It’s Okay to Trust DOGE
In 2017 – the most recent data I could find — the U.S. Office of Personnel Management reported that there were 1,869,986 civilian employees working in the federal government.
None of these people were elected.
These unelected employees had, and continue to have, access to your data. Employees at the IRS, for instance, know how much money you’ve made, from whom you got paid, when, and how much in taxes you paid (or didn’t pay) in any given year.
The good people at the FBI, CIA, and especially the NSA also were not elected. These agencies spy on citizens routinely, and even more vigorously after the passage of the poorly named Patriot Act.
The wealth of data they have collected is inspiring.
Who’s Calling?
It’s not just the government, though. As I’ve mentioned previously, if you carry a cellphone, your carrier knows everywhere you’ve been, when you were there, and for how long. They know who you called or messaged, where the person was that you called, and for how long you spoke. They have the contents of your messages. They know which apps you are using, and can access the sites you have visited, when you visited them, and so forth. To say that your carrier can paint a vivid portrait of you is a charming understatement.
No employee or official at your cellphone company was elected. Neither were any of the people at the various medical, insurance, or private establishments with which you have had data dealings.
Choosing Teams
Elon Musk heads the new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, as we now hear almost daily, was not elected, nor were the vigorously effective people who are working under him in their short-term, limited assignments to uncover wasteful spending at the federal level.
DOGE employees have access to the same data all those other unelected federal employees had in the old regime. You remember that one, right? It was led by a senile figurehead controlled by unelected bureaucrats who were hellbent on converting the world to their perverse religion. What were they doing with your data?
Unless you are a strict Luddite and have no online presence, credit card, cellphone, car, or Social Security number, your privacy is a thing of the past. The best we can now hope for is prudence from those in charge of our data.
We have two choices: We can have the woke people of the old regime accessing our data and using it for their unscrupulous purposes, or we can have our people, the new regime, accessing our data and using it for our purposes. Choose well.
Crying Wolf
In a February 13 article in which she describe Musk running DOGE as a “digital coup,” popular writer and podcaster Naomi Wolf demonstrated that she fails to understand this. She thinks that Trump’s orders will make Musk “more powerful than any nation-state, more powerful than the WEF and the WHO, more powerful than any prime minister, and more powerful than any other CEO or leader of any other set of corporations.”
Dude. That’s a lot of power. Prime ministers can start wars. Can Musk do this at DOGE? Maybe — if Emmanuel Macron has set the password to France’s nukes as your Social Security number. Otherwise, no.
Wolf says she is “not a coder.” She says she can’t understand why Musk hired top coders to build DOGE code; she even asked why he needs any engineers at all This is like saying you’re not a cook, and you can’t understand why a restaurant hired a Michelin-starred chef who then hired line cooks. But you’re sure the restaurant will be no good.
Like others, Wolf frets about “teenagers” and “young” and “inexperienced” engineers at DOGE. She ought to meet the kids the Marines put in charge of massively destructive weapons.
Wolf also wonders how Musk’s work will benefit his own businesses, such as Tesla and SpaceX, and suggests he’s only helping Trump for some kind of personal payout. The world’s richest man didn’t exactly need the money he’d be paid for this job. Would we be better off with a poor guy in charge of DOGE?
Cheerful News
DOGE is a rare thing: an actual working government program. Meaning it’s working for our benefit, not bureaucrats’. Have a look what they are up to.
- The old regime tried transforming the world in its woke image, handing out vast amounts of suspicious money. DOGE is exposing its nefarious efforts. To mention just two of a myriad of revelations already made public, some $1.9 billion allocated for the Department of Housing and Urban Development that the previous regime “misplaced” has been found.
- The Social Security Administration has on its books, and has been paying, five million people over the age of 140.
DOGE is already inspiring other agencies. Take the Environmental Protection Agency, where newly confirmed chief Lee Zeldin, accessing that agency’s data in DOGE fashion, found and “cancelled a $50 MILLION Biden-era environmental justice grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, which believes ‘climate justice travels through a Free Palestine.’”
The list goes on and on.
Things are looking up. Let’s try to enjoy the victories while we have them — and keep building on them so we can actually turn the country around for good and not just for a while.
William M. Briggs is a senior contributor to The Stream, the author of Uncertainty and maintains an active and lively blog at wmbriggs.com. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in statistics and studies the philosophy of science, the use and misuses of uncertainty, the corruption of science and the uselessness of most predictions. He began life as a cryptologist for the Air Force, slipped into weather and climate forecasting, and matured into an epistemologist.