Elon Musk’s DOGE is growing desperate for a “win”
Elon Musk’s DOGE is growing desperate for a “win”
As America turns against DOGE and its assault on the government, its staffers are hoping for a public relations win to change the narrative.
Summary
Elon Musk’s DOGE faces mounting pressure to show achievements amid criticism. Staffers, under pressure from Trump administration officials, seek public relations wins to counter negative headlines.
Cuts to federal offices led to mass layoffs, and efforts to modernize government services have been chaotic. DOGE prioritizes speed over security and protecting sensitive information.
Trump has distanced himself, stating agency chiefs, not Musk, control department cuts, preferring a "scalpel" over a "hatchet" approach. Public opinion has turned against DOGE, with 48% disapproving versus 34% approving, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
With limited time before their tenure ends, DOGE officials are desperate to show results.
I suggest Russian roulette, winner is one that finds the hidden present.
Like all his others companies.
- SpaceX has exploding star ships
- StarLink comes with so many ties, that alternatives are highly sought after
- Neural link might already be defunct, I don't know
- His stake in OpenAI is too complicated to follow
- Tesla has 3 models you could buy, none of them is FSD yet, one is the Cyberstuck, no truck, no robots.
- Boring company was just fluff and BS, since a tunnel that's only 1 lane wide is a safety nightmare and hyperloop is like the simpisons "monorail" Episode
Maybe at some point in his mid 50ties he should have focused on one thing.
Maybe at some point in his mid 50ties he should have focused on one thing.
He seems to be focused on twitter posting.
yeah don't follow that
"X marks the Rot"
You don't have to pretend space x is bad to hate musk. Spacex has done massive leaps for space tech
So much of the criticism focuses on Starship, specifically. Starship has never claimed to be anything other than a test program. Look back into the history of NASA test programs and you'll fine lots of exploded pieces of rockets. Starship is also moving along a whole lot better than the SLS at a comparable stage of the development track. People bleating about this clearly don't have a lot of knowledge about rockets and their history.
Safety is somewhat valid. Obviously, exploding rockets over the Gulf of Mexico is not a good thing, but the chances of debris actually hitting a plane are minuscule. See Big Sky Theory, which is the basis for a lot of air traffic policy. It's just that the aviation industry has extremely tight safety standards, and so they divert planes.
Falcon 9 also exists, and now has a better track record than Soyuz (the previous gold standard). People making these arguments seem to conveniently leave that out.
Now, environmental standards, how Musk is trying to gut NASA and the FAA, and how the company never would have survived without government subsidies? Yes, absolutely focus on those. Also, the fact that SpaceX employees are mostly insulated from their idiot CEO. They're the real heroes of the company.
In a different Administration, I think SpaceX should be nationalized and run something like the USPS or Amtrak. NASA shouldn't make their own rockets anymore. They're really bad at making anything close to cost effective.
@Fredthefishlord @QuarkVsOdo all his companies basically exist to siphon off government funding that should be going to something more worthy. In the case of SpaceX, look what's happening to NASA now. And with the Hyperloop, he openly said he promoted that to take attention and money to prevent the development of high speed rail
Yes and no. The engines and upright landing is very good... designing&Testing unbound by yearly grant applications but with "fuck you money" really propelled the industry forward.
But they cut so many corners.
Agreed, I despise Musk as much as any sane person does now, but I just can't get on board with this prevalent behaviour of indiscriminately trashing everything about a person who you don't like.
Just be honest! He clearly has played a big part in achieving some spectacular results: Whether you think that was in engineering, or by cunning manipulation all the way up; the fact is SpaceX have achieved feats nobody else has, and I don't believe it would have happened without Musk.
None of that changes the fact he is a cunt, but dishonesty in criticism only weakens it.
In the end, DOGE financial waste will be bigger than any "savings" they produced, but the real costs of their action will be much, much bigger in the end.
