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WIRED
10-04-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
The Trump Administration Is Turning Science Against Itself
Apr 10, 2025 1:48 PM In addition to firing researchers and pulling funds, the Trump administration is also inverting science. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images The damage the Trump administration has done to science in a few short months is both well documented and incalculable, but in recent days that assault has taken an alarming twist. Their latest project is not firing researchers or pulling funds—although there's still plenty of that going on. It's the inversion of science itself. Here's how it works. Three 'dire wolves' are born in an undisclosed location in the continental United States, and the media goes wild. This is big news for Game of Thrones fans and anyone interested in 'de-extinction,' the promise of bringing back long-vanished species. There's a lot to unpack here: Are these dire wolves really dire wolves? (They're technically grey wolves with edited genes, so not everyone's convinced.) Is this a publicity stunt or a watershed moment of discovery? If we're staying in the Song of Ice and Fire universe, can we do ice dragons next? All more or less reasonable reactions. And then there's secretary of the interior Doug Burgum, a former software executive and investor now charged with managing public lands in the US. 'The marvel of 'de-extinction' technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk,' Burgum wrote in a post on X this week. 'The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of 'de-extinction' can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.' What Burgum is suggesting here is that the answer to 18,000 threatened species—as classified and tallied by the nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature—is that scientists can simply slice and dice their genes back together. It's like playing Contra with the infinite lives code, but for the global ecosystem. This logic is wrong, the argument is bad. More to the point, though, it's the kind of upside-down takeaway that will be used not to advance conservation efforts but to repeal them. Oh, fracking may kill off the California condor? Here's a mutant vulture as a make-good. 'Developing genetic technology cannot be viewed as the solution to human-caused extinction, especially not when this administration is seeking to actively destroy the habitats and legal protections imperiled species need,' said Mike Senatore, senior vice president of conservation programs at the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement. 'What we are seeing is anti-wildlife, pro-business politicians vilify the Endangered Species Act and claim we can Frankenstein our way to the future.' On Tuesday, Donald Trump put on a show of signing an executive order that promotes coal production in the United States. The EO explicitly cites the need to power data centers for artificial intelligence. Yes, AI is energy-intensive. They've got that right. Appropriate responses to that fact might include 'can we make AI more energy-efficient?' or 'Can we push AI companies to draw on renewable resources.' Instead, the Trump administration has decided that the linchpin technology of the future should be driven by the energy source of the past. You might as well push UPS to deliver exclusively by Clydesdale. Everything is twisted and nothing makes sense. The nonsense jujitsu is absurd, but is it sincere? In some cases, it's hard to say. In others it seems more likely that scientific illiteracy serves a cover for retribution. This week, the Commerce Department canceled federal support for three Princeton University initiatives focused on climate research. The stated reason, for one of those programs: 'This cooperative agreement promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as 'climate anxiety,' which has increased significantly among America's youth.' Commerce Department, you're so close! Climate anxiety among young people is definitely something to look out for. Telling them to close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears while the world burns is probably not the best way to address it. If you think their climate stress is bad now, just wait until half of Miami is underwater. There are two important pieces of broader context here. First is that Donald Trump does not believe in climate change, and therefore his administration proceeds as though it does not exist. Second is that Princeton University president Christopher Eisengruber had the audacity to suggest that the federal government not routinely shake down academic institutions under the guise of stopping antisemitism. Two weeks later, the Trump administration suspended dozens of research grants to Princeton totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. And now, 'climate anxiety.' This is all against the backdrop of a government whose leading health officials are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mehmet Oz, two men who, to varying degrees, have built their careers peddling unscientific