Last week we covered how the government successfully convinced Judge Colleen McMahon to order the plaintiffs in the DOGE/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) lawsuit to “claw back” the viral deposition videos they had posted to YouTube — videos showing DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh stumbling through questions about how they used ChatGPT to decide which humanities grants to kill, and struggling mightily to define “DEI” despite it apparently being the entire basis for their work.
The government’s argument was that the videos had led to harassment and death threats against Fox and Cavanaugh — the same two who had no problem obliterating hundreds of millions in already approved grants with a simplistic ChatGPT prompt, but apparently couldn’t handle the public seeing them struggle to explain themselves under oath. The government argued the videos needed to come down. The judge initially agreed and ordered the plaintiffs to pull them. As we noted at the time, archivists had already uploaded copies to the Internet Archive and distributed them as torrents, because that’s how the internet works.
The ruling is worth reading in full, because McMahon manages to be critical of both sides while ultimately landing firmly against the government’s attempt to suppress the videos. She spends a good chunk of the opinion scolding the plaintiffs for what she clearly views as a procedural end-run — they sent the full deposition videos to chambers on a thumb drive without ever filing them on the docket or seeking permission to do so, which she sees as a transparent attempt to manufacture a “judicial documents” argument that would give the videos a presumption of public access.
McMahon doesn’t buy it:
When deciding a motion for summary judgment, the Court wants only those portions of a deposition on which a movant actually relies, and does not want to be burdened with irrelevant testimony merely because counsel chose to, or found it more convenient to, submit it. And because videos cannot be filed on the public docket without leave of court, there was no need for the rule to contain a specific reference to video transcriptions; the only way to get such materials on the docket (and so before the Court) was to make a motion, giving the Court the opportunity to decide whether the videos should be publicly docketed. This Plaintiffs did not do.
But if Plaintiffs wanted to know whether the Court’s rule applied to video-recorded depositions, they could easily have sought clarification – just as they could easily have filed a motion seeking leave to have the Clerk of Court accept the videos and place them on the public record. Again, they did not. At the hearing held on March 17, 2026, on Defendants’ present motion for a protective order, counsel for ACLS Plaintiffs, Daniel Jacobson, acknowledged the reason, stating “Frankly, your Honor, part of it was just the amount of time that it would have taken” to submit only the portions of the videos on which Plaintiffs intended to rely. Hr’g Tr., 15:6–7. In other words, “It would have been too much work.” That is not an acceptable excuse.
The Court is left with the firm impression that at least “part of” the reason counsel did not ask for clarification was because they wished to manufacture a “judicial documents” argument and did not wish to be told they could not do so. The Court declines to indulge that tactic.
Fair enough. But having knocked the plaintiffs for their procedural maneuver, the judge then turns to the actual question: has the government shown “good cause” under Rule 26(c) to justify a protective order keeping the videos off the internet? And the answer is a pretty resounding no. And that’s because public officials acting in their official capacities have significantly diminished privacy interests in their official conduct:
The Government’s motion fails for three independent reasons. First, the materials at issue concern the conduct of public officials acting in their official capacities, which substantially diminishes any cognizable privacy interest and weighs against restriction. Second, the Government has not made the particularized showing of a “clearly defined, specific and serious injury” required by Rule 26(c). Third, the Government has not demonstrated that the prospective relief it seeks would be effective in preventing the harms it identifies, particularly where those harms arise from the conduct of third-party actors beyond the control of the parties.
She cites Garrison v. Louisiana (the case that extended the “actual malice” standard from NY Times v. Sullivan) for the proposition that the public’s interest “necessarily includes anything which might touch on an official’s fitness for office,” and that “[f]ew personal attributes are more germane to fitness for office than dishonesty, malfeasance, or improper motivation.” Given that these depositions are literally about how government officials decided to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, that framing fits.
The judge also directly calls out the government’s arguments about harassment and reputational harm, and essentially says: that’s the cost of being a public official whose official conduct is being scrutinized. Suck it up, DOGE bros.
Reputational injury, public criticism, and even harsh commentary are not unexpected consequences of disclosing information about public conduct. They are foreseeable incidents of public scrutiny concerning government action. Where, as here, the material sought to be shielded by a protective order is testimony about the actions of government officials acting in their official capacities, embarrassment and reputational harm arising from the public’s reaction to official conduct is not the sort of harm against which Rule 26(c) protects. Public officials “accept certain necessary consequences” of involvement in public affairs, including “closer public scrutiny than might otherwise be the case.”
As for the death threats and harassment — which McMahon explicitly says she takes seriously and calls “deeply troubling” and “highly inappropriate” — she notes that there are actual laws against threats and cyberstalking, and that Rule 26(c) protective orders aren’t a substitute for law enforcement doing its job:
There are laws against threats and harassment; the Government and its witnesses have every right to ask law enforcement to take action against those who engage in such conduct, by enforcing federal prohibitions on interstate threats and cyberstalking, see, e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 875(c), 2261A, as well as comparable state laws. Rule 26(c) is not a substitute for those remedies.
And then there’s the practical reality McMahon acknowledges directly: it’s too damn late. The videos have already spread everywhere. A protective order aimed solely at the plaintiffs would accomplish approximately nothing.
At bottom, the Government has not shown that the relief it seeks is capable of addressing the harm it identifies. The videos have already been widely disseminated across multiple platforms, including YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit, where they have been shared, reposted, and viewed by at least hundreds of thousands of users, resulting in near-instantaneous and effectively permanent global distribution. This is a predictable consequence of dissemination in the modern digital environment, where content can be copied, redistributed, and indefinitely preserved beyond the control of any single actor. Given this reality, a protective order directed solely at Plaintiffs would not meaningfully limit further dissemination or mitigate the Government’s asserted harms.
Separately, the plaintiffs asked for attorney’s fees, and McMahon denied that too, noting that she wasn’t going to “reward Plaintiffs for bypassing its procedures” even though the government’s motion ultimately failed. So everyone gets a little bit scolded here. But the bottom line is clear: you don’t get to send unqualified DOGE kids to nuke hundreds of millions in grants using a ChatGPT prompt, and then ask a court to hide the video of them trying to explain themselves under oath.
Releasing full deposition videos is certainly not the norm, but given that these are government officials who were making massively consequential decisions with a chatbot and no discernible expertise, the world is much better off with this kind of transparency — even if Justin and Nate had to face some people on the internet making fun of them for it.
Look, I get it. Government waste is real. Bureaucratic bloat is real. The desire to have a federal government that spends taxpayer money wisely and operates without unnecessary friction? That’s a pretty standard and quite reasonable desire in American politics. So when Elon Musk showed up promising he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending by bringing the vaunted “efficiency” of the tech world to the government, a lot of people — not just MAGA diehards, but regular people who’d spent time cursing at a federal website built in 2003 or waiting on hold with the DMV — thought: sure, maybe give it a shot. A decade of fawning tech press coverage about Elon Musk will do that to your priors.
We now have the receipts on how that went. And they’re absolutely damning.
Let’s start with the most basic question: did DOGE save the government money? Because that was, you know, apparently the whole point (or so we were told).
The answer, as the Times bluntly puts it:
But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.
Spending went up. Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts during the campaign, started walking that back almost immediately after the election, and the actual result was that the government spent more money. The entire exercise was supposed to pay for itself many times over. Instead, the taxpayer funded an $81 million operation that produced negative returns.
But DOGE had that website — the “Wall of Receipts” — proudly tallying up all those billions in savings, right? About that. The Times went through the 40 largest items on DOGE’s claimed savings list:
In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.
At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.
Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.
Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.
Two fake line items on a spreadsheet claimed more “savings” than 25,000 other entries combined. Of the 40 biggest claims, 28 were wrong. The 13 biggest were all wrong. The very first day the “Wall of Receipts” went live, its largest claim was an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was off by a factor of 1,000 — the contract was actually worth $8 million, as many folks reported at the time. That’s the kind of error that would get you fired from an introductory accounting course, and these were the people supposedly bringing precision and transparency to the federal government.
The accounting trick DOGE relied on most heavily is worth understanding, because it reveals whether this was mere incompetence or something more deliberate. The Times explains that in many cases, DOGE simply lowered the “ceiling value” of contracts — the theoretical maximum the government could spend, not what it was actually spending — and then claimed the full difference as “savings.” A defense contractor CEO explained this perfectly to stock analysts:
This summer, CACI’s chief executive, John Mengucci, told stock analysts that the change was meaningless.
