DODGEY
CONTEXT
WHAT IS DOGE?
Executive Order - ESTABLISHING AND IMPLEMENTING THE PRESIDENT’S "DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY"
"DOGE Teams. In consultation with USDS, each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees, which may include Special Government Employees"
"Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney. Agency Heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President ‘s DOGE Agenda."
"Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, in coordination with the USDS Administrator and to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards."
"General Provisions.
(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations."
WHO IS DOGE?
Does Elon Musk have a handful of kids, or "lost boys" as The New York Times put it, with little education and experience working for him, as you've been led to believe? Or is DOGE populated by all the science, tech, engineering, and legal all-stars you know the man and his businesses to be surrounded by and can easily call upon? Well, here is a small sample of some of the folks we know to be working with DOGE (and whom seemingly every Democrat and supporter is calling to be arrested for unstated crimes):
Brad Smith, 42
- Rhodes Scholar and health-care entrepreneur who served in Trump's first administration on the board of the COVID-19 vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed
Alexandra Beynon, 36
- formerly a software engineer with Goldman Sachs and director of engineering at Symphony.com
Nicole Hollander, 42
- previously senior vice president of retail asset management at JBG Smith before joining X
Brian Bjelde, 44
- associate engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who has worked for SpaceX for more than 20 years
Keenan Kmiec, 45
- clerked on the Supreme Court, for Chief Justice John Roberts, before transitioning to a corporate law firm. He was a partner in a small law firm focused on insider-trading litigation and worked for the Tezos Foundation
Ryan Riedel, 37
- previously served in the US Army Cyber Command as a network manager. Riedel worked as a lead network security engineer at SpaceX before becoming chief information officer at the Department of Energy
Justin Monroe, 36
- formerly an information security expert, and information warfare officer with the US Navy
Anthony Armstrong, 57
- a technology banker at Morgan Stanley
Tom Krause, 47
- previously CFO and then CEO of Cloud Software Group, an enterprise software company, with 20 years in software and technology
Michael Russo, 67
- spent more than seven years as an executive and senior advisor for a payment processing company Shift4Payments, and is now a high-ranking technology official at the Social Security Administration
Christopher Stanley, 33
- an information security specialist who has worked for SpaceX
Stephanie Holmes, 43
- former lawyer with Jones Day and ran her own HR consulting firm, BrighterSideHR
Steve Davis, 45
- a senior executive with SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X and has known Musk for 20+ years
James Burnham, 41
- former litigation partner at Jones Day and high-ranking Justice Department and White House official in the first Trump administration
Jacob Altik, 32
- previously clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Judge Larsen and United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Rao. Last year, he was selected to begin a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch
Kyle Schutt, 37
- was chief technology officer and software engineer at Revv
Okay, now we're on the same page and dealing with some aspect of reality. Grand. Now to the point:
THE ARTICLE
Many articles following the same logic and argumentation landed all at once. Here, the author tells us, “DOGE apparently didn’t understand the workers’ role, or how important they are to national security, sources told CNN and Bloomberg News”
Given the above (that every DOGE team has specialists, lawyers, and an HR person or two, as the DOGE mandate requires, and is populated by NASA engineers, cyber security experts, retired military, Justice Department officials, and senior executives) what are the chances that no one was aware of what the National Nuclear Security Administration does, the kinds of folks who work there, or what they're up to — all of which is available on landing page of their website? Probably safe to say there's zero chance of that.
Even without knowing the structure and mission of DOGE, reading that “sources told us”, and that those unnamed individuals make up the entire basis for their claims, should be a strong red flag that the whole piece is fiction.
“Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons”
“The workers were fired because ‘no one’ had ‘taken any time to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security,’ one source told CNN”
“‘Congress is freaking out because it appears DOGE didn’t really realize NNSA oversees the nuclear stockpile,’ another source told CNN”
“‘The nuclear deterrent is the backbone of American security and stability – period. For there to be any even very small holes poked even in the maintenance of that deterrent should be extremely frightening to people,’ the source added”
“The NNSA is now seeking to recall the workers because they deal with sensitive national security secrets, sources told Bloomberg”
We've been given no reason whatsoever to suspect the authors have such inside sources or that said sources are not more likely a staffer working for Elizabeth Warren… Obviously. And certainly there’s no reason at all to think that such a person or several of them, were they real (folks clearly happy to spill all the dirt to the press), would not just come forward and name themself if something terrible actually happened — particularly given that effectively everyone in government votes Democrat and half the country is itching to platform and celebrate such a hero…
Not buying it. Sorry.