malarky. The Trump administration has made clear that it will not stop at the destruction and degradation of scientific research in the United States. It will also misrepresent, misinterpret, and bastardize it to achieve distinctly unscientific ends. Those dire wolves aren't going to solve anything; they're not going to be reintroduced to the wild, they're not going to help thin out deer and elk populations. But buried in the announcement was something that could make a difference. It turns out Colossal also cloned a number of red wolves—a species that is critically endangered but very much not extinct—with the goal of increasing genetic diversity among the population. It doesn't resurrect a species that humanity has wiped out. It helps one survive. The Chatroom Will the United States lose its position as a leading home of scientific research? Leave a comment on the site or send your thoughts to mail@ WIRED Reads Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading 🔗 How a Small African Nation Scrambled to Appease Trump on Tariffs: The government of Lesotho offered everything from an operating license for Starlink to help with mass-deportation in the face of reciprocal tariffs. (Mother Jones) 🔗 Trump Wants to Merge Government Data. Here Are 314 Things It Might Know About You: Everything from your bank account numbers to your student loan details sit in government servers. The NYT put together an exhaustive list. (The New York Times) 🔗 Trump Takes Aim at Low-Pressure Showers With Executive Order: Make Water Pressure Great Again? OK, guess this is where we're at now. (The Wall Street Journal) The Download We tried to make sense of tariffs this week in our flagship Uncanny Valley podcast. Did we succeed? Well, in fairness no one else has. Listen now. Thanks again for subscribing. You can find me on Bluesky or on Signal at barrett.64.
WIRED
21-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Elon Musk and Donald Trump Have Chosen Chaos
Mar 21, 2025 8:00 AM Elon Musk secured his choke hold on the mechanics of the federal government weeks ago. Along with Donald Trump, he has already standardized chaos across the US. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Two months into the second Trump administration, the United States is in pure chaos mode. Tens of thousands of workers are fired one week and forcibly rehired the next. Tariffs rise and fall based not on strategy but on one man's ire. Deportations fly in the face of judicial orders, careening the country toward a constitutional crisis. The only constant is the volatility itself. On paper, that may be surprising. A central premise of Donald Trump's appeal is that he is an apex businessman. Same with Elon Musk. The elevator pitch: Through the sheer force of their combined savvy, America will be saved from 'bankruptcy'—or worse. There aren't many Harvard Business School case studies, though, that suggest maximum instability is the path to success. There's plenty of Occam's razor at work here: The US is wobbling wildly because its president and de facto CEO are some combination of self-serving and inept. But in between and among the absurdities, something darker takes shape. Inherent in every chaotic act is a challenge. Every outrage is a test. In the meantime, the uncertainty has international consequences. Tourism has plummeted, as potential visitors cancel their trips to a country increasingly, openly hostile to noncitizens. Europe is rearming itself in the face of a heightened potential for conflict, as Ukraine becomes the fulcrum on which decades of solidarity between the US and Europe may pivot. Allies have considered sharing less intelligence with their US counterparts, given the Trump administration's increasingly cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin. It's a heel turn worthy of a WWE Monday Night RAW plotline. But the US is not in the business of selling spectacle. Its value lies in its reliability. Instead it is now erratic, unpredictable. It's messy. International politics is a relationship business; Donald Trump seems intent on undermining America's relationships at every turn. (Well, except toward Moscow.) There's the slash-and-burn approach to budgeting, a seeming race to create a minimally viable government. The operative part of a turnaround plan is the 'plan' part. Firing as many people as possible as quickly as possible—without apparent consideration for actual skills or value that they bring to the role—does not qualify as a plan. It's just more instability. The good news is that many of those employees are being reinstated, as the gears of the judiciary have slowly begun to turn. But that reinstatement itself may prove temporary, depending on what higher courts say. And even if those workers do come back, how motivated will they be to stay now that they know how their employer views their worth? More to the point, who would go work for the US government in its current state? Civil service doesn't pay great, but at least you get to feel like you're serving a higher calling with a side order of job security. The only callings being served right now are Donald Trump's