“It doesn’t change a thing for this company,” he said. His company had always expected to be paid about $2 billion over the contract’s life span. And even if the contract ever did reach the ceiling, he said, the Pentagon could just raise it again.
“There’s no reduction of revenue,” Mr. Mengucci said.
Or to put it in even more understandable terms:
“Does lowering the maximum limit on your credit card save you any money?” said Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies federal spending. “No, it does not.”
The core of DOGE’s operations was to manufacture pretend statistics so that Musk and friends could claim savings that weren’t real. It was how DOGE manufactured the appearance of progress while delivering essentially nothing. After DOGE initially claimed $55 billion in savings, the website’s own documentation only supported $16.5 billion. Media analysis then showed half of that was a single data entry error (that $8 billion instead of $8 million). A Politico analysis found DOGE had cut only $1.4 billion in actual spending — and even that money couldn’t reduce the deficit because it would be returned to agencies that were legally obligated to spend it. More than one-third of DOGE’s contract cancellations yielded no monetary savings at all.
The Garcia report traces a trajectory that any honest observer should find embarrassing:
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk claimed he could reduce the federal deficit by eliminating “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, promising the destruction of the American social safety net. He began walking back these goals after President Trump’s election victory. In early 2025, Mr. Musk appeared on a variety of conservative-leaning podcasts and media outlets baselessly claiming that fake or stolen Social Security numbers led to more than $500 billion in fraud. Media analysis classified Mr. Musk’s claims about waste and fraud in the federal government as lacking evidence or misleading, saying that he misconstrued Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports or lacked basic understanding of the contracts in question.
So: $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $55 billion claimed, then $16.5 billion documented, then $1.4 billion confirmed, then spending went up anyway. That’s quite a trajectory for something that was sold as bringing Silicon Valley precision and efficiency to government.
Okay, fine — DOGE didn’t save much money. But did it at least make the government run better? Did it cut red tape, speed things up, make services less awful?
No. It did the opposite. And this is the part that should really bother anyone who genuinely wanted government reform.
The Garcia report documents in excruciating detail how DOGE’s “efficiency” measures actually added bureaucratic layers:
In one example, a State Department employee described a new requirement for a 250-word essay, extra forms, and days of work and approvals needed to hire a vendor for an embassy event, which previously would have taken a single day. In another, a NASA employee was required to write several detailed paragraphs justifying a purchase of fastening bolts. FDA employees have stated that DOGE requirements have caused significant delays in routine food monitoring tests for items like exposure to heavy metals because spending for every step—from purchasing lab supplies to paying to ship samples between labs—now requires separate department-level approval.
Much efficient. Very savings.
As one federal employee stated:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to continue to work, which I fear is the point.”
Meanwhile, the services Americans actually rely on got measurably worse:
At the Social Security Administration (SSA), wait times for a callback ballooned to as high as two and a half hours for assistance between January and March 2025. Americans attempting to access the SSA website for assistance frequently found the webpage down or unresponsive as DOGE recklessly implemented changes while cutting information technology (IT) staff. SSA eventually discarded several of the supposed fraud checks implemented by DOGE because they significantly delayed claim processing without meaningfully combatting fraud. Career employees reportedly knew that DOGE’s anti-fraud measures would make little difference but were intimidated into silence for fear of losing their jobs. DOGE also implemented a new requirement for Social Security applicants to verify their identity in person instead of over the phone if they aren’t able to do so online, while at the same time closing regional and local offices and reducing the workforce at those offices that remained. More than six million seniors have to drive nearly 50 miles round trip to reach their nearest Social Security office, more than twice the average distance an elderly person expects to drive in a day.
This was a heist dressed up as a reform — and the damage to everyday Americans wasn’t a bug.
Layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led to delays in clinical trials and getting new drugs to sick patients. Remaining FDA workers reported struggling to meet statutorily mandated schedules for approving both tobacco products and medical products after the Trump Administration announced 3,500 job cuts across the agency. At one point, FDA drug center leadership resorted to asking drug review staff to volunteer to work on contracting and acquisition tasks because the layoffs had eliminated the entire contracting office.
The Times talked to people on the receiving end of the small-dollar cuts that were DOGE’s actual handiwork. An organization providing counseling and rehabilitation services to torture survivors had to close its centers and stop paying 75% of its staff. A program that sent museum staff into low-income Baltimore schools to teach parents about child development was terminated by form letter because it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” Research projects were killed at the stage where data had been collected but results hadn’t been published, rendering the government’s entire prior investment wasted. And the impact on American people was real.
Mr. Roehm said he was particularly concerned about possible suicides — around a quarter of the torture victims the group served had recently experienced suicidal ideation.
“We know for sure that survivors we are no longer able to serve are suffering,” he said.
Those dollar amounts were small, compared with DOGE’s largest claims. That is, in effect, how DOGE ultimately saved so little but still caused so much disruption. For small business and local communities, relatively modest sums had major effects.
“It’s the small numbers that hurt people,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose company, the Pulse of GovCon, tracks government contracts.
This is how DOGE managed to simultaneously save almost nothing and cause enormous disruption: the big-dollar claims were fake, and the real cuts targeted things that were individually small but collectively devastating to the people who depended on them.
And then there’s the corruption angle, which is where this moves from incompetence into something much uglier.
DOGE staff were embedded at nearly every executive branch agency, and many of them were associates or employees of Musk’s own companies. The conflicts of interest were staggering and barely concealed. The Garcia report details how DOGE staff were involved in firing FDA investigators responsible for oversight of Musk’s biotech company Neuralink. DOGE took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which just happened to be the agency that would directly oversee a mobile payments function Musk wanted to add to X. The DOGE staffer who oversaw firings at the CFPB owned approximately $365,000 in shares of companies regulated by the Bureau. Executive branch employees are generally prohibited from working on matters in which they hold a personal stake, but there’s no indication this person took any such precautions.
Elon Musk and DOGE’s active involvement in knee-capping agencies with which he has a direct conflict makes clear that Musk, DOGE, and the broader Trump Administration are focused on weakening accountability for the American people while advancing their own interests.
DOGE staff at the IRS initiated mass firing of skilled specialists responsible for auditing the complex tax filings of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The Congressional Budget Office has found that reductions in funding for IRS tax enforcement reduce federal revenues. So DOGE’s “efficiency” move at the IRS will likely cost the government more in uncollected taxes than it could ever have saved.
The same pattern held at the CFPB, which since 2011 had received $7.3 billion in funding but returned over $21 billion to consumers through enforcement actions — a three-fold return on investment. DOGE gutted it anyway. The IRS Direct File program — a free electronic tax filing service that 86% of users said increased their trust in the IRS and was projected to save taxpayers $11 billion once fully operational — was killed after lobbying by for-profit tax preparation companies.
And perhaps most alarming were the data security violations that I’ve written about multiple times. A whistleblower from SSA reported that DOGE operatives had accessed a database containing “the entire country’s Social Security information,” copied it to a high-risk external system, and violated a court order barring them from continued access. The DOJ later had to file “corrections” to prior testimony from senior SSA staff, admitting that DOGE employees had in fact accessed SSA’s most sensitive data and covertly signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with a political advocacy group that sought to overturn election results. And here’s one I had missed:
DOGE’s forced access to Treasury data was particularly noteworthy as a Treasury threat intelligence analysis recommended that DOGE staff “be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ may have posed the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
At the NLRB, a whistleblower reported that DOGE operatives sent enormous amounts of sensitive case information outside the government to unknown recipients — information that companies like Musk’s SpaceX could use to “get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data.” OPM’s own Inspector General found that DOGE employees flouted cybersecurity and privacy laws, and that Trump appointees at OPM overrode career civil servants’ warnings about security to force implementation of DOGE’s systems, which may have resulted in a massive national security threat:
Experts have shown evidence raising concerns of potential Russian and Chinese access to OPM servers shortly after DOGE created the government-wide email infrastructure. Separately, information received by Committee Democratic staff indicated that DOGE employees lowered all firewall protections at OPM to enable the exfiltration of data for use outside of a government environment.
Yikes.
And while they were gutting agencies that protect Americans, they also gutted the agencies actually responsible for catching waste, fraud, and abuse. Offices of Inspectors General — the very watchdogs whose mission aligns with what DOGE claimed to be doing — were starved of resources. One OIG lost 20% of its staff and was operating with “the fewest number of auditors in decades.” The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of politicians accused of corruption, was purged of all but a fraction of its former employees.
