immigration backlog in its history,” reported Newsweek in November. While officials say green card and visa processing are getting faster, “agency data from January through March shows that processing times for several key immigration forms have continued to rise, leaving applicants waiting months or even years longer than expected.” The “closure of consulates abroad” and “planned firing of State Department staff,” the MPI noted in April, were also “expected to lengthen visa wait times.””
Because states run programs like Medicaid, but the federal government pays for over half of it, states have the incentive to come up with new programs and less incentive to properly police Medicaid spending.
“state and federal prosecutors have been trying to bust fraudulent preschools and other Medicaid fraud schemes in Minnesota for more than a decade. And yet, there are always more. Law enforcement is doing its best, but the problem seems to be that the state’s welfare bureaucracy is doing a terrible job of stopping the scammers in the first place.
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This is not just a problem in Minnesota either. Medicaid fraud is remarkably common. The federal departments of Justice and Health and Human Services run a joint program to catch fraudsters, and in 2024 alone it accounted for 1,151 convictions that recovered almost $1.4 billion.
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Anyone who wants to stop Medicaid fraud should focus less on scoring partisan political points or demonizing immigrants and more on the boring work of fixing federal policy.
Telling states to pay for a larger share of their own Medicaid spending seems like an obvious step in the right direction. It would give state officials—from governors like Walz all the way down to the lowest-ranking bureaucrat—a stronger incentive to prevent waste and fraud in the first place. It would reduce the burden placed on out-of-state taxpayers when states with lax enforcement allow fraud like this to occur.”