retribution tour and Elon Musk's amateur hour AI jamboree. Eventually they'll run out of SpaceX interns to hire. (A quick side note: Donald Trump reportedly told transportation secretary and Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons champion Sean Duffy that he should hire Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates to work as air traffic controllers. The average starting salary for an MIT undergraduate is $126,438. The starting salary out of ATC school is $43,727. Business savvy!) As for Musk, he secured his choke hold on the mechanics of the federal government weeks ago. But the installation of Starlink terminals at the White House, his repeated attacks against federal judges on X, his open dismissal of Congress—none of these are normal. The longer they go on, though, the more they feel like they might be. That's the point, really. The standardization of chaos. The steady insistence that no matter how outlandish, how dangerous, this tilt away from democracy gets, it's actually nothing to get upset about. Attempt to remake the US government as quickly and radically as possible, because otherwise how will you know how far you can push it? Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you'll land among the kakistocracy. The good news is that there is a way out of this. The courts have already stopped DOGE at various turns and reversed some of its most extreme activities. Congress could wake up tomorrow and remember that it's a coequal branch of government. Public pressure can remind politicians that elections aren't decided only by whose corner the world's richest man is in. Boundaries do exist, even if they need to be reinforced with rebar. And then there's the bad news, which is the likelihood that Trump and Musk will at some point stop pretending to care about any official checks on their power. Or that they already have. The Chatroom What do you think of chaos as a political strategy? Leave a comment on the site or send your thoughts to mail@ WIRED Reads Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading 🔗 Elon Musk's Starlink Expands Across White House Complex: Officials say that Starlink, the internet service run by Elon Musk's SpaceX, gifted access to the White House. (The New York Times) 🔗 More Than 400 Social Security Numbers, Other Private Information Revealed in JFK Files: The data belongs to former congressional staffers and others. (The Washington Post) 🔗 DOGE Stranded USAID Workers With Laptops Full of Sensitive Data: When you close down an agency … what happens to their sensitive tech? (The Verge) The Download Check out this week's news episode on Uncanny Valley : DOGE Is Doing the Opposite of Government Auditing. WIRED staff writer Vittoria Elliott joined global editorial director Katie Drummond to dig into all things DOGE. Listen now. Thanks again for subscribing. You can find me on Bluesky or on Signal at barrett.64.
WIRED
27-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The DOGE Takeover Is Worse Than You Think
Feb 27, 2025 10:08 AM What's happening to the US government right now is bad. What comes next is worse. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images If you've felt overwhelmed by all the DOGE news, you're not alone. You'd need too much cork board and yarn to keep track of which agencies it has occupied by now, much less what it's doing there. Here's a simple rubric, though, to help contextualize the DOGE updates you do have time and energy to process: It's worse than you think. DOGE is hard to keep track of. This is by design; the only information about the group outside of its own mistake-ridden ledger of 'savings' comes from media reports. So much for being 'maximally transparent,' as Elon Musk has promised. The blurriness is also partly a function of the speed and breadth with which DOGE has operated. Keeping track of the destruction is like counting individual bricks scattered around a demolition site. You may be aware, for instance, that a 19-year-old who goes by 'Big Balls' online plays some role in all this. Seems bad. But you may have missed that Edward Coristine has since been installed at the nation's top cybersecurity agency. And the State Department and the Small Business Administration, and he has a Department of Homeland Security email address, and by the way also had a recent side gig selling AI Discord bots to Russians. See? Worse than you think. Even if that feels like old news, remember that it's actually still happening, every day a fresh incursion by Big Balls and his cohort of 20-something technologists. (In fairness, they're not all young; some of them are old enough to present conflicts of interest so flagrant that they literally lack modern precedent.) Similarly, you've likely heard that the United States Agency for International Development has been gutted and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been put on ice. All true, all bad. But here's what that means in practice: Fewer people globally have access to vaccines than they did a month ago. More babies are being born with HIV/AIDS. From here on out, anyone who gets ripped off by payday loan companies—or, say, social media platforms moonlighting as payments services—has lost their most capable defender. Keep going. The thousands of so-called probationary employees DOGE has fired included a significant number of experienced workers who just got promoted or transferred. National Science Foundation staffing cuts and proposed National Institutes of Health grant limits will combine to kneecap scientific research in the United States for a generation. Terminations at the US Department of Agriculture have sent programs designed to help farmers into disarray. