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The DOGE Fatal Flaw [1]
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Date: 2025-03-12
The DOGE Fatal Flaw is Conflating Intelligence with Education/Expertise
In the U.S. there is a tendency to believe that intelligent people must be smart and educated. That is not true, and the DOGE crew epitomizes the problem. While little is known about the actual membership of the DOGE terrorists, what is obvious is that collectively they are conspicuously unqualified for the job. We do know they are young, arrogant and uneducated. Competency in writing code, or other IT-related skills, is totally inadequate for the positions and authority and access they have been granted. Trump has relinquished his mandated responsibilities. Far worse, all elected Republican officials in Congress have abdicated theirs.
A classic example of a consultant who lacks adequate educational and mental capacity is James Fishback, the oneirocritic who came up with the concept of giving a portion of DOGE “savings” in the form of a refund to all Americans. Fishback is a high school graduate and college dropout from Georgetown University who became a hedge fund manager four years ago. He rails about “meritocracy,” a topic he knows little about with his massive four years’ experience and running his own business. Importantly, he has no understanding of how the U.S. Government works or the complexity of international relations. Fishback’s lack of mental acumen was fully displayed when he was a guest of Michael Smerconish on his CCN show. (The entire exchange is available here)
Americans will be reassured to learn the concept came in a dream and was then fleshed out in two hours with other equally uninformed people. (Sarcasm intended) That was followed with a quasi-indorsement by Trump and rapid dissemination via social media. Among his misguided statements was that Americans only send money to the government to be spent in this country. His concept of fraud included “the green new scam, Ukraine, and the migrant crisis.” He seems to believe that any money sent abroad constitutes fraud. He was impervious to Smerconish’s point that if there were any DOGE savings dispersed under that scheme they would add to the national debt. Basically, Fishback’s concept was a Ponzi as it was sending out money that didn’t exist.
Like Fishback, it is obvious that most of the DOGE participants have only the vaguest notion of the functions of the U.S. Government (USG). With limited formal education, they came from schools that dropped even basic civics as required courses many years ago. The reality is that many people who have spent decades in the USG have little understanding of the complexity of the whole system. They may understand their functions, but it is exceedingly rare for anyone to comprehend the full spectrum of complexity.
My personal experience came when assigned as a Department of Army Inspector General (DAIG) in the Pentagon. Our boss, Lt.Gen. Richard Trefry, found it necessary to create a course of several weeks for all incoming inspectors general to instruct them on “how the Army works.” Remember, we were all LTCs and COLs with over 15-20+ years of service when we arrived. LTG Trefry had a War College level four-hour presentation going from the foxhole to Congress and back down again to the individual soldier. He was possibly the only person who understood that process and could coherently explain it to others. And, his presentation just applied to the U.S. Army, not DoD, or the other equally complex organizations. Yet, we are led to believe that these DOGE Wunderkind, with zero experience in governmental affairs, can instantly identify fraud, waste, and abuse. Unfortunately, Trump, Musk and DOGE appear to assume that anything they disagree with is considered fraud. They freely discuss finding billions of dollars of fraud only to recant when pressed for details. (Like $800 million in not the same as $800 billion)
During Trump’s non-State of the Union address to Congress on March 4th, he repeatedly boasted about the great savings that the DOGE comedians had found. He specifically pointed out the Social Security Administration (SSA) as exemplary of such fraud, Trump then repeated the thoroughly discredited claims that millions of people over 100 years of age were getting Social Security payments. Apparently, DOGE Wunderkind were not smart enough to recognize a default setting in the SSA database. Or they thought they could bamboozle the public into believing their false assertions,
There were several high profile screwups initiated by DOGE lack of education. An immediate one was when they fired employees from the National Nuclear Security Administration. While they left the Hanford site with a skeleton crew, it was only later that they came to realize those employees were key guardians of US nuclear weapons. Failure to understand the nuclear arsenal was not unprecedented. In Trump’s first term he nominated Governor Rick Perry of Texas to be his Secretary of Energy and Perry did not realize that nuclear weapons came under the DOE not DoD (Another of Trump’s meritocracy “none but the best” hires.)
The disastrous dismantling of USAID demonstrated another example of extreme incompetence by DOGE. Besides setting up a food shortage leading to starvation of tens of thousands of children, the uneducated DOGE dolts did not know that among the USAID functions was early detection of hemorrhagic fever and other diseases that are prone to arise in relatively obscure places. In fact, there already was an Ebola outbreak occurring in Uganda. (Trump, DOGE, and the GOP apparently don’t care about the lives of Africans and don’t understand that viruses don’t respect borders)
Another egregious example of incomprehensible incompetence of MUSK and DOGE was the 20 percent staff reduction of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Those Americans who have lived a few decades have witnessed the vast improvements in weather forecasting, especially with local weather. That was made possible because of the scientific advances of NOAA scientists. It is NOAA that provides data that makes local forecasts accurate. In an era of increasingly severe weather, it is NOAA that provides life-saving information about the paths of hurricanes, warnings about tornadoes, coming blizzards and other damaging weather events.
