Let’s Have a Look at DOGE

ITM unpacks the tangled web of Elon Musk's antics

One of Trump’s oldest boasts is that he only hires the best people. His obsession with pedigree has produced countless blunders for his political aspirations. One mistake the reality TV president seems to have learned from over the years is to look beyond “central casting” when filling out the ranks of his administration. Trump once hired people like General James “Mad Dog” Mattis and Rex Tillerson based solely on their resumes, ignoring how ideologically opposed they were to his isolationist, authoritarian views.

Loyalty, not competence, is now his sole defining lodestar. Government employees swear an oath to the Constitution. Lawyers are bound by strict ethical obligations, as former mayor turned apex court jester Rudy Giuliani and others have learned over the years. Trump expects people to ignore their duties in favor of his bidding, and as we’ve learned with Jan. 6^th, he’ll just pardon anyone who runs afoul of that pesky thing called the law.

I’ve lived in Long Beach for the past eight years. Long Beach has a pretty sizable aerospace presence. I’ve been out with people from practically all the big space companies, including Boeing, SpaceX, Airbus, as well as plenty of other smaller ones no one’s ever heard of.

The SpaceX people always struck me as a little odd, even back in the days before Elon went full right-wing. Practically all of them I met noted that they could make more money at other companies, but believed in Elon’s mission, a peculiar defensive posturing. In 2019, A spouse of one of my close friends specifically chose SpaceX over others because he wanted to be part of the team that made it to Mars.

Elon Musk employs thousands of competent, serious people across his many companies. Many of those people could make more money elsewhere, but choose places like Tesla or SpaceX out of their belief, however misguided, that they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Musk has essentially convinced a large portion of his workforce to adopt the mindset that they’re serving the public, not his own pockets.

Based on the loyalty that so many in his workforce have demonstrated, you would think that DOGE would be staffed with the best people, considering they’d actually be public servants. According to the Trump administration, Elon isn’t even the head of DOGE. You can’t make this shit up.

You may have some questions. What is DOGE? Who works for DOGE? Is DOGE even a real thing?

The last question is probably the simplest to answer. DOGE is real. Sort of. On Jan. 20^th, Trump signed an executive order renaming The United States Digital Service to the United States DOGE Service, keeping the same acronym. The USDS was created by President Obama in 2014 to help other government agencies with data efficiency. Within the new USDS, Trump also created the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which is essentially the DOGE we hear about in the news.

The temporary part is important. Musk is designated a Special Government Employee, which means he technically can’t work more than 130 days out of the calendar year. There isn’t really anyone keeping track of that. SGE’s are bound by ethics rules, but rules are only good if there’s someone to enforce them. Nobody at the Department of Justice is going to say anything about Musk’s workload.

So what is Musk’s role in DOGE? He technically isn’t the head of part of DOGE that falls under the USDS, but he’s clearly pulling all the strings. The strings are pretty spread out across the government.

Propublica put out an interesting list tracking what we know about DOGE-affiliated figures. If you scroll through the list, you’ll find a 19-year-old child, alongside the 25-year-old racist who our Bloated Care Bear Vice President defended despite his anti-Indian sentiments. You’ll also see some serious people with longtime ties to Musk, including Steve Davis, current CEO of Musk’s The Boring Company (which has been promising high-speed tunnels for years that are nowhere to be found, except for a small circuit connecting a few hotels in Las Vegas).

What’s perhaps most fascinating about this list is how spread out the DOGE members are within the federal government.

The two most common areas of employment for DOGE-affiliated government staffers are the Executive Office of the President, which is comprised of over a dozen agencies, including the USDS, and the Office of Personnel Management, which is supposed to be an independent agency. OPM is basically a big HR department for the entire federal government.

OPM is not a political agency. You’ve probably never heard of anyone who’s run it. I could name a single former acting Director of OPM, but only because I’ve dated a lot of lesbian lawyers. Naturally, anything impartial (conservative synonym for radical Marxist agenda) is an apex threat to our current administration.

Trump has been at war with OPM, recently firing much of its staff. It’s not hard to see why he doesn’t like it. Trump has no place for an independent DOJ, let alone a whole agency tasked with the care of the executive workforce, many of whom are career civil servants who are supposed to keep their jobs no matter who’s president. Perhaps the most notorious of Musk’s cronies at OPM is the aforementioned 19-year-old racist, a child named Edward Coristine, better known as “Big Balls.” At 19 years old, Big Balls is now a senior adviser at the State Department. God only knows what qualifications are needed for a junior adviser.

