“A month after Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk began directing all federal employees to submit a weekly list of five things they accomplished during the previous week, technical issues have hit the process.
A number of employees across multiple agencies have received bounce-back emails indicating that the mailbox they were directed to email at the Office of Personnel Management is full, thus preventing them from sending their reports, according to multiple emails reviewed by ABC News.
After submitting their weekly “5 Things” email on Monday, some federal employees received an automated response from an OPM email address stating, “The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now. Please try resending your message later or contact the recipient directly,” according to the emails.”
DOGE is not significantly cutting the deficit. To do that, you need to go through Congress. They are not creating government efficiency, they are just firing whoever they can, whether they are useful workers or not.
In Elon’s businesses, he gets quick feedback. So he can cut cut cut, and then see what’s broken and add back in. If a car doesn’t work or sell, something is broken, so let’s fix it. The variety of functions of the government don’t work that way. The government isn’t an engineering business building an actual car or rocket.
Some excuses for destroying government and using it to be self-serving are that the Democrats were doing it. But this isn’t really true. The largest change passed by Democrats in the last few decades is the Affordable Care Act…it was a transfer of money from blue states to red states.
Elon either holds several false beliefs, or he regularly lies and misleads about political issues.
“But less than 1 percent of Social Security’s payments in recent years were determined to be improper – often the result of an accidental oversight or change in benefit status, according to a report last year by the agency’s inspector general. That works out to about $9 billion a year, and more than two-thirds of the mistaken payments were eventually clawed back. Another agency audit, which looked only at payments to retired workers, survivors and people with disabilities, found fraud was listed as the cause behind just 3 percent of improper benefit payments.”
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“The degree of scrutiny by Social Security’s IG can be intense. One report issued by the office earlier this month found that a partner agency in Mississippi had incorrectly made a $14 payment because of a data-entry error.
Social Security’s inspector general was fired in the first days of the Trump administration, along with top internal investigators at 16 other government agencies. Although the office has continued to operate, it is expected to lose up to 20 percent of its staff because of budget cuts, Rose said.”
“The lawsuit filed by USAID employees and contractors argued that Musk and DOGE are wielding power the Constitution reserves only for those who win elections or are confirmed by the Senate.”
“The United States Postal Service said it has signed a deal with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut costs at the agency.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told congressional leaders in a letter that he had signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s DOGE to cut jobs and spending at the agency that has long lost money.”
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“The postmaster general said his agency plans to reduce its workforce by 10,000 workers within the next month through a voluntary early retirement program.”
“A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is wielding so much power that its records will likely have to be opened to the public under federal law.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said the vast and “unprecedented” authority of DOGE, formally known as the U.S. Digital Service, combined with its “unusual secrecy” warrant the urgent release of its internal documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The authority exercised by USDS across the federal government and the dramatic cuts it has apparently made with no congressional input appear to be unprecedented,” Cooper wrote in a 37-page opinion.”
MAGA Republicans ranted and raved about a deep state they mostly imagined, and then created a real one…
“at the same time that he’s focused on dismantling the deep state, Trump seems to have built his own undemocratic, unaccountable executive apparatus.
How else should we view the incident that The Washington Post reported on last week involving Elon Musk, the unofficial head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio?
As DOGE was slashing its way through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rubio issued a waiver ensuring that “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” should continue, despite the announced shutdown of USAID. “Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House,” the Post reported. “But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [Luke] Farritor and [Gavin] Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.”
As a result, USAID clinics that were supposed to be protected by Rubio’s order were shuttered.
That is an almost perfect illustration of how conservatives used to believe the deep state operated—with unelected, unofficial back-channel operatives overruling the plainly stated instructions of those who are nominally in power.”
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“this should be worrying to anyone who takes seriously the threat of the deep state or values the rule of law.
Whatever your views of Musk and Rubio as individuals, it simply cannot be that the Senate-confirmed secretary of state is having his decisions overruled by a man (or his lieutenants) who still lacks any official place in the White House’s organizational chart and who runs a rebranded version of the U.S. Digital Service, an agency meant to streamline the executive branch’s digital outreach efforts that has no statutory authority to make spending decisions.”
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“while the situation with USAID and Rubio is the most high-profile, it is not the only example of DOGE and Musk operating like the very deep state Republicans used to criticize.”
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“Overruling the decisions made by legally appointed officials. Dodging transparency. Refusing to identify who is running the show. Are Musk and the DOGE just the deep state by a different name?”
DOGE’s wall of receipts has been full of basic mistakes that makes it look like DOGE isn’t familiar with the organizations they are cutting.
DOGE is less a efficient tech support generally improving the efficiency of government, and more a political project broadly cutting things they don’t like.
“In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the Trump administration is arguing that its much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is exempt from public records requests.”
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“”All aspects of the government must be fully transparent and accountable to the people,” Musk posted on X earlier this month. “No exceptions, including, if not especially, the Federal Reserve.”
At a White House press conference earlier this month, Musk said, “We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible, so all of our actions are maximally transparent. I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”
And again, Musk declared last November: “There should be no need for FOIA requests. All government data should be default public for maximum transparency.”
But DOGE has struggled to make its data public while also claiming exemption from FOIA, which is a recipe for maximum opacity, not transparency.
Between the shifting claims of how much taxpayer money DOGE was going to save, the release and quiet deletion of error-filled data, and now attempts to hide DOGE from public record laws—well, it doesn’t inspire confidence.”