Health has never been a priority under Trump. This time he withdrew quickly from the World Health Organization (WHO) and then ordered the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to not communicate with them. The absurdity of that order is mindboggling. As Covid-19 devastatingly demonstrated, viruses do not respect geographic boundaries. It was Trump’s incompetence in handling of the pandemic that led to more than a million American fatalities. Rapidly emerging in early 2020, Trump informed us it “would be gone by Easter” of that year and suggested injecting bleach as a cure. Although he knew it had airborne transmission, he failed to promptly alert the public. Even with the success of Operation Warp Speed, many MAGA supporters refused the vaccine leading to many unnecessary deaths. (Notably they are still vocal anti-vaxxers on social media today) There are numerous DOGE actions that have significant negative health consequences both domestically and abroad. People will die because of them.
The DOGE firings and cancellations at the National Institute of Health (NIH) demonstrated a number of spectacular failures. Without regard to what projects they worked on, more than 1000 NIH employees, or about 10 percent, received termination notices. Among the projects that were terminated included critical cancer studies. The sudden stop resulted in loss of substantial data. The DOGE clowns did not realize that many studies cannot be interrupted and then turned back on. Rather the projects had to be scrapped at a loss of data and lives.
Here are a few of the other reduction in forces that have led to detrimental results:
Just a few examples and each of those could, and have, filled entire articles. The damage done to American infrastructure is incalculable. My intent when I started drafting this piece last week was to address all of the shortcomings of Trump, Musk and DOGE actions. The task became overwhelming, and it is impossible to keep up with their crazy/criminal activities.
At a White House Cabinet meeting dominated by Musk, he stated they “might make some mistakes,” but they “would immediately fix them.” He was right about making mistakes but lied about fixing them. When you jump off a cliff without a parachute, it is too late to prevent impact. That is exactly what DOGE has done. While businesses often experience some mistakes, they either quickly correct or go bankrupt. Remember, going bankrupt is what Trump has done six times, and now he is taking the country with him.
Any company that has made the consequential mistakes that DOGE incompetence has would fire those involved immediately. Instead, DOGE incompetence is rewarded with substantial USG salaries. Their thesis that being intelligent can compensate for knowledge has been repeatedly proven false. The firing leading to rehiring of critical people has demonstrated that. Ignorance should not be an excuse for obvious “mistakes.” The DOGE incompetence is a direct result of ignorance that stems from lack of knowledge about the systems they are interrupting, or the complexity of the U.S. Government, and false assumptions made regarding contracts cancelled.
It has already been determined that many of the Trump/DOGE actions are illegal. To minimize exposure of their illegal or inappropriate activities, Trump has fired many of the key, congressionally mandated, positions that are specifically designed to reduce fraud, waste and abuse while also protecting people who come forward as whistleblowers. That includes:
Trump and MAGA supporters frequently talk about common sense. It should be remembered that a flat Earth was once common sense. Then came the notion that the Earth was the center of the universe, which was followed by the heliocentric concept, which too was proven wrong. Many of the concepts MAGA tout as common sense have about as much validity. Consider that Hegseth’s DoD would cancel a photo of the plane that dropped the first Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima because it was named Enola Gay. The DOGE ignorance conflated transgenic with transgender and failed to understand there are two Gazas; one in the Middle East and another in Mozambique (which is an island off Africa). That flub caused Trump to claim USAID had sent $100 million in condoms to Hamas to use as bombs. Another brilliant move was to offer to sell a secret CIA facility as part of an exercise to remove excess buildings.
Trump has codified The Golden Age of the Robber Oligarchs. The American plutocracy has been evident for decades. Trump has taken it to a new level, with the richest people in the world paying homage to an incompetent, narcissistic petty tyrant. The reality is the country is being run not so much as like a business, but more like an organized crime syndicate.
The bottom line is that DOGE is populated with a number of very bright IT whiz-kids, who are basically uneducated about the systems they are damaging. It is led by a foreign-born adversary with personal ties to Russia and unimaginable conflicts of interest with the USG. The USG is far more complex than anyone can imagine. Experts with doctorates in political science rarely understand the totality of the complexity involved. Therefore, keyword searches are insufficient to replace expert knowledge of those systems and identify the entirety of what is being accomplished by the millions of dedicated civil servants. It should be Congress, not Wunderkind, making decisions regarding the efficacy of programs and what constitutes waste and abuse. Of course, the Executive Branch had established watchdogs – until Trump fired them.
To prepare for the expected and foreseeable, but unintended consequences of DOGE actions, I propose that an escrow account be established. That fund should be at least 100 billion dollars, coming from the personal accounts of both Musk and Trump to cover the costs associated with their “mistakes” and activities deemed illegal by courts. Clearly, $100 billion will not be enough to compensate for a possible pandemic or war generated by DOGE incompetence but might start to offset some of the lesser errors such as retroactive pay for people illegally fired.
Many MAGA supporters claim they want a strong leader. They forgot the Pied Piper was a strong leader.
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