While DOGE is ostensibly a government agency, few of Elon’s cronies are actually placed there. They’re pretty spread out. Why run an organized team when you can just throw a wrecking ball at the entire federal government and all three million people who work there?

Another Musk sycophant at OPM helps us understand what passes as method amongst this madness. Brian Bjelde is a 44-year-old who joined SpaceX in 2003. Bjelde is currently a VP in SpaceX’s HR department. Bjelde appears to be in charge of the efforts to gut OPM, a task he once carried out at Twitter (sometimes known as X) after Musk bought it.

If you scroll through that ProPublica list, you’ll see a lot of people with ties to Musk’s various companies, which he doesn’t seem to care much about. How can he run SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Twitter, xAI, and all his other companies while he’s busy slashing the government with Big Balls? How can Brian work at OPM while still employed as a VP at SpaceX, at least according to his LinkedIn page?

The short answer is that most of these people are probably not being paid. Nobody knows for sure. Things get a little more complicated when you factor in DOGE-affiliated staff like Katie Miller, wife of Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. Then again, when you look at her social media, maybe she’s moonlighting as a DOGE spokeswoman when she’s not busy as a housewife. Her bio certainly doesn’t mention anything noteworthy besides the man she’s married to.

We probably won’t know for a few weeks, if not longer, how many DOGE staffers are actually compensated for their work. The unpaid labor seems to explain why so many DOGE-affiliated personnel are barely old enough to drink. The initial Big Balls saga reminded me of my time in Long Beach meeting SpaceX staffers, who once professed a strange devotion to Elon Musk.

Where are those people? Elon Musk employs thousands of people across his companies. Every news organization in the country is tracking DOGE, not just the transgender Thomas the Tank Engine memer. They’re not finding a lot of talent. Sure he’s got a few people from his orbit along for the ride, but not many. Why does he need to hire children when people like Brian will happily bounce from company to company with him?

We think of men like Trump and Musk as having large legions of supporters. That’s certainly true to some extent. Trump did get tens of millions of votes in the last election.

Remember Trump’s hush money trial? He tried to organize a protest of his perceived slights on the scale of Jan. 6. Not many people showed up.

Musk has people like Brian and Steve who will do his dirty work from company to company, almost certainly undercompensated. Children like Big Balls might work for free, at least for a while. But the vast majority of people who worked at SpaceX, Tesla, etc. stayed put. It’s (probably) not because Big Balls is a better engineer. People with families and mortgages are less inclined to follow around those with proven track records of being stingy bosses.

Musk, like Trump, does not seem to be a big fan of hiring the best people. One would think that a serious effort to curtail trillions in government spending would probably not be led by a teenage racist. The real irony amidst all of this is that it’s not the executive branch’s job to root out government waste.

Our system of government tasks the legislative branch with oversight over the federal government. Impartial institutions like OPM exist to address the needs and deficiencies of the employees themselves, but it’s Congress’ job to determine how much money these agencies need to do their jobs. Somebody was doing this before Elon and Big Balls came along.

Elon has a very patchwork approach to life. He famously once drove to Sacramento to rip out a Twitter server farm himself three days before Christmas. He hires children and moves people like Brian around from his companies and his pretend government agency because he doesn’t have a wide circle of people that he trusts in his orbit.

For now, Elon has broad latitude over DOGE’s daily chaos. The amount of rehiring’s that have been needed from agencies pertaining to the handling of nuclear waste and bird flu stresses his piecemeal, scattershot approach to penny pinching. Congress isn’t interested in regulating his antics. Chuck Grassley said so yesterday.

The Courts have and will continue to restrict Musk’s nonsense where it’s clearly illegal. The Supreme Court has dramatically expanded the power of the Executive Branch in the past 20 years. There aren’t a lot of guardrails saving us from this fool, other than perhaps one of the most important ones. The Courts have sided with DOGE in a few recent cases regarding data access. They’re going to have more victories.

Trump tires of people. He doesn’t like sharing the spotlight. He’s somewhat more beholden to Musk than somebody like, say, Steve Bannon and all the shirts he wears at once, but he also can’t run for reelection (at least, we hope).

The old Elon and his many shirts

DOGE does exist. You could even argue that DOGE is somewhat serious. DOGE is also poorly constructed. DOGE is not a cohesive unit.

DOGE exists for as long as Elon is having fun in his new sandbox. History has shown us that he’s got a short attention span, but the federal government is probably more fun to wreck than Twitter. DOGE has no infrastructure. DOGE is essentially just Elon’s island of misfit toys.

When he’s gone, there’s not going to be any DOGE left. The man doesn’t have the attention span to build anything stronger than a house of cards. What do we know about houses of cards? They fall down.