The Garcia report’s conclusion is perhaps the most honest assessment of the whole debacle:
Many analyses have referred to the DOGE disaster as a failure, and DOGE did indeed fail at its stated mission of meaningfully reducing spending and increasing government efficiency. But in the Trump Administration’s vindictive, ideologically motivated, and pointless quest to break the federal government, drive out talented and committed public servants, and make flashy promises of cutting fraud while enriching themselves and their wealthy donors, DOGE was a resounding success.
Now, the Garcia report is a Democratic minority report, and the most committed DOGE defenders will dismiss it on those grounds alone. But the most devastating evidence comes from DOGE’s own website — which kept quietly deleting incorrect entries — from the Times’ independent analysis, from a defense contractor’s CEO telling his shareholders the “savings” were meaningless, from the GAO finding multiple violations of the Impoundment Control Act, from OPM’s own Inspector General, and from the DOJ having to file corrections to its own court filings.
You don’t need to trust a single Democratic politician to see what happened here. You just need to look at the numbers.
Oh, and yes: Musk himself admitted in a podcast interview with MAGA influencer and former DOGE employee Katie Miller (wife of Stephen) in December that DOGE had fallen short and said that if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t do it again, preferring instead to have “worked on my companies.” The man who was going to supposedly save the republic from government bloat decided his actual companies were more worth his time. Musk’s public admission probably shouldn’t carry too much weight either way — he knows DOGE was publicly perceived as a failure and he’s distancing himself — but it is a fitting coda.
This whole thing was billed not just by MAGA faithful, but also by many in the media, as an expected triumph of private sector brilliance over government incompetence. What it actually demonstrated is that when you hand the keys to people who don’t understand how government works, don’t respect the people who do, and have massive personal financial conflicts of interest, you get chaos, corruption, and a bigger bill for taxpayers. The people who were making government work better — the original U.S. Digital Service employees who were building more efficient systems and better websites — got fired and replaced with Musk acolytes who couldn’t tell the difference between a contract ceiling and actual spending.
The MAGA world continues to pretend DOGE was a ruthless cost-cutting machine. The receipts say otherwise: it failed in every direction except enriching corporations connected to the administration. It was a looting operation dressed up as reform.
Much of last week I had been working on a different article than the one this became. The American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies — all plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities over DOGE’s mass grant cancellations — had uploaded the full video depositions of four government witnesses to YouTube. I had been watching through the many hours of those videos, planning to write specifically about what former DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh actually said under oath about how they decided which grants to kill.
I had already written about what the legal filings revealed back in February, well before the NY Times published its own deep dive into the depositions last week. But the videos added something the transcripts couldn’t fully capture: the demeanor of two young guys with zero government experience who were handed the power to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in already-approved humanities grants, and who were now forced to sit there, on camera, and attempt (weakly) to explain themselves. Before I could publish my piece, 404 Media’s Joseph Cox covered some of what was found in the depositions and illustrated it with these thumbnails of Fox straight from YouTube that certainly… tell a story.
And then, of course, the government got the videos taken down. Because these alpha disruptors who thought they were saving America by nuking grants for Holocaust documentaries and Black civil rights research turned out to be too fragile to withstand a little internet mockery for their dipshittery.
We’ll get to that part. But first, let’s talk about what made the depositions so devastating, and why the government was so desperate to hide them.
As we covered in February, the actual “process” by which Fox and Cavanaugh decided to terminate nearly every active NEH grant from the Biden administration was, to put it charitably, not a process at all. Fox fed short grant descriptions into ChatGPT with a prompt that read:
“Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.”
That was it. A chatbot verdict in fewer characters than a tweet. As Cox reported after watching all six-plus hours of Fox’s deposition, nobody told Fox to use an LLM for this. He did it on his own. He called it an “intermediary step” — a fancy way of saying he asked the magic answer box to justify what he’d already decided to do.
The depositions revealed the ChatGPT prompt raising flags that would be comedic if the grants hadn’t actually been terminated. As the NY Times reported:
A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.”
The Thomas Gage one is really something. The British general who oversaw the colonial crackdown that helped trigger the American Revolution is apparently too “diverse” for Trump’s “America First” humanities agenda. George Washington’s papers got spared, but the papers of the guy Washington fought against? DEI.
A sizable portion of the deposition was spent trying to get Fox to define DEI. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He repeatedly deferred to the text of Trump’s executive order on DEI, while also admitting he couldn’t recall what it actually said.
How do you interpret DEI?
Fox: [sighs and then a very long pause] There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.
It’s okay. I’m asking for your understanding of it.
Fox: Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.
Okay, so can you…
Fox: I don’t remember what was in the EO.
So right now do you have an understanding of what DEI is?
Fox: Yeah.
Okay, so what’s your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?
Fox: Um, well, it it was exactly what was written in the EO. And so anytime that we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order, we would just refer back to the EO and assess if this grant had relation to it.
Okay. But I guess I’m stepping back from your uh methodology strictly in terminating the grants. Do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?
Fox: Yeah.
Okay. So what’s your understanding of what it means?
Fox: Well, I [scoffs] it is it is is exactly what was written in the EO. And I don’t have the EO in front of me, but that was we would always reference back to the EO and make sure that this grant was in compliance with the EO.
I understand that. Okay, but I’m not asking necessarily about what was in the EO. I’m asking very specifically about your present understanding of what… of DEI? Do you have a present understanding of DEI?
Fox: Yeah!
Okay. Can you explain what that present understanding is?
Fox: Um well, it It’s just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.
Are you refusing to answer the question?
Fox: I’m not refusing to answer the question. I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language. And so, I think giving a a high-level overview of what I could relay as DEI is not going to do justice what was written in the EO.
And that’s okay. We can look at the EO as well.
Fox: Great.
I’m asking you for I mean this is a deposition. I’m asking you questions. You’re under oath to answer them. So what what is your understanding of what DEI means?
Fox: Well, I I think I would say again that I I would go back to the EO to make sure I’m capturing enough. I don’t I don’t feel comfortable saying a high level overview because it is such a big bucket and there’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle.
What’s a part of the bucket?
Fox: Um gender fluidity um sort of promoting um like promoting subsets of LGBTQ+ that um might um alienate another part of the community. Um. Again, it was just easier for us to reference back into the EO.
Okay, so …
Fox: And I don’t want to give you a broad overview because it’s at the end of the day it it is capturing… it is all encompassing in the EO. It’s how we it’s how we did our methodology.
Right. Do you always refer to EOs to gain an understanding of words used in your typical daily vernacular?
Fox: What do you mean?
You you say that you have an understanding what DEI means and when I ask you you say you need to reference the EO. Do you need to reference EOs to define every word you use in your everyday life?
Fox: No.
Okay. So, what’s stopping you from defining DEI to your understanding as you sit here today? On January 28th, 2026.
Fox: It wouldn’t be capturing enough of how big the topic is. DEI is a very broad structure. I’m giving giving my limited recall of what’s included is just not…
But his understanding leaked through anyway when specific grants came up.
Take the grant for a documentary about the 1873 Colfax massacre, where dozens of Black men were murdered by former Confederates and Klan members. ChatGPT flagged it as DEI. Fox agreed. Here’s how he explained it during the deposition. The lawyer reads aloud ChatGPT’s output and questions Fox about it:
“The documentary tells the story of the Colfax Massacre, the single greatest incident of anti-black violence during Reconstruction. And it’s historical and leg NAACP for black civil rights, Louisiana, the South, and in the nation as a whole.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes. Okay.
And then in column B right next to that, it says, “Yes, the documentary explores a historical event that significantly impacted black civil rights, making it relevant to the topic of DEI.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes.
Is it fair to say that what I just read is the ChatGPT output of the prompts in the first column?
Fox: Yes.
Okay. Do you agree with ChatGPT’s assessment here that a documentary is DEI if it explores historical events that significantly impacted black civil rights?
Fox:Yes.
Okay. Why would that be DEI?
Fox: It’s focused on a singular race. It is not for the benefit… It is not for the benefit of humankind. It is focused on a specific group of or a specific race here being black.
Why would learning about anti-black violence not be to the benefit of humankind.
Fox: That’s not what I’m saying.
Okay, then what are you saying?
Fox: I’m saying it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
You said it’s not to the benefit of humankind. Right?
Fox: Is that what I said?
[Laughs] Yeah.
