What The Hell Is Going On? Part 1

Anatomy Of A DOGE

It’s not just you. No one, including people in the news media, can keep up with everything that’s happening right now. A story drops every hour that under any other circumstances would occupy front-page headlines for days, and at least 90% of those induce roughly the same reaction as an adrenaline shot to the heart. There is no time to catch our breath, no time to process the news in aggregate, just a headlong sprint from incident to development to full-blown crisis

But there is order in this chaos. We’re not meant to have the time or energy to take a step back, but if we can manage it, we can make sense of what’s happening and get a better idea of what’s about to happen. Here's the short version: DOGE is not an ad-hoc department that’s gone rogue, but a carefully-crafted weapon of mass destruction perfectly designed to thwart all attempts to regulate or even monitor its operations. Musk and his minions are using that weapon to execute a full-on coup that has nothing to do with efficiency or saving taxpayer money and everything to do with concentrating dictatorial power into a single pair of hands. They are shredding the checks and balances enshrined within our Constitution in order to take over every federal agency — all of them, without exception. The courts are way behind, our elected officials can’t or won’t save us, and while many people remain personally unaffected by this wanton destruction, that’s likely to change in a big way very soon.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I intend to provide it. This is Part 1 of a running series that will explain, in detail, exactly what has happened, how it’s happening, and what is likely to happen next. Today, we’re going to look at the structure of the Department of Government Efficiency: how it’s set up, how it functions, and the full extent of its explicitly-granted power.

What Is A DOGE, Anyway?

The story of DOGE begins in 2013, when Healthcare.Gov shat itself and died repeatedly during its initial debut. As bad press and bad feelings grew, President Obama scrambled to recruit engineers from top private tech companies to fix the failing portal, which they managed to do in a few months. To avoid similar catastrophes in the future, Obama created the United States Digital Service (USDS) to help government agencies develop and maintain user-friendly websites with the latest available technology. Google’s Mikey Dickerson, who led the team that fixed Healthcare.Gov, became the first USDS administrator.

“We have a lot of bad UI experiences that could go away,” Dickerson said in a video introducing the new department. “If we are a smash success, then a few years from now you won’t even know that we exist.” Dickerson's dream came true — almost nobody except for policy wonks knew about the agency until it stopped existing.

On January 20th, Donald Trump signed an executive order that changed the United States Digital Service into the United States DOGE Service. This new USDS no longer reports to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but instead answers directly to the Chief of Staff. Unlike OMB, the Chief of Staff belongs to a small circle of personnel called the White House Office that reports directly to the President. This office is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. You cannot FOIA the Chief of Staff, which means it’s very difficult to FOIA anyone who reports to the Chief of Staff — for example, the USDS administrator.

Obtaining records from the USDS administrator would be difficult even without the White House Office shield, to be fair, because no such person exists. The previous administrator left the agency on January 17th and Trump has not even nominated a candidate for the job. No one is officially in charge of the USDS, which means no one can be held accountable for what the USDS does. Exhibit A: last night, a White House official countered a lawsuit accusing Musk of wielding unconstitutional power by asserting that Musk is not in charge of the USDS, he’s just a “special government employee.”

The roughly 230 people who worked at USDS when Trump took over do still exist, but only in a technical sense. All of them were “reinterviewed” immediately following Trump’s executive order and have reportedly been sidelined ever since.

The only active, functioning part of this gutted agency is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Trump’s executive order created as a temporary organization within the empty husk of USDS. Employees and volunteers at temporary organizations are not subject to the same hiring restrictions as other agencies; the head of DOGE has total discretion over who to hire [1]. This all-powerful executive is — drumroll please — the nonexistant USDS administrator. No one is in charge of hiring, no one is officially running the organization, and no one can FOIA the organization to prove who’s actually calling the shots or reveal who’s actually getting hired. This is the definition of zero accountability.

You might assume there would be limits on what temporary organization volunteers and employees can access, and you’d be right — or, at least you would have been right, until about a month ago. A different executive order allows the White House Council (David Warrington, who represented Trump in several J6-related lawsuits) to grant Top Secret (TS/SCI) government clearances to whoever he wants, with no background checks or vetting. As someone who held a TS/SCI while in the military, I can authoritatively tell you that allowing one shady lawyer to arbitrarily hand out access to classified infromation to anyone he wants to is, to put it into technical terms, batshit fucking bananas. I don't even have words for how dangerous this policy is. This is a catastrophic threat to national security.

