DOGE's Complicated Story

Plus: When FOIA stops working, how the pandemic shifted young people to the right, and more...

DOGE update: Last week, some 220,000 probationary workers—those who'd been at their agencies for under a year or two—started getting laid off, a process that should result in 4 percent of the federal workforce being axed once all is done. Many critics have lingered on the fact that 300 of those probationary workers cut were from the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency tasked with ensuring safe travel through the skies, which has been having a mighty bad year given the January 29 plane crash over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people. But it's hard to tell what roles exactly these workers were performing; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took to X to claim that "zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go" and that the preceding administration had "failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system."

Useful functions grinding to a halt: CNN filed some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about Elon Musk's security clearance, as well as the clearances received by those within the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who have been granted access to classified or otherwise restricted networks. "Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team," an Office of Personnel Management staffer responded. (Of course, the government tends to spend an awful lot of time selectively denying FOIA requests under the guise of lots of different excuses; this might be true, or it might be the excuse flavor of the day.)

But the haphazard nature of the layoffs is affecting real, useful government functions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, accidentally let go of staffers working on containing the bird flu outbreak.

I'm honestly sympathetic to "if you never realize you cut something important, you aren't cutting enough", but if you realize every single day that you cut something important I don't think you're hitting the sweet spot on that tradeoff https://t.co/nULny1SNG1

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) February 19, 2025

Big picture: DOGE, though off to a good start, appears to be sputtering. The executive order authorizing it says it ought to be terminated by July 4, 2026, at the latest; Musk has echoed that the department will "delete itself" then. Musk has claimed that they can and will cut $2 trillion in useless spending, later hedging by saying that if they set out to target that amount, they will probably end up closer to $1 trillion (implying that the outcome would also be pretty good, which is fair). Many wonks have countered that the discretionary budget totals about $1.7 trillion. For Musk to get close to that $2 trillion target, he will probably need to look outside of the easy discretionary spending targets alone.

But the progress he has made so far hasn't really been good enough or fast enough to meet his goal. The headline number is $55 billion; that's what Musk and DOGE claim to have saved already with their cuts. But the total for canceled contracts equals about $16.5 billion—half of which came from one single contract cut which had unfortunately been miscounted as $8 billion when it was in fact a contract for merely $8 million. (The dollar-amount error had been present in federal documents dating back to at least 2022, so it's good that DOGE found this error, at minimum. But there's some brewing controversy that DOGE has been trying to cover their tracks for this mistake and hide it from the public.)

The next-largest items are three USAID contracts for $655 million each. The only issue is that they're a specific type of contract that has been triple-counted, so the savings are unfortunately not massive. Another consistent theme emerging: Counting the amount designated by a contract's total, but ignoring the fact that in many cases, 70 or 80 percent of it has already been spent, so the actual amount saved is less than it would seem.

So we're down to $6.5B in savings, and an alarming trend emerges: @DOGE does not seem to understand how the government contracts they are canceling work. The savings they are claiming are not annual savings, but rather hypothetical savings if we spent every unobligated penny.

5/

— Momentum Chaser (@electricfutures) February 18, 2025

A perfectly defensible counter to all this is: They're coming under intense partisan scrutiny for the cuts they're making, and it's unwarranted. Of course cutting the federal government down will involve making cuts people don't like, and of course the backlash will be enormous. Musk is overly ambitious, but it's better to begin by acknowledging that federal spending is out of control and setting a huge goal than to aim for a more modest overhaul. They're new at this all and they can't get everything right. Is there a way to do this that's not chaotic? Isn't it worth it in the end?

I think this way of looking at it is probably correct. But the ineptitude and mistakes also ought to be documented; we're calling balls and strikes here, are we not?

Agreeing to start working on a solution: Yeah, you heard that right. The U.S. and Russia have come to an agreement that they will start to begin to work on a solution for winding down the Ukraine war—kind of an odd step given that Ukraine had no seat at the negotiating table, and given European uneasiness surrounding what type of assistance may be expected from the rest of the continent. (Again, file this under better than nothing!)

But the talks, which took place between top diplomats in Saudi Arabia, were broadly successful. They agreed "to restore staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow, to create a high-level team to support Ukraine peace talks, and to explore closer relations and economic cooperation," per the Associated Press. "The meeting marked the most extensive contact between the two countries since Moscow's Feb. 24, 2022, invasion. [Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey] Lavrov and then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talked briefly on the sidelines of a G-20 meeting in India nearly two years ago, but tensions remained high."

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Scenes from New York: Following up on our definitely-not-corrupt politicians: "New York's highest court on Tuesday rejected efforts by former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to dismantle a state ethics commission that had been investigating a $5.1 million book deal he had received, ruling that the body's creation was constitutional," reports The New York Times.

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QUICK HITS

• Populist leaders in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Poland have all dismissed the option of committing peacekeeping troops to Ukraine if any sort of deal is reached to end the war, per Bloomberg.
• "Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction," writes The Atlantic's Derek Thompson. "But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person's 20s….Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were 'more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,' according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the 'lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.' In the past decade alone, young Americans' trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent."
• The Free Press' Bari Weiss details the ways the far left destroyed the center-left in America (and abroad) and asks: Is the far right now in danger of destroying the center-right?
• Is OpenAI actually struggling to convert free users to paid users? A popular post circulating on Hacker News throws cold water on some of the ChatGPT-related buzz. ("300 million monthly active users would mean a conversion rate of less than 4%, which is pretty piss-poor, especially as subscription revenue for ChatGPT Plus (and other monthly subscriptions) makes up the majority of OpenAI's revenue," writes Edward Zitron.)
• "The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West," writes Seth Mandel in Commentary.
• Pope Francis, who is 88 years old, has developed pneumonia in both of his lungs.
• California is finally beginning to tackle its real problems: Companies that sell anti-aging skincare products to willing buyers who happen to be teenagers.
• Very cool:

Announcing our first open-weights model: R1 1776 - a version of DeepSeek R1 that's been post-trained to remove the China censorship and provide unbiased, accurate responses. Here's a graph showing % of Chinese censorship by the model (the lower, the better). pic.twitter.com/w0hPVafnDM

— Based Whale (@AravSrinivas) February 18, 2025