Then there was the documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust:
The grant description of column row 252 says, “Production of My Underground Mother, a feature-length documentary that explores the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust through a daughter’s search for her late mother’s past, a collective camp diary in which she wrote and interviews with dozens of women survivors who reveal the gender-based violence they suffered and hit from their own families.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes.
Okay. And then in that row or column, you say “Yes DEI.” Did you write the rationale in that column?
Fox: Could you scroll over, Jacob?
Again, the rationale says, “The documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Fox: Yes.
Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?
Fox: It’s the… gender-based… story… that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.
It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?
Fox: The gender-based so females… during the Holocaust.
And you believe that that’s inherently discriminatory?
Fox: I’m just saying that’s what it’s focused on.
Sure.
Fox: And this is related to the DEI.
Right. But you just use the term inherently discriminatory. What did you mean by that?
Fox: It’s focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them.
So a documentary that’s about women would be DEI. Is that fair to say?
Fox: No.
Okay. So, tell me why what I just said isn’t DEI, but what you just said is DEI.
Fox: It’s a Jewish specifically focused on Jewish cultures and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture. It’s inherently related to DEI for those reasons.
Because it’s about Jewish culture?
Fox: Plus marginalized female voices during the Holocaust gender-based violence.
Okay. Is this… when we focus on a minority, is that your understanding that, you know, the Jewish people fall into the category of a minority?
Fox: Certainly a culture that could be described as minorities.
Okay. So, how did you go about determining what was a minority and what wasn’t a minority for the for the purpose of identifying DEI in grants?
Fox: Inherently focused on any ethnicity, culture, gender, no matter the sort of race or gender or or religion or… yeah.
So a documentary about anti-Black violence during Reconstruction is “not for the benefit of humankind.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust is “inherently DEI” because it’s focused on “gender” or “religion.” But remember, the keyword list Fox built to scan grants included terms like “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “BIPOC,” “native,” and “immigrants.” Notably absent: “white,” “Caucasian,” or “heterosexual.” When pressed on this, Fox offered the defense that he “very well could have” included those terms but just… didn’t.
Now, about Nate Cavanaugh. If you haven’t heard of Cavanaugh, he’s the college dropout who co-founded an IP licensing startup, partnered with Fox on the DOGE work at NEH, and was subsequently appointed — I am not making this up — president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, among other roles. When asked about DEI in his own deposition, Cavanaugh provided what might be the most inadvertently self-aware definition imaginable. While obnoxiously chewing gum during the deposition, the following exchange took place:
What is DEI referring to here?
Cavanaugh: It stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.
And what is your opinion of diversity, equity, inclusion.
Cavanaugh: My personal opinion?
Well, let’s start with what does it mean to you?
Cavanaugh: It means diversity, equity, inclusion.
Well, that’s the label, but what does what do those words mean?
Cavanaugh: It means uh it means making decisions on a basis of something other than merit.
Irony alert: Nate Cavanaugh — a college dropout with no government experience, no background in the humanities, and no apparent understanding of the grants he was terminating — defined DEI as “decisions on the basis of something other than merit.” He said this while sitting in a deposition about his time holding multiple senior government positions for which he had no qualifications whatsoever. The lack of self-awareness is genuinely staggering.
And what did all of this actually accomplish? By Cavanaugh’s own admission, the deficit didn’t go down. Fox was asked about this too. From 404 Media:
When the attorney then asks if Fox would be surprised to hear if the overall deficit did not go down after DOGE’s actions, Fox says no. In his own deposition, Cavanaugh acknowledged the deficit did not go down.
“I have to believe that the dollars that were saved went to mission critical, non-wasteful spending, and so, again, in the broad macro: an unfortunate circumstance for an individual, but this is an effort for the administration,” Fox says. “In my opinion, what is certainly not wasteful is food stamps, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid funding,” Fox says. Later he adds when discussing a specific cut grant: “those dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.”
There is no evidence these funds were directed in that way. The Trump administration has kicked millions of people off of food stamps. It has, just as an example, given ICE tens of billions of more dollars, though.
Sure, kiddo. It was all for grandma’s food stamps. (Though given Fox’s ideological priors, one suspects that food stamps themselves would end up on the ‘wasteful spending’ list soon enough.)
The NY Times piece also revealed some remarkable details about how the process played out internally. Acting NEH Chairman Michael McDonald, who had been at the agency for over two decades and could recall fewer than a half-dozen grant revocations in that entire time — all for failure to complete promised work — went along with the mass cancellation of nearly every active Biden-era grant. When DOGE’s process wasn’t moving fast enough, Fox emailed McDonald:
We’re getting pressure from the top on this and we’d prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you’re no longer interested.
McDonald expressed some reservations, calling many of the grants slated for termination “harmless when it comes to promoting DEI.” But he rolled over:
“But you have also told us that in addition to canceling projects because they may promote DEI ideology, the DOGE Team also wishes to cancel funding to assist deficit reduction. Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list.”
Out of all grants approved during the Biden administration, only 42 were kept. The rest — 1,477 grants — were terminated. No appeals were allowed. Termination letters bore McDonald’s signature but were sent from an unofficial email address the DOGE employees created. McDonald himself admitted he didn’t draft the letters and couldn’t tell you how many grants were cut. And when pressed on whether the grants concerning the Colfax Massacre and the Holocaust were actually DEI, McDonald — who, unlike Fox and Cavanaugh, actually has a doctorate in literature — said he didn’t agree they were. But he signed off on their termination anyway.
Oh, and McDonald apparently didn’t even know Fox and Cavanaugh had used ChatGPT to make the determinations.
So that’s the substance. Two unqualified guys, a chatbot, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and the destruction of a century-old institution’s grant portfolio in about two weeks. We covered the mechanics in February. The depositions just put it all on video, in their own words, in all its arrogant, ignorant glory.
And then the government decided it couldn’t handle the public seeing it.
After the plaintiff organizations uploaded the deposition videos to YouTube and shared materials with the press, the government filed an urgent letter asking the court to order the videos removed “from the internet” — yes, they actually used that phrasing — and to restrict the plaintiffs from further publicizing discovery materials. Their argument was that the videos “could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm.”
A few days later, the government came back even more agitated, reporting that Fox had received death threats and that the videos had circulated widely, with “well over 100,000 X posts circulating and/or discussing video clips” of the depositions. The filing cited media coverage from People, HuffPost, 404 Media, and The Advocate.
“Unfortunately, that risk has now materialized—at least one witness has been subjected to significant harassment, including death threats. Accordingly, we respectfully request that the Court enter the requested order as soon as possible to minimize the risk of additional harm to the witnesses and their families.”
Death threats are genuinely bad and nobody should send them. Full stop. That said, let’s explore the breathtaking asymmetry for a moment.
Fox and Cavanaugh subjected more than 1,400 grant recipients to termination with no warning, no due process, no appeal, and effectively forged the director’s signature on the letters. They didn’t give an ounce of thought to the livelihoods they were destroying — the researchers mid-project, the documentary filmmakers, the archivists, the teachers, the organizations that had planned years of work around these grants. When asked if he felt any remorse, Fox said:
Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that’s ultimately—the more important piece is reducing the government spend.
But now that people are being mean to them on the internet? Now, suddenly, the government needs an emergency protective order and the videos must be scrubbed from existence.
Judge Colleen McMahon did initially order the plaintiffs to “immediately take any and all possible steps to claw back the videos,” pending further briefing. The plaintiffs responded with an emergency motion pointing out a fairly important detail: the government never designated the deposition videos as confidential under the existing protective order. They had the opportunity to do so and didn’t. From the plaintiffs’ filing:
Defendants never designated the video depositions in question as Confidential under the Protective Order, and Defendants have never alleged in their correspondence with ACLS Plaintiffs that ACLS Plaintiffs violated the protective order presently in place.
In other words, the government had a mechanism to keep the videos under wraps. They chose not to use it. And now they want the court to do retroactively what they failed to do at the time.
The judge’s response to the emergency motion was delightfully terse:
DENIED.
See you Tuesday.
And then there’s the part where the government’s own filing accidentally makes the case for why these videos are important. In arguing that the plaintiffs were acting improperly, the government noted that the MLA’s website had links to the deposition videos alongside a link soliciting donations to its advocacy initiative:
Directly below these materials is a link soliciting monetary donations to the MLA’s advocacy initiative “Paving the Way.” To the extent the MLA or other ACLS Plaintiffs are publicizing these documents as part of their fundraising efforts, that is improper.
