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wrecking the revenue collection isn't deficit neutral, it's just a bad idea
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/19/irs_job_cuts/DOGE bites taxman: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday.
Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades.
This happened as the Trump administration reshaped the federal bureaucracy last year with Elon Musk's DOGE wielding the chainsaw.
The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of the year, the team encompassed around 8,500 employees.
As reported by Federal News Network (FNN), Pandya said: "Last year, we lost approximately 40 percent of the IT staff and nearly 80 percent of the execs."
...
wrecking the revenue collection isn't deficit neutral, it's just a bad idea
crazy wildness
the video of the DOGE takeover of USIP got FOIA's by Marisa Kabas and was released by a judge
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/body-...id-mpd-lawsuitThe people representing the Trump administration knew they were entering a privately-owned building, and the DC MPD allowed them to enter despite that fact.
here's the ChatGPT spreadsheet DOGE used to nuke NEH grants for being too DEI
https://www.historians.org/wp-conten.../03/248-11.pdf
"NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction furtherance of the President's agenda"
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/...t-is-this-dei/Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”
cosmic cowboy abandoned his excellent savings tracker the day after posting about it, the rest of the small government crowd did the same 2 months later...
Surely after a year yall have huge savings to tout?? how's the deficit going ? Military spending up or down? How much money did you save removing DEI and changing from "defense" to "war"? ing re s
tax economist bets against DOGE, wins $128,000 from suckers who believed in it
https://www.offmessage.net/p/elites-maga-trump-iranThe right-leaning tax economist Alan Cole, whom you’ll frequently see quoted in news articles about the federal budget, recently won over $128,000 gambling. Not against poker players, or the house in Vegas, or in any game of chance. Instead, Cole put his entire liquid savings on the line—almost $350,000—betting that Elon Musk was full of , and that Musk’s legions of fans were suckers.
This is surely not how Cole would put it, at least publicly, but it’s the truth. Last year, Musk promised to chainsaw trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal budget, easy peasy, as the temporary head of a temporary White House initiative called DOGE. Sums that large would accomplish something pretty much unthinkable: reducing government outlays in nominal terms, year over year, such that the Treasury would spend less money in calendar year 2025 than it did in calendar year 2024.
Because he is not a complete moron, Cole understood this was not going to happen. That even if Musk were committed in an above-board way to reducing federal spending—and even if he were to findmore in savings than experts believe we lose to waste, fraud, and abuse each year—it couldn’t counteract the tidal forces of an aging population, or the federal government’s fairly steady, year-by-year obligations to the defense and welfare of the country.
So he took the other side of the bet: that outlays would go up. That DOGE would fail on the terms Musk set. And he won.
I don’t gamble in prediction markets, so it would have never occurred to me to search for or try to create this market, and place the same bet. But Cole’s success is enough to make any half-way competent wonk want to develop that reflex: Look for opportunities to fleece suckers. Identify false promises from Donald Trump and his loyalists, then bet against their marks.
What’s impressive about Cole’s haul is the creativity of the method. It takes nothing away from his skills as a tax economist to note that his underlying insight was banal—something any competent, mid-career budget reporter could have told you, with complete certainty.
The revealing thing isn’t that Cole got this right, but how many suckers made the opposite bet without bothering to learn anything about the ways and means of the U.S. government.
do you think people are mad about the DOGE-bro who couldn't define DEI taking SSA personal information on 500 million living and dead Americans on a thumb drive to his new private sector job?
this is after he nuked a bunch of already approved NEH grants for being "too DEI." Justin Fox used ChatGPT as a pony.
https://www.404media.co/doge-deposit...pread-mockery/
objection your honor, my client is being brutally owned online
Oh no, these videos might ruin the reputation of the guys who stole our social security numbers
https://www.propublica.org/article/d...-peace-talibanAfghan scholar Mohammad Halimi, who fled the Taliban in 2021, had worked to help U.S. diplomats understand his homeland. Then DOGE put his family’s lives at risk by exposing his sensitive work for a U.S.-funded nonprofit.
- Errors: DOGE staffers exposed a sensitive U.S.-funded Afghanistan program and falsely suggested a contractor was involved in an off-books mission.
- Consequences: DOGE’s public outing led to a Taliban intelligence service crackdown in Kabul.