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration cancelled a meeting that would have given guidance on this year's flu vaccine composition. It hasn't been rescheduled. Don't care about science or vaccines? The Social Security Administration is reportedly going to cut its staff in half. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is going to be cut by as much as 84 percent. Hundreds of workers who keep the power grid humming in the Pacific Northwest were fired before a scramble to rehire a few of them. The National Parks Service, the Internal Revenue Service, all hit hard. So don't make any long-term bets on getting your checks on time, keeping your lights on, buying a home for the first time, or enjoying Yosemite. Don't assume all the things that work now will still work tomorrow. Speaking of which, let's not forget that DOGE has fired people working to prevent bird flu and to safeguard the US nuclear arsenal. (The problem with throwing a chainsaw around is that you don't make clean cuts.) The agencies in question have reportedly tried to hire those workers back. Fine. But even if they're able to, the long-term question that hasn't been answered yet is: Who would stay? Who would work under a regime so cocksure and incompetent that it would mistakenly fire the only handful of people who actually know how to take care of the nukes? According to a recent report from The Bulwark, that brain drain is already underway. And this is all before the real reductions-in-force begin, mass purges of civil servants that will soon be conducted, it seems, with an assist from DOGE-modified, automated software. The US government is about to lose decades of institutional knowledge across who knows how many agencies, including specialists that aren't readily replaced by loyalists. Elon Musk has, at least, acknowledged that DOGE will make mistakes, and promised fast fixes. He even called one out specifically Wednesday, the cancelation of a USAID program designed to prevent the spread of Ebola. 'We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,' he said during an appearance at Trump's first cabinet meeting. 'And there was no interruption.' This is not the case, as The Washington Post first reported. Not only has Ebola prevention not been restored—it was and remains severely diminished—but the Trump administration also said Wednesday it would terminate nearly 10,000 contracts and grants from USAID and the State Department. Many of those contracts represent an attempt to lessen some form of suffering in some part of the world. It's too many individual stories to tell, too many tragedies unfolding too far away. It's worse than you think in the same way that your brain breaks a little when you try to picture how deep the ocean is. It's worse than you think because by the time the courts catch up, the damage will already have been done. It's worse than you think because the people running the government seem to have no higher mission than to watch it burn. Federal agencies could absolutely be more efficient, but we're long past the point where efficiency is a plausible goal. DOGE's cuts have no apparent regard for civil society or opportunity costs or long-term strategic thinking. Their targets are Elon Musk's and Project 2025's targets. They have found no fraud, just democracy at work. They're apparently eager to see what happens when it no longer does. It's worse than you think because so far all DOGE has done is drop a boulder into the middle of a pond. If you think this is bad, wait for the ripples. The Chatroom What will be the most lasting impact of the DOGE cuts? Leave a comment on the site or send your thoughts to mail@ WIRED Reads Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading 🔗 DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week: The parade of casual incompetence continues. (The New York Times) 🔗 Trump Administration to Cut 92% of USAID Foreign Aid Contracts: This is reportedly going to 'save' $60 billion. The federal budget is $6.8 trillion. As discussed above, the true cost will be incalculable. (Axios) 🔗 Is What DOGE Is Doing Legal?: Great question! Wish the courts would get around to answering it! (The Washington Post) The Download Check out this week's special-edition podcast episode, WIRED News Update: DOGE's Many Conflicts of Interest & Elon's Weekend Email Chaos. I joined global editorial director Katie Drummond to dig into all things DOGE. Listen now. Thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with Makena via email, Instagram, X, Bluesky, and Signal at makenakelly.32.
