A lot of what’s allegedly happening with DOGE doesn’t make sense. Some things just can’t be happening as reported; others need explanations that no one is giving. The news media are doing their usual bad job of delivering facts.
To start with, what is DOGE? The “Department of Governmental Efficiency” isn’t a department of the government, in spite of its name. Officially, it’s a “special commission” created by the president. It has no power over anybody beyond its own employees. Yet we keep hearing of government employees being fired by DOGE. A notice of termination by DOGE to, for example, a Department of Energy employee has no more significance than one from me. Either the terminations are actually coming from somewhere else, or people are complying for no apparent reason.
Lately we’ve seen a reversal, admitting that it’s the various departments of the government that are terminating their own employees, with DOGE advising the action at most. Why are they doing this? If Trump is telling them to and they think they have to comply, that’s on him, not on Elon Musk. This gets into questions of whether these people can be terminated and who can order it, but it’s a more normal issue.
This little news video encapsulates the situation for employees at the Portsmouth Naval Yard. Alana Schaeffer says, “You know, this email came in the dark of night, people see tweets from Elon Musk saying, ‘Hey, this email is going out to all federal workers, if you don’t respond to it, you’re going to be fired.’ Simultaneously our employees get an email from the Department of Defense, saying, ‘Don’t respond to the OPM email, we evaluate our own employees.’ At the same time, we see our Commander in Chief saying, ‘You know, if you don’t respond to this OPM email, you’re going to be fired or semi-fired.'” First interesting point there: The email came from the Office of Personnel Management, not from DOGE. She also noted that DoD shipyard workers deal with classified information and can’t tell just anybody through an insecure channel all about what they do.
One more important thing: Before the conversation, host Adam Sexton refers to “scrutiny by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency” and later says the email is “from Elon Musk.” This directly contradicts Schaeffer’s statement that the email came from OPM, but neither of them seems to notice.
The orders are coming from Trump, either directly or through subordinate offices such as OPM. Yet the media keep portraying Musk as exercising actual authority, often getting the facts wrong to create this impression.
Another question is why DOGE is getting access to so much personal, confidential information on people. There are generally strict restrictions on who can access personal data and for what purpose. Agencies seem to be handing DOGE information without question. They reassure us that the access is “read only.” That’s something; it would be worse if they could change our data. But it’s small consolation; how much does it relieve you if your credit card data is stolen and you’re told that the thief merely has “read-only” access to it? Why are they just handing over access? Is it even legal?
The real story, as far as I can tell, is that Trump is bullying people who are used to presidents holding vast power but not exercising it so capriciously. The chain of command is probably whoever will do Trump’s dirty work for him. No one will squarely stand up to him, and anyone who does is likely to be out of a job. But we’re not getting the straight story from the news media. They need to ask pointed questions and figure out which answers are telling the truth. The news media just aren’t good at that.