Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.

Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.

After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”

Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.

As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.

  • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
    32·
    15 hours ago

    DOGE couldn’t have possibly worked, ever. I think everybody knows a situation where there’s an employee who is contributing far more than their own manager knows. So the point is that even if you asked everybody’s immediate managers to decide who to lay off, you’d have huge mistakes being made.

    A central bureaucracy like DOGE is so much farther removed from that situation that it’s not even funny. There is simply no way that it has the expertise to conduct layoffs, and it was obvious from the beginning. Companies facing layoffs know that they will lose unreplaceable employees, but they have to do so due to immediate financial pressures, nothing like what the government faces.

    So, DOGE was either a stupid idea created by absolute morons, or it was a cover for bad actors who never intended to do what they claimed. Or a little from column a, and a little from column b.

    • FlexibleToast@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      13 hours ago

      Also, the methodology was awful. Offer buyouts for people to leave. That means the people who are the best at their job and most confident in finding a new job left.