Just think of the people who will get killed by hurricanes without a warning because they dismantle NOAA.
Seems like a waste of funds to me
48% disapproving.
He’s destroying our entire government and 52% of Americans think ‘yeah, this is fine’ or ‘yeah, who cares?’
They don't understand what the people being fired do. There's no marketing or awareness campaigns for the GSA clerks that keep every government office in the country stocked with chairs; or the mental health nurses that pick up the phone at 2 in the morning.
People think it's some white guy just golfing while they collect checks.
I want DOGE to be put to sleep.
Or maybe just move to a farm upstate where they can run and play through the fields all day. No one to say “bad doge”, no one to stop from digging homes or chasing squirrels, no one to care when they play on the mud
What’s all the BS they’ve been doing all this time? Is it not winning to crash about like a bull in a china shop wrecking things? What sort of “win” are they looking for? Are they looking for a Death Star shot where the entire country says, “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
These idiots are so drunk on their own Kool aid that everyone in government is useless and corrupt and not actually working and that it's all a "waste."
Also that zillions of people are on government support that should not be, nevermind that its people, exactly like Musk, who have run their shitty corpos in such a way that people can't afford to exist anymore without government assistance.
I mean, technically he is right, there are a ton of people who should not be on government programs, that are, because profit profit profit companies have made life miserable and those people don't have a choice.
Musk is on government support. He has scores of billions in contracts, loans, subsidies, and incentives.
I mean... If it's about efficiency, wouldn't the military be the first place to audit?
That's how we know it was never about auditing or waste.
We have generals from the military asking for less equipment , and then congress ignores them and rubber stamps the contracts of their doners in the Military Industrial Complex.
https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-congress-4416606e329b4c8baa755aad333d73db
If we want to go after real waste in our spending we need to start forcing the rich to make concessions. This becomes more true every year we allow wealth inequality to continue growing.
This is a common misconception. The military isn't designed to be efficient on the back end. It's designed to win wars efficiently, which is an entirely different thing. The last time they tried to be "efficient" with the military the 101st ended up doing the world's fastest ground and air assault on rations because they didn't have enough food and water. And entire battalions got extremely sick from using local water when they absolutely had to.
Whitmore: How do you get funding for something like this?
Julius Levinson: You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
Ooh traditional American victories included overthrowing a regime in a third world country, there's one he doesn't even have to do much to do.
I thought a cool online name like Big Balls was win enough.
What a get.
The funny thing is that Elon Musk is the wealthiest man ever and enough hecklers chanting "no one likes Elon" in a sing song manner would bring him to tears
Turns out the federal government is actually pretty efficient. Who would've thought!
Yeah, because they have to account to Republican and Democratic administrations repeatedly. Other than defense spending, which is just allowed to literally not add up...
Every time there's a World War, a bunch of industries are put under the control of the government in a process called Nationalization, or a "War Economy"...
...this is because it's highly efficient. This is an excellent argument against free market libertarian types. They don't put business in charge of government (like is being done now, eg. Privatization) they put the government in charge of business/industry.
My societal dream is that the government would nationalize industries once they reach the monopoly or oligopoly stage. Like, congratulations Comcast/Verizon, you won the game of capitalism. Now move over and let the government actually provide services to the people at a reasonable cost.
But I know this is just a dream.
Efficient and complicated. Not that these dipshits would understand that.
And super fucking important
I thought destroying the government and setting up racism was the win?
I'd say it's predictable ..... Had it been a success I think Trump would be shouting "One of my master moves, this is the mother of all my moves" Now we get to read "Trump has distanced himself" meaning it's failing and Musk is gonna be sacrificed without a thought "I don't know what Musk did, he acted like a loose cannon but I fired him for his incompetence"
The people Trump fired this way in the past didn't pay for his campaign.
Trump works for Musk, not the other way around.
If you think Trump cares if people did things for him, even Musk, maybe you should talk to one of the dozens of contractors Trump has stiffed over the years.
