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.

  • InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
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    16 minutes ago

    One of many troubling issues with all this and the way it was handled is that these cuts were made too hastily. My former employer is a federal contractor whose income was some mix of federal, state, and private. Had there been sufficient time to reallocate staff and resources towards state and federal private funding, they/we would have had time to change our strategy and pursue those other lines of funding – likely avoiding the massive monthly layoffs that have been going on in 2025. But that takes time, which was not something anybody had with the sudden, drastic, and unprecedented cancellation of federal contracts that did not leave any room for a smooth transition It was just lost jobs and shattered lives with little to no benefit for working class people.

    It may just be my circle, but my friends and colleagues who managed to keep their jobs pretty much all complain about how they’re dealing with burnout now because they have an untenable workload but also the work environment is so stressful because everybody’s still under threat of more layoffs. This is happening both in federal work as well as private industry.

  • kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 hour ago

    The one valuable thing DOGE showed is is what happens when you put a 19 year old broccoli-haired dog shit person in governance.

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    3 hours ago

    This is what happens when someone has a whole shitload of money but not a good understanding of the world in which he can spend it.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Efficiency-obsessed weirdos don’t understand redundancies. All they see are inefficiencies, and think people can just make up for them in harder times by just “working harder”, which for these weirdos just become a new baseline for even more cuts.

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      For a man who is obsessed with space travel and claims we need to go live on Mars. He doesn’t understand how much redundancy is critical to survival in space.

      Imagine a sci-fi spaceship… you are light-years away from civilization and any repairs. What if something goes wrong on your ship? We’ll? There had better be at least a half dozen back up systems to guarantee that you will survive instead of being fucked.

      You cannot apply just-in-time supply chain logic to space travel. YOU WILL DIE!

      No wonder SpaceX hasn’t been able to get out of low-earth orbit.

      • ameancow@lemmy.world
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        46 minutes ago

        His only obsession is social acceptance and adoration, he doesn’t even want to go to Mars for whatever good it will do, he wants to go live somewhere where he’s the defacto “owner” of the whole goddamn planet. So people will be trapped working for him. And so that everyone else thinks he’s soooo cool for doing a space travel.

        He isn’t going to Mars at least. I was worried for a while he might pull it off, but I’d be shocked if it happens before he overdoses or dies of pathological levels of cringe and ignorance.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      You give him too much credit for seeing inefficiency. It was simply “gov is too expensive. We need massive layoffs”.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      don’t understand redundancies

      names agency after a program where every user has to download everyone else’s transactions

  • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    I’ve seen it first hand. I work as a consultant in public sector. Every where we go now the teams are crippled because people took the buyouts and left. Network teams that were 7 people reduced to 2 that are barely keeping things together. I’m sure NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, etc… love selling all these consulting hours now.

    • bluemellophone@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      I was at a military industry conference a month or so ago, with several flag level officers giving talks. The total amount of lost years of experience and senior leadership in the military and intelligence agencies is staggering. It is going to take generations to recover.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      I’d bet some of those ex government employees are back doing the same job as IBM contractors for 3x the cost.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    Many Americans may not realize this, but the actions of DOGE were effectively the destruction of their generational inheritance; decades and generations of taxpayer dollars to build an effective machine for doing the work of government.

    That won’t be rebuilt in a month or a year or even a decade. Its multi-generational damage which has been done.

    • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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      It is part of why I want the Blue States to break off from the Confederates and build a fresh government. If you are going to replace what was broken, it should be only for people who appreciates what was lost. The MAGA are just going to bring out the chainsaw again…

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        That’s the conclusion I came to after they decided SNAP was expendable too. The federal government is good for literally nothing. We’ve already been conquered by Russia and this is what it looks like.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      But just think of all the data that Elon Musk got to mine out of the government, to feed to his AI.

      Won’t anyone think of the billionaires?

    • JohnnyFlapHoleSeed@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      The only way to recoup losses from the damage done will be an effective 99%+ tax on income, from any source, on amounts over 10 million.

      That and treason charges, followed by executions

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        I mean I’m all for the guillotines coming out. I think we should have brought them out on January 7th 2021 and start taking serious making things right then.