Which is an interesting argument to make when the entire lawsuit exists because DOGE used ChatGPT to destroy a hundred million dollars in humanities funding.
Now, finally, about those videos the government wanted removed “from the internet.” As anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes studying the history of online content suppression could have predicted, the attempt to get the videos taken down had precisely the opposite of its intended effect. The videos were backed up almost immediately to the Internet Archive, distributed as a torrent, and spread across social media. As 404 Media reported:
The news shows the difficulty in trying to remove material from the internet, especially that which has a high public interest and has already been viewed likely millions of times. It’s also an example of the “Streisand Effect,” a phenomenon where trying to suppress information often results in the information spreading further.
We’ve written about the Streisand Effect many, many times over the years here at Techdirt, and the pattern is always the same: someone sees something embarrassing about themselves online, panics, tries to make it go away, and in doing so ensures that orders of magnitude more people see it than ever would have otherwise. The government’s frantic filings, complete with citations to specific media articles and X post counts, served as a helpful reading list for anyone who hadn’t yet seen the videos.
The judge’s order, notably, only directed the plaintiffs to take down the videos. It said nothing about the Internet Archive, the torrent, the clips on X, the embeds in news articles, or the countless other copies that had already proliferated. And, really, given that none of the other sources are parties to the case, and the associated First Amendment concerns, it’s difficult to see those videos going away any time soon.
The government wanted the videos removed “from the internet.” They have now been seeded to the internet in a format specifically designed to be impossible to remove.
This is what happens when you try to suppress something the public has already decided it wants to see.
And that gets to the broader absurdity here. Fox and Cavanaugh walked into a federal agency they knew nothing about, used a chatbot to condemn more than a thousand grants they never read, created spreadsheets labeled “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” planned to highlight them on DOGE’s X account for culture war clout, sent termination letters with someone else’s signature from a private email server, and explicitly told the agency head that no appeals would be allowed.
When asked under oath to justify what they did, Fox couldn’t define DEI, couldn’t explain why documenting anti-Black violence isn’t “for the benefit of humankind,” and could only offer that the money they saved was probably going to food stamps for grandma — which it very much was not. Cavanaugh couldn’t define DEI either, acknowledged the deficit didn’t go down, and gave a definition of DEI that perfectly described his own role in the federal government.
These are the people who DOGE sent to reshape the government. And now that government is asking a federal judge for an emergency protective order because the internet is being kinda mean about it. Poor poor snowflake DOGE boys.
As the ACLS president put it, “DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”
She’s right. Though I’d argue watching these depositions is — unlike Fox’s ridiculously bigoted definition of Black history — very much for the benefit of humankind.
From the very beginning of the DOGE saga, many of us raised alarms about what would happen when a bunch of inexperienced twenty-somethings were handed unfettered access to the most sensitive databases in the federal government with essentially zero oversight and zero adherence to the security protocols that exist for very good reasons. We wrote about it when a 25-year-old was pushing untested code into the Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system. We published a piece about it, originally reported by ProPublica, when DOGE operatives stormed into Social Security headquarters and demanded access to everything while ignoring the career staff who actually understood the systems.
That ProPublica deep dive painted a picture of 21-to-24-year-olds who didn’t understand the systems they were demanding access to, had “pre-ordained answers and weren’t interested in anything other than defending decisions they’d already made,” and were operating with essentially no accountability. The former acting commissioner described the operation as “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank—screaming all the time.”
These are the people who were handed the keys to the most sensitive databases the federal government holds.
And now we have what appears to be the entirely predictable consequence of all of that: direct exfiltration of data in a manner known to break the law, but zero concern over that fact, because of the assurances of a Trump pardon if caught.
The Washington Post has a stunning whistleblower report alleging that a former DOGE software engineer, who had been embedded at the Social Security Administration, walked out with databases containing records on more than 500 million living and dead Americans—on a thumb drive—and then allegedly tried to get colleagues at his new private sector job to help him upload the data to company systems.
According to the disclosure, the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the Social Security Administration last year before starting a job at a government contractor in October, allegedly told several co-workers that he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens’ information, and had at least one on a thumb drive. The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names. The complaint does not include specific dates of when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events unfolded around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had approved access to Social Security data.
In the past, this was the kind of thing that the US government actually did a decent job protecting and keeping private. Now they have DOGE bros walking out the door with it on thumbdrives. Holy shit!
And here’s the detail that really tells you everything about the culture DOGE created inside these agencies:
He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.
According to this complaint, this person allegedly understood that what he was doing might be illegal, did it anyway, and had already calculated that the political environment would protect him from consequences. The Elon Musk DOGE bros clearly believed they ran the show and that anyone associated with DOGE was entirely above the law on anything they did.
Perhaps just as troubling, the complaint also alleges that after leaving government employment, the DOGE bro claimed he still had his agency computer and credentials, which he described as carrying “God-level” security access to Social Security’s systems.
The complaint alleges that after leaving government employment, the former DOGE member told colleagues he had a thumb drive with Social Security data and had kept his agency computer and credentials, which he allegedly said carried largely unrestricted “God-level” security access to the agency’s systems — a level of access no other company employee had been granted in its work with SSA.
The Social Security Administration says he had turned in his laptop and lost his credential privileges when he departed. His lawyer denies all alleged wrongdoing, and both the agency and the company said they investigated the claims and didn’t find evidence to confirm them. The company said it conducted a “thorough” two-day internal investigation.
Two whole days! Investigating themselves. On an issue where ignoring it benefits them.
But the SSA’s inspector general is investigating, and has alerted Congress and the Government Accountability Office, which has its own audit of DOGE’s data access underway.
And this whistleblower complaint, filed back in January, surfaces alongside a separate complaint from the SSA’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, which alleges that DOGE members improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud.
A separate complaint, made in August by the agency’s former chief data officer, Charles Borges, alleges members of DOGE improperly uploaded copies of Americans’ Social Security data to a digital cloud, putting individuals’ private information at risk. In January, the Trump administration acknowledged DOGE staffers were responsible for separate data breaches at the agency, including sharing data through an unapproved third-party service and that one of the DOGE staffers signed an agreement to share data with an unnamed political group aiming to overturn election results in several states.
We wrote about that other leak at the time, of a DOGE bro sharing data with an election denier group.
All of this just confirms what many people expected and none of this should surprise anyone who was paying attention: Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk and his crew of over-confident know-nothings to view federal government computer systems as their personal playthings, where they could access and exfiltrate any data they wanted for whatever ideological reason they wanted.
And we’re only hearing about this because a whistleblower came forward and because a former chief data officer had the courage to file a complaint. How many similar incidents happened at other agencies where no one spoke up? DOGE operatives were embedded across the entire federal government, accessing heavily restricted databases and, as the Washington Post puts it, “merging long-siloed repositories.” Every single one of those agencies had the same dynamic: young, inexperienced but overconfident engineers demanding unfettered access, career staff pushing back and being overruled, and essentially no security protocols being followed.
Former chief data officer Borges put it about as well as anyone could:
“This is absolutely the worst-case scenario,” Borges told The Post. “There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.”
Once it’s out, you can’t put it back. We’re going to be learning about the consequences of DOGE’s ransacking of federal systems for years, maybe decades. And we’re finding out that the waste, fraud, and abuse we were told DOGE was there to find, appears to have mostly been in their own actions.
We spent a lot of time last year calling out how dangerous it was that Elon Musk and his inexperienced 4chan-loving DOGE boys were gaining access to some of the most secure government systems. We also highlighted how it seemed likely that they were violating many laws in the process. One specific point of concern was DOGE’s desire to take control over Social Security data, something that many people warned would be abused for political reasons, in particular to make misleading or false claims about voting records.
For all the people who insisted that this was hyperbolic nonsense, and DOGE was just there to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” well… the DOJ last week quietly admitted that the DOGE boys almost certainly violated the Hatch Act and had given social security data to conspiracy theorists claiming Trump won the 2020 election (he did not).
Oh, and this only came out because the DOJ realized it had lied to a court (they claim it was because the Social Security Administration officials had given them bad info, but the net effect is the same) and had to correct the record.
Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.
Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernize the agency’s technology.
Also in his March 12 declaration, Mr. Russo attested that, “[t]he overall goal of the work performed by SSA’s DOGE Team is to detect fraud, waste and abuse in SSA programs and to provide recommendations for action to the Acting Commissioner of SSA, the SSA Office of the Inspector General, and the Executive Office of the President.”….
However, SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025,a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rollsthat the advocacy group had acquired.The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election resultsin certain States. In connection with these communications,one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.
The filing goes on to admit that the declaration from a Social Security administration employee that there were safeguards in place against sharing data, and that everyone had received training in not sharing data, was apparently wrong.
However, SSA has learned that, beginning March 7, 2025, and continuing until March 17 (approximately one week before the TRO was entered), members of SSA’s DOGE Team were using links to share data through the third-party server “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.
Cool cool. No big deal. DOGE boys just put incredibly private data on a third party server and no one knows what data was there or even if it’s still there.
Have I got some waste, fraud, and abuse for you to check out!
Separately, the filing reveals that Elon Musk’s right hand man, Steve Davis—the “fixer” Musk deploys across all his organizations—was copied on an email containing an encrypted file of SSA data. The filing is careful to note that DOGE itself “never had access to SSA systems of record,” but that’s a distinction without much difference when your guy is getting emailed password-protected files derived from those systems. Oh and: SSA still can’t open the file to figure out exactly what was in it.
However, SSA has determined that on March 3, 2025—three weeks prior to entry of the TRO—an SSA DOGE Team member copied Mr. Steve Davis, who was then a senior advisor to Defendant U.S. DOGE Temporary Organization, as well as a DOGE-affiliated employee at the Department of Labor (“DOL”), on an email to Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”). The email attached an encrypted and password-protected file that SSA believes contained SSA data. Despite ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Information Office, SSA has been unable to access the file to determine exactly what it contained. From the explanation of the attached file in the email body and based on what SSA had approved to be released to DHS, SSA believes that the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.
Looks like some more waste, fraud, and abuse right there.
So to recap: the team that stormed in to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” committed what looks an awful lot like actual fraud and abuse—sharing data on unauthorized servers, misleading courts, cutting deals with election conspiracy groups, and emailing around encrypted files of PII that the agency itself can’t even open anymore. All of it now documented in federal court filings—not that anyone will do anything about it. Accountability is for people who don’t have Elon Musk on speed dial.
Here’s a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you’ve “invented” the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in.
Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.
USDS and 18F were genuine success stories. Obama-era programs that brought engineers from Silicon Valley into government to help all Americans by modernizing creaking federal systems. Here’s how USDS described itself two years in:
In the early days, we worried if more than ten people would apply to join the team. Two years later, folks from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the likes have joined to put their skills towards helping Veterans, students, small businesses, and all Americans.
That institutional knowledge, that decade of learning what works and what doesn’t, that careful balance between public service and private sector expertise? All gone. Torched by Musk as part of his faux “efficiency” crusade earlier this year.
And now they’re reinventing it. Badly. I used to joke that the Elon Musk Twitter era was all about throwing out all of Twitter’s carefully thought out ideas and then bringing them back in a dumber, more dangerous way. This seems like that, but in the federal government.
The United States Tech Force, announced Monday, is meant to source the artificial intelligence talent the government needs to win the global AI race and modernize the government, the administration says. The goal is to recruit an initial cohort of around 1,000 technologists who will be placed in agencies for two-year stints, potentially as soon as March.
“We need you,” said Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management. “The U.S. Tech Force offers the chance to build and lead projects of national importance, while creating powerful career opportunities in both public service and the private sector.”
Welcome to Temu USDS, everyone.
Same basic concept—rotate tech talent through government—but stripped of all the institutional knowledge about what actually works, run by political operatives instead of civil servants, and riddled with conflicts of interest that the original programs were specifically designed to avoid.
The especially galling part? Watching the same tech bros who helped destroy USDS and 18F now celebrate “Tech Force” as some brilliant innovation:
These are the people who either stayed silent or actively cheered when Musk gutted the actual working programs. Now they’re acting like this is some breakthrough moment of government-tech collaboration. Looking through the boosters, it looks like every partner at A16Z felt the need to support this. None of them seem to mention how this only came after the destruction of the programs that were doing such great work over the past decade (including during the first Trump administration).
Again, conceptually, there is merit to the idea of bringing in techies to help make government work better for the public. But it seems pretty obnoxious for these tech bros to jump into this without acknowledging (1) this existed and worked really well for over a decade until (2) they and their tech bro buddy Elon went in and destroyed it all. Also, given how the Trump admin has acted towards the public for the past 11 months, pretty rich to assume anything done by this new “Tech Force” will be in the interest of the public.
The one actual “innovation” in Tech Force creates a corruption vector that should alarm anyone who cares about government integrity: companies are guaranteeing participants can return to their old jobs after their tour of duty.
USDS never needed this because it wasn’t a problem—people could always go back to industry if they wanted. What this guarantee does is fundamentally change the incentive structure. Now you have engineers building government systems who know exactly where they’ll be working in two years, and whose interests they’ll be serving. They won’t divest from their stock. They won’t sever ties with their employer. They’ll just be on “leave” while accessing sensitive government data and making technology decisions that could directly benefit their future (and current) employer.
As the NextGov piece notes, this should set off every alarm:
“My first question with any programs like this are, ‘What are the rules that are in place to guard against conflicts of interest?’” said Rob Shriver, former acting OPM director and current managing director of Civil Service Strong at Democracy Forward.
This is especially worthy of attention, he said, given DOGE’s approach to data — “coming in and taking over agency systems and accessing data without going through the regular procedures” — which has been at the center of several lawsuits.
Scott Kupor, who is running this is a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, who was there for 16 years (basically since A16Z started) before taking this job. And he insists that there are no conflicts, so don’t worry about that at all:
The setup may vary by company, but the managing engineers from private companies participating in the program will “effectively take a leave of absence” to become full time government employees during the program, Kupor told reporters Monday. They won’t be required to divest from their stocks.
“We feel like we’ve run down all the various conflict issues and don’t believe that that’s actually going to be an impediment to getting people here,” said Kupor. “The huge benefit to the government will be getting people who are very skilled in the private sector at managing engineering teams.”
The idea is that the participants can return to their old jobs with new skills and expertise after working for the government, he said.
“We’ve run down all the various conflict issues”—except for the part where participants will keep their stock, maintain their guaranteed employment at private companies, and have access to sensitive government systems and data. But sure, no conflicts.
The value of tech expertise in government is real. That’s why USDS and 18F existed and succeeded for over a decade. What made those programs work was their careful construction to minimize conflicts while maximizing the transfer of knowledge and expertise.
This isn’t that. This is a hastily rebuilt version of a program they deliberately destroyed, now run by political appointees from the very industries that will benefit, with explicit mechanisms that invite corruption. They gutted the institutional knowledge, fired the people who knew how to do this right, and replaced it with a system where people from private companies get guaranteed access to government data and decision-making through employees who are explicitly planning to return to those same companies.
That doesn’t seem like innovation. It seems much more like regulatory capture with better branding and a cool “force” name.
First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his way, enriching his allies, and dismissing any consequences with a wave of his hand.
The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story:
The spokesperson, in response to written questions, confirmed DOGE still exists as a temporary organization within the U.S. DOGE Service, and that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS.
But, of course, most of this is just semantics, just as the “DOGE” name has always been semantics as well. The idea was, from the very beginning, a smash-and-grab job, in which Elon would get access to the fundamental (traditionally highly guarded) systems of the US government and wreak havoc, Twitter-style, in which anything he and his suck-up compatriots didn’t understand would be deemed “bad” and anything that helped enrich him and his friends would be deemed “good,” and any consequences (including destroying life-saving programs around the globe) would be dismissed with the wave of a hand, and no culpability.
“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.
“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
Wired’s report has details on a bunch of DOGE bros with little-to-no relevant experience who are continuing the DOGE grift while employed throughout the federal government, detailing the new (and constantly changing) set of job titles of a bunch of the DOGE crew, almost all of which they seem wholly unqualified for.
But the bigger story may be now that they’re scattered across the bureaucracy without Elon as their shield, some of these DOGE operatives are starting to realize they might actually face legal consequences for the very real and very serious damage they caused. A recent Politico report noted that the younger members of the crew are getting genuinely worried about how this ends:
The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.
As the sun fell on downtown Washington, the displaced dozen joined up with fellow DOGE staffers atop the nine-story GSA building, armed with beer, pretzels and La Croix, and prepared for something akin to a wake. Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.
Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering.Other DOGE leaders were less sanguine. “Guys, seriously,” one warned, “get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system.