Trump’s executive order explicitly created DOGE to “[advance] the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda” (please kill me). The order leaves the exact nature of that agenda purposefully vague, but is very clear about how DOGE is to go about advancing it:

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…Agency Heads shall select the DOGE Team members in consultation with the USDS Administrator.

In other words, DOGE’s mandate, explicitly, is to insert a team into every single government agency, ostensibly selected by agency heads in consultation with an adminstrator that does not exist. There is no agency within our government that DOGE is not authorized to touch.

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.

As public policy professor Don Moynihan pointed out to WIRED in their incredible explainer of DOGE’s inner workings, this composition is optimized for extraction and demolition: an engineer to seize the data, an HR director to purge employees, and a lawyer to ensure that everyone’s actions stay on the right side of the law (or, you know, wherever Musk and Trump think the law should be).

“OK, but they’re just advising the agency heads,” I imagine some of you saying. “That’s not the same thing as seizing control.” And that would be true, if DOGE’s “advice” wasn't backed up by the authority of Trump’s multitudinous and often vague executive orders, all of which carry the force of law. While courts can freeze such orders and/or strike them down as unconstitutional, government employees are legally required to follow executive orders until that happens. DOGE has an explicit mandate to “implement the President’s DOGE agenda,” which means they get to interpret and enforce those executive orders across the federal government. The only person with the authority to intervene is the President himself. He has, so far, declined to do so, preferring to focus instead on destroying our relationships with close allies and renaming bodies of water to own the libs.

“There is not one single entity holding Musk accountable,” historian Douglas Brinkley told the New York Times on February 3rd. “It’s a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.”

This is not democracy. This is not representative government, it is not a Constitutional Republic, it is the actual goddamn Deep State and a roadmap for the dictatorship that the tech bro faction of MAGA openly longs for (more about that in a future explainer). Is the federal government bloated, wasteful, and inefficient in many ways? Of course. Is the right way to fix that handing absolute power to an unelected body that answers to no one? Absolutely not. It’s dangerous, it’s unconstitutional, and it’s fundamentaly un-American.

This, to me, seemed close to the worst case scenario. But this is 2025, The Year That Can Always Get Worse, and so, of course, it has.

On February 11th, President Trump issued a new executive order. The ongoing purge of anyone who might stand up to the administration will eventually necessitate hiring some loyalists and flunkies to replace them, and the order outlines how that effort will unfold. The order, which exempts only “functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement,” states that one person can be hired for every four employees fired: the kind of arbitrary one-size-fits-all edict that ignores the actual needs of agencies entirely. More importantly for our purposes, however: agency heads are to work with their DOGE team lead to draft a hiring plan, with one predetermined clause:

“This hiring plan shall include that new career appointment hiring decisions shall be made in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, consistent with applicable law.”

In other words, DOGE now has final authority over every single federal hire from this day forward not directly involved in law enforcement and immigration. Whoever controls DOGE now controls almost every agency within the civil service.

This is a nightmare scenario. Even if DOGE teams were staffed entirely by philosopher kings and/or wise stewards who wielded that power with perfect discernment, the organization would still possess a structure analogous to a nuclear bomb at the heart of DC with a big red button next to it and a sign that says “PUSH ME.”

All hail 2025: The Year That Can Always Get Worse. The people staffing DOGE are neither philosopher kings nor wise stewards. They are, as far as we can tell, tech bros with fanatical loyalty to just one man: Elon Musk. None have government experience. Many are quite young. And all of them seem to revel in pushing that big red button, again and again and again.

We’ll talk about Musk’s minions in Part 2.

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[1] 5 U.S.C. § 3161 grants permission to heads of temporary organizations to accept volunteers, as well as hire employees “in such numbers and with such skills as are necessary”: as many people as they want, with whatever qualifications they want. Temporary organization employees fall into the “excepted service” category, which means no competitive application process. Employees and volunteers must still adhere to restrictions around conflict of interest as detailed in Chapter 11 of title 18, which is not happening at all. We’ll talk about that in Part 2 also.