WIRED
20-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Feb 20, 2025 7:00 AM A series of mistakes by DOGE shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk's DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following: Pushed a website live to track 'savings' that showed no savings for several days, and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it. Published classified information on that same website. Got called out for accidentally inflating that savings amount by $7,992,000,000, and doubled down on their inaccuracy before they fixed it. Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn't know how to get in touch. Basically the same deal, except with the US Department of Agriculture employees working to protect the country from a looming bird flu crisis. Rehired a 25-year-old engineer with a stack of racist tweets to his name. Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who's getting Social Security benefits. (Okay, that was all Musk.) That's just a sampling. It doesn't include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that arbitrarily spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy. It doesn't include the opportunity cost of tossing hundreds of government contracts and programs into a bonfire. This is just the truly dumb stuff, the peek behind the veil of DOGE, the confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems. When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It's the federal government; how hard can it be? This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It's a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It's the implacable confidence that if you're smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things. It doesn't work like that. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time; when he turned to baseball in 1994, Jordan hit .202 in 127 games for the AA Birmingham Barons. (For anyone unfamiliar with baseball stats, this is very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.) Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly. Just look at all of those firings. DOGE has targeted so-called probationary employees first, often without regard for their skill or necessity of their roles. Do you know what a probationary employee is? It's people who have been in their position for less than a year, or in some cases less than two years. That means new hires, sure, but also experienced workers who recently transferred departments or got promoted. Not only does DOGE not seem to understand this, it has given no indication that it wants to understand. These are the easiest employees to fire, legally speaking, so they're gone. It even changed the length of the probationary period—from one year of service to two—in order to super-size its purge of the National Science Foundation. It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we've repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.) And if you don't believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE's costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration. Worse still, none of this will actually help DOGE make a dent in its purported mission. What's efficient about firing people you have to scramble to hire back? What are the cost savings of a few thousand federal employees compared to the F-35 program? What are we even doing here, actually? There are two possible explanations for this mess. One is that Musk and DOGE have no interest in the government, or efficiency, but do care deeply about the data they can reap from various agencies and revel in privatization for its own sake. The other is that a bunch of purportedly talented coders have indeed responded to a higher civic calling, but are out here batting .202. Musk did have a rare moment of self-awareness late last week, during an Oval Office appearance with his four-year-old son and President Donald Trump. 'We will make mistakes,' he said. 'but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.' So far he's half right. The Chatroom Are any of the changes DOGE has made for the better? WIRED Reads Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading 🔗 DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million: Further reading on the DOGE savings tracker fiasco. (The New York Times) 🔗 'Help Us:' Hundreds deported from US held in Panama hotel: A bracing look at the conditions under which immigrants are being held abroad. (BBC) 🔗 Trump administration yanks CDC flu vaccine campaign: Robert F. Kennedy is now sworn in, and it appears the vaccine pullback has already begun. (NPR)
WIRED
14-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The DOGE Squad Is Squandering a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