- Fight: The Afghan scholar whom DOGE exposed is fighting to clear his name after his family was forced to flee the country.
lol Streisand effect
https://www.404media.co/the-removed-...-the-internet/The Removed DOGE Deposition Videos Have Already Been Backed Up Across the Internet
tl:dr
DOGE lives on as the National Design Studio and scrapes your information on official looking websites like passport.gov and vote.gov
The National Design Studio reports directly to Susie Wiles and has no IG or oversight
The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. Its job, officially, is to redesign how Americans experience their government. Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, which is to say he is a man who looked at the American home and saw an untapped revenue stream. If anyone understands how to improve public spaces, it is the company that took residential ones and made sure the public could never afford them again. He reports directly to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, which is a strange place to house a website design agency. A technology office that builds federal websites should answer to the General Services Administration, or at minimum to the agencies whose websites it is building. Instead it answers to the person who controls access to the President. His position requires no Senate confirmation, which means he files no financial disclosures, which means the office he runs does not appear in any federal procurement database, which means as far as the official record is concerned, it barely exists.https://thedreydossier.substack.com/...otegov-and-itsWhich, as I was about to find out, was entirely the point.
The structure of the National Design Studio will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. Staff are hired under a federal authority called Section 3161, written for temporary advisory bodies, which means most of them are part-time advisors or volunteers. They do not appear on the White House salary report. They answer to no inspector general, because the Executive Office of the President does not have one. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it is exactly how DOGE was run.
Gebbia spent six months at DOGE before taking his current role. The senior staff at the National Design Studio, when you pull the bylines from their blog posts and run the names against court filings, come back from the same place, DOGE, the same DOGE currently named as defendant in multiple federal lawsuits for letting engineers without proper security clearance access Social Security data and Department of Homeland Security data, and for sharing sensitive federal information with outside parties. The National Design Studio is not a successor to DOGE. It is DOGE with a better logo and a design philosophy.
"a galaxy of phishing sites run by the White house"
overall spending did not go down
Surely after a year yall have huge savings to tout?? how's the deficit going ? Military spending up or down? How much money did you save removing DEI and changing from "defense" to "war"? ing re s
Freedom 250 isn't on the list I just posted, but it's a National Design Studio website too
and now we have screwworm in Texas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/do ...f8991a3888.pdfOn June 3, 2026, a former SSA career official with more than 25 years of experiencecame forward with deeply troubling, first-hand knowledge of the steps DOGE allegedly took topush SSA to “kill off” more than 6,000 immigrants by marking them as deceased in SSA’s DeathMaster File. Although part of this scheme was publicly reported in April 2025,3 the whistleblower’s disclosure reveals new details about its goals and the scope of a further plan tomark 2.7 million individuals as deceased.
The whistleblower alleges that, over the course ofFebruary and March 2025, he met with the DOGE team at SSA headquarters four or five times, that they identified themselves as “volunteers,” and that they used computers that did not appearto be SSA-standard-issue. Contrary to DOGE’s supposed mission, the whistleblower alleges thatMr. Gracias “was dismissive of” the whistleblower’s ideas for potential savings and that “[Mr.Gracias] was looking only for projects that would result in ‘$50 billion’ in fraud savings.” Ofcourse, DOGE’s government-wide efforts never realized even a small fraction of this amount insavings and likely cost the federal government billions of dollars in waste.
Instead of pursuing real cost-saving efforts, DOGE focused on turning the SSA into a toolof immigration enforcement by marking thousands of individuals as dead in active databases,which would have terrible financial consequences for each targeted individual. The reports raisesignificant questions about whether these activities were illegal. As the whistleblower describes,“Marking a live individual as deceased within these systems has dire real-life consequences forthe individual. The individual’s bank account and credit cards become frozen immediately. Anybenefits for which they are eligible, such as Social Security or other public benefits, ceaseimmediately. The individual cannot legally work.” Despite the whistleblower’s and anotherofficial’s warnings that such a step would be devastating and illegal, SSA proceeded to mark 6,100living immigrants as dead.
Indeed, these allegations raise questions about whether DOGE’sactions may have violated a federal court order barring DOGE and any “DOGE Affiliates” fromaccessing non-anonymized personally identifiable information in any SSA system. The whistleblower reveals that, in April 2025, the Department of Homeland Security(“DHS”) transmitted to SSA a second list of individuals to be marked as dead; the list included 2.7million records. According to the whistleblower, Mr. Koval, who had since been transferred fromSSA to DHS, “was behind the effort to mark these 2.7 million individuals as deceased.” ThenDHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s memoranda requested only “that SSA help DHS to prevent‘suspected terrorists’ and ‘convicted criminals’ without lawful immigration status from using Social Security numbers. But the whistleblower expressed concern to his superior that the DHSrequest to “kill off” 2.7 million people was “part of DHS’s efforts to deport immigrants, regardlessof whether they were suspected terrorists or convicted violent criminals.”
Indeed, when askedwhy DHS wanted the 2.7 million people listed to be marked deceased, during what he thought wasa private conversation with the whistleblower’s superior, Mr. Koval allegedly said that either “thelives of these individuals would be ruined. . . and they would be driven to ‘self-deport’” or “theywould have to go to a local Social Security office, at which point SSA field office staff would sendthem to DHS offices” where officials would “detain them for deportation.”
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