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DOGE Track

345 points| donohoe | 10 days ago |dogetrack.info

209 comments

order

yabones|10 days ago

Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.

Papazsazsa|10 days ago

1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.

2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget

3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.

4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.

heisgone|10 days ago

The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.

Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.

pjc50|10 days ago

It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.

(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)

Isamu|10 days ago

>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.

You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.

It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.

It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.

sedawkgrep|10 days ago

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nxm|10 days ago

Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?

shrubble|10 days ago

Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?

It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.

reenorap|10 days ago

If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.

If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.

pjc50|10 days ago

The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.

I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.

The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.

chii|10 days ago

This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.

On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.

palmotea|10 days ago

> The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.

> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.

It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.

Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.

It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?

It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.

drstewart|10 days ago

>The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet.

It's a neat trick to pull to say something is a terrible disaster but also that you won't show why and that's by design. Impossible to refute.

hamdingers|10 days ago

The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.

Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).

bluescrn|10 days ago

Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?

Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?

mvdtnz|10 days ago

This is a conspiracy theory

plasma_beam|10 days ago

I like the layout of this site. However I feel it should be stated more prominently that the primary source of data are online news articles.

jacob_harris|10 days ago

This has been unfortunately necessary since DOGE has worked to really avoid any transparency or accountability. If FOIA or legal filings have more information, I do add them, but I always provide the source citation for you to know.

bjourne|10 days ago

Isn't that the point? That the oversight of DOGE is so bad that the only way to get information about its operations is through online news? Banana republic level of state behavior.

Sparyjerry|10 days ago

It's probably just sourcing data from doge.gov which already lists every single thing doge is cutting. This "tracking" website is just a way to add a democrat slant toa republican led project. This version literally starts with "tracking the damage" as their sub-header slogan.

aaa_aaa|10 days ago

To me improving "government efficieny" is unattainable for large states. Who claims to achieve this is a fool or a bad actor.

youknownothing|10 days ago

There is a lot of philosophical manoeuvring here but a common argument is that governments aren't supposed to be so much efficient as effective. It's not about maximising use of resources, but maximising outcomes. Companies already provide the efficiency angle in society, governments are there to provide a counter-balance. If we try to run governments as companies then we might as well not have governments at all.

lokar|10 days ago

Gore reduced the federal civilian workforce by 20% in a careful bi-partisan effort that did not really hurt effectiveness.

Clinton left office with the budget in surplus.

Government can work if you pick good leaders.

bfeynman|10 days ago

Basic knowledge of civic history and political science makes this point very salient. Anyone with a clue would know this from the beginning - that's why it was so terrifying to see what actually was motivating people, feels like the ultimate recipe for unchecked power and disaster with bad actors employing fools to do their bidding.

irl_zebra|10 days ago

Lots of organizations have massively increased government efficiency in the USA. 18F comes to mind as one.

burnt-resistor|10 days ago

The US also had a relatively very small government overall compared to many other countries and variably multiple areas are extremely under-resourced like product and worker health and safety generally.

AuryGlenz|10 days ago

So we shouldn’t try? Just let the budget expand forever?

If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.

Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.

estearum|10 days ago

Yep. Governments, by virtue of being the functional backstop on all possible negative outcomes, necessarily runs with enormous slack. The ones that do not simply break under stress and they're replaced over and over until a government emerges that figures out that extreme efficiency is a liability.

Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.

Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.

ikeashark|10 days ago

This websites seems incredibly biased and uses quite emotional language.

jacob_harris|10 days ago

It is biased. I do not think we can "both sides" the impact of DOGE here and I think the site makes its case for why it should be seen as a destructive force.

Sparyjerry|10 days ago

Doge.gov already has the most transparent listing of everything they are cutting. This other website that starts out its header with "Tracking The Damage" is clearly a biased attempt by democrats to discredit a program that was started by republicans. It's actually kind of sad people don't realize that the two-party system involves tribalism where no matter how good something is, the other side will call it bad if it wasn't their idea.

FrustratedMonky|10 days ago

This site is great.

But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.

And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.

jacob_harris|10 days ago

Thank you for the feedback!

I decided to not tackle the lies about "savings" because the math was so bad and it was quite frankly being covered much better by other organizations and sites. I also don't want to perpetuate the idea that this was about efficiency, since that and "IT Modernization" were more like a cover for DOGE's other activities.

I would like to add more graphics and charts, but I have been struggling a lot with how murky and noisy the data is. Charts communicate a certainty that I don't feel entirely comfortable presenting. One possibility might be to use them for timelines (like I do for the CIOs on the Enablers page), but if you have other suggestions, I'm always open to hear them! Thanks!

ahhhhnoooo|10 days ago

The problem with Doge was not that it was inefficient.... It's that it damaged a whole lot of essential infrastructure, exfiltrated a bunch of data, and generally destabilized a lot of essential systems.

Doing so but more efficiently would not have improved it.

baggachipz|10 days ago

Oh great, I was really hoping to get my blood boiling today. Reading about data breaches done in the light of day is appalling, infinitely more so when it's condoned by the government who's supposed to prevent such grift and violations of privacy. It will take a long time to recover from this insane timeline (if ever).

jccalhoun|10 days ago

Just today I ran into one of the very minor legacies of doge. When talking about conflict styles I used to have students take a survey on the US Institute of Peace's website. Doge shut it down. I guess that survey was taking up too much money to run... Now the only thing there is a press release stroking Trump's ego.

dfilppi|10 days ago

DOGE has no power. It produces information. Is the premise of this page that information about government operations is bad? If the goal is to persuade somebody that government should grow with no oversight forever, good luck. Democrats will read the site with horror. Republicans will cheer the accomplishments listed. People in neither camp probably won't pay attention, but if they do, they'll split down the middle.

squeegmeister|10 days ago

You might consider sharing this in the fednews subreddit. Awesome project

myrmidon|10 days ago

I think it is really important from time to time to shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives and form a somewhat subjective overpromise/underdeliver judgement (also looking at where, why and how they succeeded or failed).