Oh, one can dream.
There's still time to die a hero Elon. All you have to do is commit hari-kari and I will build you a statue.
Will the statue be a dual flush model?
I will make sure it's very attractive to pigeons. It's what Elon would have wanted RIP
Will the statue look like this?
The fall-out between Trump and Musk is going to be explosive! And it will come. Sooner than we think, I'd guess.
If Canadian and European movie theatres want to boost attendance, they might want to think about screening the whole thing.
When Trump inevitably threatens to have him deported, it's going to be the comedy event of the year. Oscar worthy.
This would make my year. I hope you’re right
Defunding the nation, and undermining its function, is the win they wanted, and they're getting it.
People forget the point is to hand things over to corporate America. Hence this article is out of touch, and based on the author's feelings about Musk's feeling...
...whilst completely being ignorant of the plan. The plan is corporate run libertarian fifedoms. Corporate mini-states.
The plan is corporate run libertarian fifedoms. Corporate mini-states.
Or as we used to call them back when we were still a geopolitical enemy of Russia, "oligarchs."
With limited time before their tenure ends, DOGE officials are desperate to show results.
Uh first I'm hearing of this
What is this limited time thing?
When they were selling DOGE during the campaign, the pitch was they’d have a year or something to do their thing. The EO might have it spelled out can’t recall. But they also said they would just be an advisory group? Not insider threat hackers and political commissars at the top of every agency. Not sure why they are sweating a time limit since they dont care about any other law, regulation or protocol. I guess if they don’t deliver enough, Trump won’t do another EO extending their presence? They’re literally reworking agency stuff so that the DOGE staff have to sign off on commissioners actions, hiring etc so are they just going to revert that once the clock strikes midnight for DOGE?
I suppose the idea is that the admin wants to lock in all the creepy shit from project 2025 prior to mid terms since they know that all of it will end up being wildly unpopular and will result in republican losses in congress and potentially gridlock from that point forward… but again, their playbook essentially calls for the end of democracy, so why are they sweating something like the midterms…
Next: Elon Musk will try to fake one and will pull a full on Eric-Cartman-style "screw you guys, I'm going home" when his incompetence is inevitably revealed..
I don't think it will even matter if it's fake. They keep talking about that $8 billion cut they made when it was immediately uncovered that it was actually $8 million. Like a week later they're still saying it was billions.
Those MAGA idiots
Seriously, Musk is fit... Fit for a short tour of the inside of a whicker basket.
Switch that to the wicker man, and I'm listening...
Typical of useless employees: show some results even if they are in detriment to the business. The important thing is to show that you are doing something.
They'll make something up. If they actually care about corruption, and I don't believe they do, that shit takes a lot of time to uncover. You need subject matter experts, forensic accountants and a bunch of lawyers, not a handful of 20 year old tech bros
Yes where are the weapons of mass corruption?
Maybe Saddam Husein can help?
Oh no they hung him!
oh no they hung him!
Hanged*
Sorry, not usually that person but this one drives me nuts because literally everyone gets it wrong, including TV, movies, news.
I guess at this point, it's gotten the "literally" treatment, and "hung" has become valid since it's used so much.
Thank you, I am literate and opinionated but not educated 😀.
Part of me wonders whether the whole thing is just a set up so Trump can look good for shutting them down...
No, that would require planning and forethought.
DOGE was always just an excuse to fire a bunch of government workers, cancel contracts (except for Musk), and run the government into the ground. If trump did fire Musk for overreach it would be afger the damage is done and trump will just proclaim mission accomplished.
You’re giving too much forethought for a plan, but Trump thinks that way about everyone. He’s not just a bully but a toxic boss who always has someone lined up to be the fall guy.
The goal was always to fire a bunch of workers and replace them with sycophants: people actually trying to do their job inhibited the damage in trumps first term, so nope the priority is sycophants. Sycophants. everywhere. But every action needs a fall guy
