They’re not a “secret group” in the sense that we don’t know who they are – we know who they are. But the things they’re doing are a “secret” if nobody can verify what those things are.
I’d say all the butthurt people filing lawsuits make it clear they’re actually doing it, compared to the unverified bragging by every other agency in every previous administration.
The Legal Resistance got exposed.
I’m not a lawyer, but I do wonder about having random local judges proclaim some executive action at a national level should be blocked because they feel like it. Kinda like making up crimes and indicting your political opponents in captive jurisdictions where they won’t get a fair trial.
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Tusli approved.
DOGE now has a website (and is hiring!), where you can see stats on the workforce in various departments, their average salary and so forth.
https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106601b01b90
Savings will be posted there shortly as well.
Informative website
Here’s a fun parody version of DOGE
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Trump has been criticized for cutting a destructive swath through the federal bureaucracy. Here’s some context for why that makes sense for him. The article also discusses the merits of moving most of the bureaucracy headquarters out of DC.
Bureaucratic resistance to Trump was legion and legendary in his first administration. A Napolitan Institute survey in January found that 46% of federal managers are still willing to ignore the president’s orders — not because those orders are illegal, but simply because they don’t agree.
Achieving that vision requires moving much of the federal government out of DC, where agencies are more likely to hire from a different and more nationally representative talent pool.
Trump has already proved it’s possible to move agencies, and that such moves have benefits.
In 2019, the president announced the Bureau of Land Management headquarters would move from DC to Colorado — i.e., a location closer to the land that BLM actually manages. Nearly 90% of DC-based employees subsequently quit.
Not only did that save the government money, but it allowed the bureau to hire new workers in a purple state — workers who are less likely to reflect the ideological biases of the DC swamp. President Joe Biden moved the bureau back to DC in 2021.
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See, I would think this would be mainstream headline-worthy material. Everyone can relate to the notion that if you do not follow your boss’s orders you get unceremoniously fired. But these facts are instead swept under the rug in favor of a narrative about the loyal career civil servants being unfairly kicked out by a tyrant.
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Survey says: “Among the managers who voted for Trump, 78% would follow the president’s order and 19% would do what they thought was right.”
I think the problem is Trump, because everyone is questioning his orders. I don’t recall this being an issue under any other administration.
And why isn’t anyone talking about Trump’s handlers like they talked about Biden’s handlers? Trump is being handed orders to sign that he knows very little about, he doesn’t even pretend to know even while being recorded by TV crews.
I think it’s a night and day comparison though - Biden was hidden away and rarely gave any speeches, let alone free form interviews or Q&A with the press, and even then he managed to botch many of them attempting to read the teleprompter. Trump gives sit down interviews and Q&A’s more than any recent president except Obama, so he’s happy to talk about all these new policies. I’m sure plenty of them were crafted by policy advisors of course over the last few years, ala Project 2025 and similar conservative thinkers, but that doesn’t make them “handlers”.
Said another way, I think at least Trump understands at a high level, if not in all the details, what he’s signing when it comes to laws or executive orders.
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This is just the kind of thing DOGE is finding that makes them important- political graft under the guise of NGO funding. $20B slush fund via the EPA.
Power Forward Communities’ grant was one of just eight Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants that the EPA doled out in April 2024 and that, altogether, totaled $20 billion. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Feb. 13 that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials discovered that the Biden administration parked that same $20 billion at an outside financial institution before leaving office, limiting the federal government’s oversight of the program.
“For an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant—it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud,” Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, alleged in an interview with the Free Beacon.
Power Forward Communities lists a large number of partners on its website that it works with to implement its mission. Among its partners are the Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count, two left-wing nonprofits founded by Abrams in the wake of her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election defeat.
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Social security upper management didn’t want to cooperate with DOGE and tried to fire a guy within SS who did. The story has a happy ending -
“They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE,” he posted, saying he received a phone call from his boss placing him on administrative leave.
“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA,” the post continued, according to screenshots seen by Bloomberg News and confirmed by two people who read the post before it was deleted. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”
Neither Dudek nor a Social Security spokesperson returned messages seeking comment. White House spokesman Harrison Fields called Dudek “a career Social Security anti-fraud expert”
Trump appointed him to be the Head of SS! Although this is a temporary vacancy pending senate confirmation of the permanent head, it does put the uncooperative bureaucracy in their place and sets good incentives for those willing to cooperate with their new Chief Executive.
The new guy also basically said there weren’t any 150 year olds on the payroll and there was some bad data being misinterpreted regarding some online posts to that effect.
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In the meantime, Chief Justice Roberts is considering the district judge restraining order on the executive branch. Read to the bottom of the article for the interesting list of amicus briefs including the one from 20 conservative state attorneys general
|Feb 18 2025|Amicus brief of Law Professors submitted.
|Feb 18 2025|Amicus brief of Former Public Officials and Legal Scholars submitted.|
|Feb 18 2025|Amicus brief of New Civil Liberties Alliance submitted.|
|Feb 19 2025|Reply of applicant Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, et al. filed.|
|Feb 19 2025|Amicus brief of State of Florida and 19 other States submitted.|
Following up on this no-oversight off balance sheet $20b slush fund from the waning days of the Biden admin, a partisan DOJ lawyer quit rather than investigate possible fraud in these “environmental justice” handouts.
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Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people,
Perfect - all DOGE wants is for these federal employees to tell them about those critical services being provided. So why all the outrage and hostile reactions?
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Even simpler, are the government paychecks going to real people?
The German exit polls are in. The AfD did not do as well as expected. If they exclude the AfD, the “conservatives” cannot make a majority even with the previously unworkable coalition partners of the SPD. Are they going to partner with the radical greens?
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Do you know what was the forecast for AfD before the election?
–TIA