        But even a modest wealth tax (like every red cent after a billion becomes the states or off with your head).

        Like no amount of money can mend a broken heart? What was destroyed isn’t something you can just throw money at to fix. There was a breach of trust between the smartest people in our society (NASA, NIH, etc…) and society itself, in the sense that the elected government is a reflection of society.

  • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
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    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.world
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      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.

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    16 hours ago

    By June, Congress was drawn, largely down party lines, on whether to codify the “DOGE process”—rapidly firing employees, then quickly hiring back whoever was needed

    To consider this as an intentional “process” a person has to have zero empathy.

    • JohnnyFlapHoleSeed@lemmy.world
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      It’s also robbing Peter to pay Paul. You fire me for no real reason? Fine, now I’m drawing unemployment from the state and the company (which in this case, is the federal government), for not working. Now you’ve hired me back after 6-12 months, but you’ve also destroyed the infrastructure which allowed me to do my job, and you’ve jaded the shit out of me, so AT ABSOLUTE FUCKING BEST, you’ve hired me back to do 50% of what I was doing before, for the same pay, if not more. Plus you used tax money to pay me unemployment after you fired me.

      It’s literally a business decision that would only be made in a world where ‘fuck it, it’s not MY money being wasted, let’s just see what happens’

      And it was ALL OF OUR MONEY being pissed away, when the people making the decisions have more than enough money to perform their dipshit experiment on their own dime.

      There is no way forward without about 20-40k public executions, and the seizure of trillions in assets. Dropping nukes on Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and qatar should also be absolutely on the table.

      If anything. Pivot hard to Iran and India, whole simultaneously doubling down on NATO and Ukraine, to the point where they don’t need Russia, use them to neutralize their neighbors while continuing to destroy Russia economically, then deploy US troops to Ukraine and Gaza. Then we do what America always does we install our own puppet governments and take anything of value, while ensuring the trade partnerships enacted are beneficial for us and the puppet governments. That’s how you f****** tip the scales

      • wuffah@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        There is no way forward without about 20-40k public executions, and the seizure of trillions in assets. Dropping nukes on Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and qatar should also be absolutely on the table.

        It’s a little unnerving for you to make a fair bit of sense, and then to see this little tidbit of insanity slip in there. Disregarding the call for institutional public execution, I would like to formally object to your plan for nuclear war with the Middle East, please.

        • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          10 hours ago

          I mean, they also blatantly want to use the n-word so I wouldn’t put too much faith in their reasoning skills.

          Edit: Odd, the username is showing as the same in my app, but different when I follow the link in my browser:

          Maybe a weird federation thing, since the original comment was removed by a mod (and apparently they were banned from the community entirely).

    • Mark@mastodon.world
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      16 hours ago

      @joyjoy @MicroWave As an aside, I knew a bodybuilder some years ago, totally jacked, like 3% body fat, all natural. Couldn’t get a life insurance policy because his BMI was something like 39% and he was classified as morbidly obese.

      • punkfungus@sh.itjust.works
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        15 hours ago

        I know this is a funny jab at BMI, which is an extremely flawed way of determining anything, but actually the risks of being a competitive bodybuilder with single digit body fat percentage are remarkably similar to being morbidly obese. Being natty certainly makes it safer but being jacked and being healthy aren’t the same thing. The people you see on stage at bodybuilding comps are a short step away from needing admittance to hospital.

        • lectricleopard@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          Particularly on stage, or leading up to a competition.

          I had a natty buddy too. Had to lock himself out of the house and sleep in a tent so he wouldn’t cave and eat in the middle of the night. Then same with water to get the paper thin skin and vascularity.

          They are starving and dehydrated.

          • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 hours ago

            Then same with water to get the paper thin skin and vascularity.

            Not drinking enough water is like one of the worst things you can possibly do to your health, closely followed by smoking.

          • punkfungus@sh.itjust.works
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            12 hours ago

            Yep. To paraphrase the wise words of Casually Explained:

            Adrenaline junkies like skydivers often say something like “I love it so much I’d die for my sport”. In contrast, with bodybuilding dying is the sport.