But wait, it gets worse.
Then we're told the number of people who were fired was “300.” According to the NNSA, they have a staff of around 72,000. Almost all of those are outside contractors (65,000) and only 2,500 are federal employees. Meaning that effectively no one (0.4%) was fired from working at the NNSA (if DOGE did let go of 300 employees.)
…but did that even happen?
According to CNN (to whom the above article links as a source and that also follows the same absurdist narrative that says Musk fired everyone critical to nuclear safety in America, threatening that country and the world, because he is just that stupid…):
“An Energy Department spokesperson disputed the number of personnel affected, telling CNN that ‘less than 50 people’ were ‘dismissed’ from NNSA, and that the dismissed staffers ‘held primarily administrative and clerical roles.’”
Zoinks! So it looks like something less than 0.06% of staff were actually fired and those were mostly clerical and admin folks not people safeguarding America's nuclear stockpile.
…but is that even what took place?
We’re also told that the dismissals arrived Thursday night and those dismissed in error saw that error corrected by Friday morning. Okay, so this event (that virtually no staff, who were effectively not fired) is meant to be the grievous threat to national and global peace and security everyone is running with and freaking out about? This is the emergency situation? Jeebus!
If that wasn’t bad enough, then they tell us, like everyone else at the moment (from social media influencers and podcasters to top pundits and journalists to senior members of the US Congress and Senate and more) that:
Musk’s wholesale slashing of the federal workforce has been plagued by chaos. He has a young crew of techies who have little work experience and are overwhelmed by the challenges to understand the wide range of tasks performed by employees in many different and complex federal agencies in a matter of days.
Right. Okay. Only, as above, none of that is happening. At all.
COMPARED TO WHAT?
Just take a moment to consider the tremendous concern being issued by senate and congresspersons, the press and pundit class, and the public for the firing of a tiny cohort of government employees (anticipated not less than a decade in advance.) How I'm seeing this is in contrast to far worse and impactful moves by government in very recent memory.
In 2025 we have every federal agency and bureaucrat who has even gotten word that DOGE may be coming to their place of employment receiving a full news profile, a sit-down interview on NPR, and a pair of complementary op-eds in the NYT or WaPo... And we have rallies and riots in a hundred cities. And the claim is that the loss of employment or even the prospect of as much (a maximum of 250k people, mostly with cushy work-from-home gigs and six figure salaries, most of whom were immune to the pandemic layoffs...) wasn't conducted in perfect accordance with conventional procedures or was somehow arbitrary or that Musk/Trump has no jurisdiction or legal justification or some variation on these themes...
Fine. Great. Okay. And what was the response to, what, 1,000 times the impact from a far more sweeping and arbitrary call in 2021?
We can all remember when vaccine mandates rejected naturally acquired infection and resulting immunity by default. That policy (a radical rejection of everything previously known about biology) was enacted in Canada and the US. In the US, the policy decision arrived despite the Biden administration’s handpicked experts (namely: Anthony Fauci, Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Rochelle Walensky, Akiko Iwasaki, and Michael Osterholm) advocating for the government to follow the science and accept natural immunity. And, of course, the livelihoods (and thus housing, healthcare, education, and more....) of, what, 150 million Americans were directly impacted as a result?
What is the calculus done to decide what to riot about and what to roll over on? I'd love to know. And, too, who spells this out and coordinates the response?
I suppose I'd also like to ask these folks, every one of them (a survey perhaps), why they're making me defend their enemies and effectively take that side? And I'd like to ask why they aren't keeping some powder dry for when something real emerges? What, you're going to keep this up over the coming twelve hundred days, burning through all remaining good faith and firing off everything you have at these stupid little phantoms of your own making in month one? How much social and political capital, and actual capital, do you people believe you have? Yikes!
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