To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard: Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.

My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.

I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...

coffeefirst|10 days ago

If you wanted to do this for real, your would double the size of 18F (which was doing extraordinary work), and given the Inspectors General a blank check to eliminate fraud. These are both apolitical entities. Frankly the only people this would upset is the legacy government contractors.

So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.

anthony_d|10 days ago

> My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.

That doesn’t seem inferior at all. There’s very little to be gained by doing everything the same but with less money; the only way to make an actual difference is to quit doing the stupid shit that’s expensive. That’s what 90% of the world means by efficiency, i.e. don’t do the things that don’t need done.

hobs|10 days ago

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zpeti|10 days ago

> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives

You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.

You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.

So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.

So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.

And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.

dlev_pika|10 days ago

One of the lessons of this Trump administration is that we *can* affect radical change, if the will is there.

I truly hope our future DSA gov takes this experience to heart.

burnt-resistor|10 days ago

Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, MbS, Netanyahu, Berdimuhamedow, and much of the worldwide pedophile oligarch class are celebrating all of their various, ascendant authoritarian restoration of de facto criminal aristocracy in multiple countries. Fascism rarely leaves peacefully once it takes hold.

jazz9k|10 days ago

[deleted]

wesleywt|10 days ago

OP then proceeds not to list the massive fraud.

reenorap|10 days ago

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javagram|10 days ago

The vast majority of federal spending is tied to programs like social security, Medicare, and the DoD which DOGE didn’t cut.

DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.

Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.

mint5|10 days ago

A man cuts back on his budget for vegetables and other healthy groceries to save money while also 10xing his spend on alcohol which he likes ice cold, surpassing the food budget by far.

Most people: “hey dude that’s a huge mistake for xy and z reasons”

There’s always one: “most Americans spend too much and save too little, we should applaud this guy!”

—- Edit - to head off any nit picking, 10x is illustrative not exact - It’s 3x up to $28B for ice while the usaid spend was either $22B for pure usaid spend, or $35B with co-managed other state dept stuff as of 2024. So depending on accounting, ice either far surpassed it or at least countered all cuts since the spend wasn’t fully eliminated . (And that’s not even touching on the moral turpitude of simply letting hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medicine rot as a consequence of the cuts as warned by the relevant inspector general before I’m assuming they were fired)

maerF0x0|10 days ago

One thing that could really help your position would be to speak specifically about one that doubled and why you believe it was wasteful besides HC/Budget. Were they not delivering value proportional (or better) to their growth?

triceratops|10 days ago

> The number of employees in some departments of the government almost doubled in 5 years

Which ones? By how many employees? If a department went from 2 to 4 people that isn't prima facie outrageous.

rurp|10 days ago

I can't believe anyone still believes DOGE was actually about cutting federal spending. The current party in power has spent the past year massively increasing the federal deficit and future debt. If they are serious about anything it certainly isn't balancing the federal budget.

ahhhhnoooo|10 days ago

You've set up a strawman, or are arguing against a position that's not relevant here. One can absolutely believe that spending should be made more efficient AND DOGE was a destructive and harmful disruption to essential spending.

lawn|10 days ago

Do you know how much money this administration is spending on ICE and the military?

righthand|10 days ago

Trump fired a bunch of people in his first term that’s why the numbers went back up under Biden. There seems to be a huge 4 year gap in peoples memories as well as no concept of what an acceptable number of government employees actually is. Just a whole bunch of “that’s a big number!”

The same thing happened with NY Times headline about spending $6B over 3 years on immigration services. Too much money! Now here we are $40B deep in one year for Dhs et al. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s spending on Dhs alone is expected to hit $480B by the end of his term. How’s that for reigning in spending?

We could have had healthcare, instead people chose hate, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

krapp|10 days ago

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spiderfarmer|10 days ago

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bryancoxwell|10 days ago

Well that’s a really, really easy thing to say. Curious if you’ve actually thought through how you’d go about that. If there weren’t any non-peaceful protests to participate in would you start one? How? Is it possible that it’s not that simple?

dilfred|10 days ago

How very very brave of you

JKCalhoun|10 days ago

Sorry, I absolutely abhor violence as a means to an end (and in all cases really).

jryan49|10 days ago

So we should all go out and get arrested and put and jail to solve nothing. Sounds like a plan...

youknownothing|10 days ago

Putting everything that DOGE has done, am I the only one who thinks that there is a teeny, tiny conflict of interest in Musk naming a department pretty much the same as one of the cryptocurrencies that he supports (Dogecoin)? Isn't that using the government for marketing?

krapp|10 days ago

Yes, when you set aside Musk buying Twitter and using it to platform white supremacists and extremists to help get Trump elected in exchange for benefits to his companies and direct control over private regulatory and financial data that allowed him to gain potential advantage over his competition and punish his enemies, naming your fake government office after your memecoin is also a problem.

People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.

mrguyorama|10 days ago

Trump sold beans in the oval office.

intermerda|10 days ago

If the list of crimes and improprieties of this administration were ranked by their severity, this one will surely get a 5-digit rank.

mlnj|10 days ago

And THAT is the biggest issue you have with the whole ordeal?