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Brian Barrett: I just this week was looking back at some of our earliest DOGE reporting and reminded of what a crazy couple of months that was. So just as a reminder for folks who were slumbering through the first half of the year, A, I’m jealous. I respect that.
Zoë Schiffer: I was just going to say, good for you.
Brian Barrett: Department of Government Efficiency came about when Elon Musk and Donald Trump got together and basically Trump gave Elon Musk kind of free rein to do whatever he wanted, and I’m not really exaggerating here, within the federal government. So Musk allies took over various government agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which is sort of the human resources for the whole government, the General Services Administration, which is its tech IT department basically. And from there, kind of fanned out across agencies and were responsible for a lot of the chaos that we saw in this early administration, massive job cuts, massive cuts to USAID, regulations being slashed, not always for good, having everyone in the federal government, having to write an email with five points of what they did that week and sending it to never be read. DOGE didn’t end up doing what it set out to do.
The idea was to cut a trillion dollars from the budget, which you literally can’t do unless you cut into entitlement programs, which A, DOGE had no control over, and B, politically would be untenable. So Zoë, what did they do?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think the goal ostensibly was to root out fraud and waste, to root out inefficiency.
Brian Barrett: And abuse, fraud, waste and abuse, I think.
Zoë Schiffer: Fraud, waste and abuse. I was going to say it and I was like, I don’t even know exactly what that means,
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