Feb 14, 2025 10:00 AM Government tech experts say Elon Musk's team could have seized the moment to make Washington work better. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images When news first broke about Elon Musk's tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would provide a long-needed jolt to an intransigent and antediluvian bureaucracy. 'It's beyond debate that a more aggressive approach was necessary if we were ever going to make any progress in our lifetimes,' says Mikey Dickerson, who was the founding administrator of the United States Digital Service, which has now been refashioned into Musk's US DOGE Service. (He left in 2017, before Trump was inaugurated the first time.) Dickerson says the executive order that Trump issued on day one of his second term, which established DOGE as a temporary organization within the government, was actually something he would have liked to see in Obama's founding charter for the agency. He particularly liked the paragraph that forced agencies to give USDS teams access to systems and records. 'That wouldn't have been a magic bullet, but it would have created a strong presumption that they needed to cooperate,' he says. 'We didn't really have that, so it was pretty much optional whether anybody wanted to work with us.' Some of the outgoing leaders of the government tech team, who were both proud of their accomplishments and frustrated by their inability to truly transform the opaque mess of federal IT, shared similar hopes. Outgoing USDS director Mina Hsiang called DOGE's power 'a tremendous opportunity.' Former federal chief information officer Clare Martorana expressed excitement that the order would force agencies to share budget data with DOGE, seeing it as an opportunity to pull back the shroud and finally figure out where these agencies hide waste. This information could inform wise decisions on what needs cutting, with the North Star being value to the American people. 'I'm trying very hard to be optimistic about it,' she told me. Before the inauguration, Jennifer Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer under Obama and one of the USDS founders, wrote an essay called 'Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,' which summed up the feeling: 'A lot of the government tech community … don't see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void.' If any of those former officials really believed that Musk was going to run with the opportunity to constructively reform the government, those fantasies have now been shattered. Musk and DOGE brought in a team of young techies and experienced executives who could have seized the moment to focus on making government work better. But to date they have used their access and power to indiscriminately drain the federal workforce and defund programs for ideological reasons, seemingly without giving even casual thought to the consequences. Yes, Musk professes to be a champion of the people against the bureaucratic state: 'If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?' he asked during a bizarre Oval Office appearance this week while Trump looked on and Musk's 4-year-old son X fidgeted. But the actions actually taken by DOGE don't sync with this sentiment, especially when the moves seem to contravene measures passed by Congress and signed into law. That's not terribly democratic. 'I think government is a good thing, and it needed massive transformation, far more quickly than anyone in political leadership had any appetite for,' Pahlka tells me. 'Since we didn't do it, this seems to be what we're getting.' Ann Lewis, who until late last year headed the Technology Transformation Services, an agency devoted to using modern tech to make government accessible to its citizens, also tried at first to see the DOGE takeover in a positive light. It didn't take long for that light to dim. 'The model of bringing in private-sector people who have a fresh perspective and skills and who want to help is a great idea,' she tells me. 'But we're not seeing people from the private sector with lots of experience who want to understand how everything works.' It's overstating the case to describe Pahlka, Dickerson, and Lewis as disillusioned, because it was obvious all along that Musk's dreams didn't involve things like single sign-on for government services, or direct tax filing, or creating a universal feedback loop so agencies could better serve their constituents. These are all examples of the kinds of efficiencies that serve people no matter where they stand politically. 'I don't believe for a second that they're taking seriously the idea of making government more efficient,' says Dickerson. 'If you were trying to do that, then you would start with the big programs, not these little things around the edges like USAID. There's like 12 people outside Washington who could have told you what that agency was three weeks ago. And why would you need access to the Treasury payment system? No one thought there was anything wrong with the Treasury payment system. That's for some other purpose.' To be fair, Musk does make a case for read-only access to the Treasury system: It can help to identify fraud and waste. (The case for DOGE's youth squad to have the ability to change the system is something else.) During the Oval Office appearance, he told horror stories of federal employees possibly enriching themselves with tens of millions of dollars. But he hasn't provided evidence and doesn't seem to be referring cases for prosecution. And defining waste sometimes depends on who's assessing the claim. A number of his charges about supposedly illegal expenditures from USAID have turned out to be misrepresentations of reasonable grants, some of which weren't made by that agency at all! Yet he called USAID 'a criminal organization' and said it was 'time for it to die.' Considering that Musk rails against the bureaucracy for wielding unelected power, that's an odd justification from an unelected official negating the will of elected representatives. (A federal judge has temporarily blocked a decision to put thousands of agency workers on leave.) DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. One goal Musk doesn't hide is cutting the federal workforce to the bone—even if it means that critical talent goes out the door. Lewis told me she heard from friends at USDS and people she hired at TTS about their interactions with DOGE people. 