Big Short Author on Effects of DOGE Cuts

Guardian:

Elon Musk’s Doge has only been running for a few weeks but Americans will be suffering the consequences of his ignorant vandalism for many years to come, in health, national security, disaster preparation and more. It would not be surprising to learn that some of the people interviewed here have already been laid off, or their work defunded. At any rate, Musk’s demolition derby makes this kind of journalism feel, more than ever, like a civic duty.

Contrary to the conservative stereotype of a ballooning bureaucracy, the size of the federal workforce has not changed greatly since the 1960s. It currently numbers around 2.4m people, more than 70% of whom work for agencies related to defence and national security. No doubt some of them are mediocre or incompetent, and some systems are badly in need of reform, but this book rightly focuses on the quiet heroes who represent public service at its best.

One reason we don’t know who these people are is that they don’t care if you know who they are. “The best thing in the world is when no one can remember whose idea it was,” says Ronald E Waters, the humble powerhouse whose National Cemetery Administration has a record rating of 97 on the Customer Satisfaction Index. As the New Yorker’s Casey Cep writes: “He refuses to believe there’s anything like a Ron Fan Club, no matter how many members I find.” Visiting Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dave Eggers notices “a relentless emphasis on teams and groups and predecessors” rather than individual glory.

Each chapter has its own distinct flavour. Novelist Geraldine Brooks’s story of an IRS cybercrime specialist who teaches jiu-jitsu when he’s not thwarting drug dealers, terrorists and paedophiles could be a movie pitch, while historian Sarah Vowell’s exquisitely written tour of the National Archives intertwines US history with that of her own family: “I was looking for a country I want to live in.”

John Lanchester tweaks the assignment by profiling not a person but a number: the consumer price index. He deftly explains how it works and how it falls short. Food prices constitute just 8% of the CPI but they are the main cause of sticker shock, so inflation can be technically falling but, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could tell you, consumers won’t feel it. But that does not make CPI, as rightwing agitators claim, a lie. Lanchester’s seemingly wonkish article ascends towards a stirring defence of the pursuit of objective data, however imperfect, as an expression of Enlightenment values.

NPR:

A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were “relatively nonexistent” during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR’s Juana Summers.

Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March. Lavingia said he had previously sought to work for the U.S. Digital Service, the technology unit that was renamed and restructured by the Trump administration. He told NPR that he just wanted to make government websites easier for citizens to use and didn’t really care which presidential administration he was working for, despite protests from his friends and family.