Elon Musk, least of all. In recent interviews, he’s still rejecting the claims that the projects he gleefully cut resulted in any real world harm:
In an interview with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on hisWTF Ispodcast, Musk denied that DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts and its mandate totarget federal “waste”included “stopping essential payments to needy people” in Africa.
“Fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They’re not going to say, ‘Give us the money for fraud,’” Musk said. “They’re going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false.
“It’s going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn’t want to save the baby pandas? They’re adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing, it’s just corruption, essentially.
“And you’re like, ‘Well, can you send us a picture of the panda?’ They’re like, ‘No.’ OK. Well, how do we know it’s going to the pandas?”
This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.
Musk’s condescending little fable about demanding photos of pandas would be merely insufferable if he were actually talking about pandas. But he’s not. He’s talking about programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon.
What’s quite clear now is that DOGE did nothing to reduce government inefficiency. If anything, it created much greater inefficiency by forcing the federal government to try to reestablish essential programs (and rehire haphazardly fired experts) in a mad dash to keep certain aspects of the government from completely falling over. And that’s not to mention all the deaths. As Atul Gawande noted in the New Yorker:
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respectedtracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustainthe programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.
The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.
So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build. Those DOGE members nervously telling each other to “get your own lawyer”? They should be.
Elon Musk’s promises on government spending cuts have followed a predictable trajectory: slash $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then a mere $150 billion. Now we have the final accounting from the Congressional Budget Office: DOGE didn’t just fail to cut spending—it presided over spending increases that exceeded even pre-DOGE projections.
Elon Musk said he was going to cut spending by $2 trillion dollars, but instead spending is higher this year than we thought it would be before Trump took office. Truly incredible stuff.
The CBO’s fiscal year 2025 report shows that despite all the performative cruelty, mass firings, and destruction of essential programs, total federal spending (excluding interest) rose by $220 billion, or 4%, for the entire fiscal year. As budget expert Bobby Kogan notes in his analysis of the numbers, even accounting for some accounting adjustments related to student loans, noninterest spending still increased substantially.
This is the perfect capstone to what we’ve been documenting all along: DOGE was never about efficiency. It was always about ideological destruction masquerading as fiscal responsibility.
As the Trump administration started,Elon Muskclaimed his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, could achieve$2 trillion in savings—equal to more than a quarter of total spending in fiscal 2024.
Not even close. DOGE did claw back some grants and fire some probationary employees. And some savings will show up later as federal workers who accepted deferred resignation drop off government payrolls in fiscal 2026.
But thathasn’t changed the big picturemuch so far. Total spending excluding interest rose $220 billion, or 4%, for the entire fiscal year.
The numbers are even more damning when you dig deeper. The WSJ notes that the Trump administration recorded a $131 billion noncash spending reduction related to modifications in student-loan programs—essentially an accounting adjustment, not actual savings. Without this paper shuffle, noninterest spending would have risen by $351 billion for the entire year. DOGE was so ineffective at cutting real spending that they had to rely on accounting gimmicks to make their numbers look less catastrophic.
So much for revolutionary cost-cutting. The only categories where spending actually declined were the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (because fewer banks failed) and the Small Business Administration (because disaster-related loan costs from 2024 didn’t recur). Neither had anything to do with DOGE’s “efficiency” efforts.
The real story in these numbers is what any competent budget analyst could have predicted: the biggest drivers of spending—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—all increased by 8%. These programs grow because of aging demographics and rising healthcare costs, not because of bureaucratic inefficiency that can be solved by firing middle managers. Addressing these trends would require serious policy work around healthcare costs, immigration to support the tax base, and long-term fiscal planning. Instead, DOGE chose X-fueled tantrums about “government waste” while the actual budget drivers continued their inexorable climb.
The spending increases become even more damning when you remember what DOGE actually accomplished during its reign of chaos. As we documented in our previous coverage, DOGE managed to waste at least $21.7 billion in just six months while destroying life-saving programs based on conspiracy theories Musk found on social media. The agency eliminated USAID—which had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021—because Musk believed fringe accounts claiming it was funding Hamas and manufacturing COVID-19.
And then there’s the perfect metaphor for DOGE’s “efficiency”: the government is now scrambling to rehire many of the workers Musk fired in his cost-cutting blitz. The General Services Administration recently begged hundreds of federal employees to return after Musk’s cuts left the agency “broken and understaffed.” These workers had been getting paid during their forced seven-month vacation while taxpayers footed the bill for mounting costs from properties that couldn’t be properly managed without them.
The GSA rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies—the IRS, Labor Department, and National Park Service have all had to bring back employees who took DOGE’s buyout offers. When you’re rehiring at multiple major agencies simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning efficiency—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.
Of course, trying to bring all those people back while all non-essential government work is shut down and many government employees are simply not getting paid suggests that it’s going to be even more difficult (and, therefore, costly) to eventually restaff the jobs that DOGE screwed up in cutting.
This spectacular failure was entirely predictable to anyone who understood that DOGE was never a serious efficiency effort. It was performance art designed to satisfy the fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. Musk and his DOGE vandals assumed that complex government operations were just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted,” when in reality they were critical functions that keep society running.
The CBO numbers now provide the final proof: after all the chaos, cruelty, and conspiracy theories, DOGE didn’t save money—it cost money. Government spending went up, essential services were destroyed, and taxpayers are left cleaning up the mess.
Despite all of DOGE’s supposed efficiency measures, spending increased because the agency focused on ideological destruction rather than understanding what government actually does. You can’t achieve efficiency by firing the people who know how to do essential jobs and then having to hire them back at higher costs.
This is what happens when you put conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of complex systems they don’t understand. DOGE’s legacy isn’t fiscal responsibility—it’s expensive chaos that proves some people’s expertise actually matters, especially when Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.
DOGE’s singular achievement was proving that “move fast and break things” is catastrophically unsuited to governing a democracy. In Silicon Valley, you can break a social media feature and roll back the code. In government, you break USAID and people die. You fire essential workers and create expensive chaos that costs more to fix than the original “inefficiency” ever did.
The CBO numbers are the final punctuation mark on this expensive lesson in the difference between actual efficiency and performative destruction. We now have the receipts showing exactly how much Musk’s conspiracy-theory-driven approach cost taxpayers—and given the ongoing government shutdown and hiring crisis, we should expect that bill to keep growing.
I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don’t really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no one in charge is smart enough to understand what they do.
Remember when Elon Musk and his merry band of DOGE vandals were going to revolutionize government by firing everyone and slashing everything? Yeah, about that. Turns out when you fire people who actually know how to do essential jobs, you eventually need to… hire them back. Who could have predicted this shocking turn of events? (Spoiler: literally everyone who was paying attention.)
The General Services Administration is now desperately begging hundreds of federal employees to come back after Musk’s cost-cutting blitz left the agency “broken and understaffed.” These are the same workers who were supposedly dead weight that needed to be eliminated to save taxpayer money. Funny how that worked out.
The General Services Administration has given the employees — who managed government workspaces — until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.
Those who accept must report for duty on October 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs — passed along to taxpayers — to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.
A seven-month paid vacation. Let’s pause to appreciate the stunning “efficiency” here. These workers got fired, kept getting paid, and now the government is begging them to come back because—surprise!—they actually knew what they were doing, were needed, and when they were suddenly cut loose it turned out to be an expensive mess that made it harder for the government to function. Meanwhile, taxpayers footed the bill for both their salaries and the mounting costs of properties that couldn’t be properly managed without them.
Of course, this was pretty much what a ton of actual experts warned would happen.
This is exactly what happens when a bunch of overconfident, under-informed Silicon Valley bros assume that complex government operations are just inefficient startups waiting to be “disrupted.” GSA wasn’t some bloated tech company with redundant product managers—it’s the agency that manages thousands of federal work spaces. You know, actual critical infrastructure that keeps the government functioning.
And, of course, GSA actually had a strong and incredibly effective team that worked on efficiency… and Musk fired them all.
“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”
Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a “triage mode” for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.
“Too far, too fast” is a charitable way to describe what amounts to institutional vandalism. This wasn’t thoughtful government reform—it was pure destruction for the sake of destroying anything a bunch of ignorant, incurious idiots didn’t understand, on the assumption that if they didn’t understand it, it couldn’t be that important.
They were wrong, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill.
Also, we’re not just talking about GSA here. There’s a pattern here of institutional destruction masquerading as reform. The rehiring wave is spreading across multiple agencies as the reality of Musk’s “efficiency” vision crashes into the actual requirements of running a government:
Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.