'These are people with decades of experience, like an AI executive from Netflix, or an early Microsoft engineer,' she says. 'They were in 15-minute interviews with DOGE staff, who are almost entirely in their twenties, white, male, and inexperienced. They were asking people who used to be on the level of their former boss's boss's boss, 'What are your skills? Why do you think your projects are important? And who do you think we should fire?' When these senior engineers answered the questions and told the DOGE staffers about things like software architecture and product management and system monitoring and production system scaling, the 20-year-olds hadn't heard of these things, because they haven't had that experience in their own tech careers yet. So the experience was humiliating, and I think intended to drive people out.' Minutes before my conversation with Lewis this week, DOGE began attempting to fire people at TTS. 'There are plenty of arguments for smaller government, but cutting people with no thought or care to what skills they have?' she asks. 'That's taking a machete to something as opposed to making surgical cuts that try and improve the functioning of the government.' For those who spent a good chunk of their lives pushing for reform, and ultimately concluded that only radical measures could tame the bureaucratic beast, Elon Musk's youth crusade represents a heartbreaking squandering of a generational opportunity. When Dickerson recruited for USDS, he would say to young techies, 'Only come here if you want the opportunity to work on the most important problems in the country. I guarantee you if you come here for that, you're going to get it. If you come here for anything else, I promise you nothing.' It's hard to determine what Musk's junior minions are thinking of their work. (If you are one of them, please ping me at stevenlevy.72 on Signal. I promise to listen.) They may well believe that they are purging evil from a deep-state conspiracy that deserves to die. But as a matter of fact, they are contributing to efforts to shut down Head Start programs, halting initiatives to monitor potential global pandemics in Africa, and creating the conditions to restore indefensible late fees on credit cards. By the time they're done, the rest of us might be pining for the good old sclerotic bureaucracy. In 2016 I interviewed Mikey Dickerson and his second-in-command Haley Van Dyck about the progress of the US Digital Service. Among other topics, we discussed dealing with entrenched bureaucracy, Steven Levy: Besides the technical challenges, what are the biggest obstacles? Do you encounter foes dedicated to the status quo? Haley Van Dyck: The biggest foe is generally risk aversion. People in government are trained to not do things differently, because there's often really bad consequences when you try something differently and it fails. We run up against this all the time. Mikey Dickerson: I wish there were bad guys with top hats and handlebar mustaches, because if there was some supervillain behind a humongously dysfunctional project, all we would have to do is identify that person and take them out and everything would get better. That's not the problem. The problem is just all of the things that inevitably happen when you try to coordinate 60,000 people in the VA to do the same thing at the same time. Even when somebody looks like they're being a big pain, it's just a function of their position in the bureaucracy and their role. Their interest is almost always wanting the same thing that we want, which is that they want the veterans to get a better experience, they want the disability claims to be adjudicated faster, but to them that doesn't mean the same thing necessarily that it means to the person next to them. B.J. asks, 'How much input, if any, did you have on the Hackers movie?' Thanks for asking, B.J. I had zero input on that 1985 flick. If they had asked me for my input, here's what I would have said: 'Please do not steal my book title for your unexceptional movie.' Seriously, Hackers the movie had nothing to do with Hackers the book, and the former offered no ideas about computers or hackers. We both know you wouldn't be asking me about it if Angelina Jolie wasn't in it. Peace out. Submit your questions in the comments below, or send an email to mail@ Write ASK LEVY in the subject line. An asteroid nearly the size of a football field is traveling in Earth's risk corridor, possibly hitting our home planet with the force of 500 Hiroshima bombs. Happy 2032! Last but Not Least The firings at Technology Transformation Services. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the GSA sell-off of federal buildings. Everything must go! During the LA fires, an app called Watch Duty caught fire metaphorically. Meet its maker. We ❤️ the heart emoji so much that it's now utterly meaningless. What happens after you expose your behavior to the 'I am an asshole' subreddit? A WIRED investigation.