The scale of this backtracking is breathtaking. When you’re rehiring at the IRS, Labor Department, National Park Service, and GSA simultaneously, that’s not fine-tuning—that’s admitting your entire approach was fundamentally broken.
In the end, the massive job cuts that were supposed to save money have, instead, created expensive messes that cost way more than the original “inefficiencies” they were meant to fix:
The administration slashed GSA’s headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.
As a result of the internal turmoil,131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies tosteep fees because property owners have not been able to rent outthose spaces to other tenants.
This is what happens when you mistake activity for achievement. DOGE fired nearly everyone who managed the government’s portfolio of real estate and then acted shocked when nobody was left to manage the portfolios. Now taxpayers are on the hook for “steep fees” because properties couldn’t be properly vacated. The government is paying rent on spaces it’s not using because the people who knew how to handle lease transitions were… fired to save money.
And now they’re desperately trying to hire them back so they won’t even save money on the decrease in salaries.
Even DOGE’s own metrics show how spectacularly this has backfired:
DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.
From $460 million in supposed savings down to $140 million in actual savings—a 70% reduction in their own projections. This collapse in projected savings reveals the fundamental flaw in DOGE’s approach: they counted theoretical benefits from lease cancellations without accounting for the institutional knowledge required to execute those cancellations. The real number, factoring in transition costs, legal fees, and operational disruptions, is almost certainly negative. And that’s assuming you trust DOGE’s remaining figures. Which you probably shouldn’t.
This entire debacle perfectly illustrates the fundamental flaw in the “government is just a broken business” mentality. Government agencies exist to serve public functions that often don’t map neatly onto Silicon Valley efficiency models. When you fire the people who understand complex lease agreements, regulatory compliance, and interagency coordination, you don’t get innovation—you get extremely expensive chaos.
The particularly galling part is that these workers will now return to clean up the mess created by their own firing. They’ll spend months untangling lease complications, rebuilding institutional knowledge, and reestablishing relationships with contractors and other agencies. All of this remedial work will cost far more than their original salaries ever did.
The Government Accountability Office is now investigating this mess, which means taxpayers will also foot the bill for studying how badly DOGE screwed up:
The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA’s management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.
So we’re paying to study the costs of the effort that led to the cuts that didn’t save money but instead cost more money. It’s inefficiency all the way down.
This is what happens when you let tech bros cosplay as government reformers with no oversight or expertise. They mistake complexity for inefficiency, assume institutional knowledge is just bureaucratic dead weight, and believe that “disruption” is always improvement. The result is predictable: expensive chaos that requires the very expertise they dismissed to fix.
The federal employees now being begged to return have every right to negotiate better terms, demand back pay for the chaos they didn’t create, and insist on job security protections against future DOGE-style tantrums. They’re the ones who will clean up this mess, rebuild what was broken, and restore the basic functions that kept government working before Musk decided to reinvent the wheel as a square.
Rather than government efficiency we ended up with expensive performance art designed to satisfy the digitally-inspired fantasies of people who think running a government is like optimizing a social media algorithm. The only thing DOGE has efficiently accomplished is proving that some people’s expertise actually matters, even if—especially if—Silicon Valley billionaires don’t understand what that expertise does.
I am reminded of Rod Hilton’s viral Mastodon post from a few years back about Elon Musk:
If you can’t see that, it says:
He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
I get the feeling that a lot of government workers who previously thought he was a genius may also now choose to stay away from Musk’s cars and rockets. As they should.
This isn’t normal. Federal judges don’t usually air their grievances about the Supreme Court in open court. The fact that an entire appeals court panel—including respected conservative judges—turned their oral argument into what Politico called “a remarkable, 80-minute venting session” tells you everything about how broken the system has become.
The immediate catalyst was trying to figure out what to do with a case about DOGE’s access to Social Security data after the Supreme Court issued one of its trademark unexplained emergency orders. But the real issue was much bigger: how are lower courts supposed to function when the highest court in the land operates like it’s playing Calvinball?
“They’re leaving the circuit courts, the district courts out in limbo,” said Judge James Wynn… “We’re out here flailing. … I’m not criticizing the justices. They’re using a vehicle that’s there, but they are telling us nothing.They could easily just give us direction and we would follow it.”
Judge Wynn didn’t stop there:
“They cannot get amnesia in the future because they didn’t write an opinion on it. Write an opinion,” Wynn said. “We need to understand why you did it. We judges would just love to hear your reasoning as to why you rule that way. It makes our job easier. We will follow the law. We will follow the Supreme Court, but we’d like to know what it is we are following.”
I’ve been writing about the law for almost three decades. I’ve never seen anything like this. Ever. Not even in the same zip code as this. These are judges crying out for help under a completely lawless Supreme Court.
And, no, this wasn’t just liberal judges complaining. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III—a Reagan appointee and one of the most respected conservative jurists in the country—was right there with them:
“The Supreme Court’s action must mean something,” said Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee. “It doesn’t do these things just for the kicks of it.”
Even Wilkinson can’t figure out what the hell the Supreme Court is doing. When you’ve lost Harvie Wilkinson—a judge so conservative and institutionally minded that he’s basically judicial royalty—you’ve completely broken the system.
The specific case that triggered this judicial revolt involves the Supreme Court’s typical shadow docket bullshit. In June, the Court overruled the Fourth Circuit’s decision and lifted an injunction against DOGE’s use of Social Security data. But they did so in the most bizarre and troubling way. After sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit for more review, it said that even if the Fourth Circuit rules that DOGE is breaking the law, the stay will remain in place.
By an apparent 6-3 vote, the justices went further, saying that no matter what the appeals court decided, the injunction would remain on hold until the case returned to the Supreme Court. Yet, the high court’s majority offered no substantive rationale for the lower court to parse.
So the Supreme Court basically said: “We’re overturning you, and also whatever you decide doesn’t matter anyway, but we’re not going to tell you why.” This left the entire Fourth Circuit panel wondering what the fuck they’re even supposed to do.
That left many of the 15 4th Circuit judges on hand for Thursday’s unusual en banc arguments puzzling at their role. One even suggested the appeals court should simply issue a one-line opinion saying the injunction is lifted and kick the case back to the Supreme Court to resolve.
Some judges thought they should just give up entirely and punt the case back to SCOTUS since SCOTUS has already said whatever they decide here doesn’t actually matter. Others insisted they had a constitutional duty to actually do their jobs:
“It sounds like some of my colleagues think that there’s no work to be done, that we’re done because the Supreme Court has told us what the answer is,” said Judge Albert Diaz, an Obama appointee.
Judge Robert King said punting on the case would be a mistake.
“We each have a commission and we have a robe and we have an oath to abide by,” said King, a Clinton appointee.
This perfectly captures the impossible position the Supreme Court has created. Lower court judges literally don’t know if they’re supposed to do their jobs or just rubber-stamp whatever vibes they think they’re getting from the shadow docket.
The whole mess stems from a series of recent Supreme Court shadow docket rulings (without much explanation) basically telling lower courts they have to follow SCOTUS shadow docket rulings (also without much explanation) as binding precedent. But as we’ve written about extensively, these aren’t reasoned legal decisions—they’re often unexplained orders issued with minimal briefing, no oral arguments, and little to no explanation of any reasoning.
This has created a situation where experienced federal judges—people who’ve spent decades interpreting legal precedent (often longer than the Justices themselves)—literally can’t figure out what the Supreme Court wants them to do.
What we’re witnessing is the breakdown of the federal judiciary as a functioning institution. When Reagan and Obama appointees are united in open revolt, and Harvie Wilkinson can’t figure out what the Supreme Court wants, the system has collapsed.
The three liberal Justices have been warning about this in dissent after dissent, while the conservative majority just keeps issuing more unexplained orders and then getting pissy when lower courts can’t read their minds. This isn’t jurisprudence. It’s government by judicial decree, where constitutional law operates on vibes and the only consistent principle is “give Trump whatever he wants.”
When federal judges with decades of experience are reduced to public pleading for basic guidance during oral arguments, we’ve crossed into judicial authoritarianism. The Supreme Court has effectively told the entire federal judiciary: “Follow our orders, but we won’t explain what they mean, and if you guess wrong, we’ll scold you for defying us.”
That’s not how precedent works. That’s not how courts work. That’s not the rule of law. It’s just nine people in robes demanding deference to their unexplained whims.
