Touring the Obviously Not-Fraudulent World of DOGE
Lots of Numbers. Little context.
A trip over to DOGE.gov reveals, well, a whole lot of screens and menus. Charts. Figures. All very uninformative.
The first page displays a list of line-item expenditures. Tweet-sized explanations of the connection to this bureaucratic, deep-state fraud accompany these screenshots.
So far, it seems, Biden is the only transgressor after scouring decades and decades of data.
Call me skeptical.
One hard to miss detail is the little “X” in the corner of each post. The whole front page is simply an X feed. A direct link to Musk’s own for-profit enterprise which, by all accounts, has not been the same since he took it over.
Advertisers are bailing. Information providers are reconsidering their presence in what is often described as a “toxic” atmosphere. The userbase has been quickly whittled down to Elon’s hardcore fans and his reply bots.
One might even say it is struggling to survive. Or was.
Now with DOGE center stage in the national news, the site may have regained some relevance.
This, of course, is all due to Musk’s hard work. And not a 250 million dollar campaign donation to the President.
No fraud or waste to see there…
Yep, it’s all bootstraps all the time for Musk, richest man in the world.
Like his failed Cybertruck launch where only 2.5 percent of those who pre-ordered actually paid up leaving him with giant parking lots full of the stainless meme wagons.
But he reached for those bootstraps again and landed a $400 million dollar deal with DoD for armored CyberTrucks to plug that awkward, wedge-shaped hole.
While the X branding might be very front and center, not so obvious is who is running the site. Luckily, a few technically savvy users were able to get a look under the hood of the unsecured database.
DOGE.gov is run on a platform called CloudFlare and hosted not on a secure government server as one might expect but just out there in the wild.
Not that anybody on his team would be that careless. Except maybe the staffer fired from a cybersecurity firm for leaking secrets…
The most helpful page is titled, “Meet the U.S. Government.” The header image of this article shows the top-level view. A sprawling operation of over 2 million souls in 16,000 offices with total wages of $212 billion dollars.
Oh the potential waste! Such enormous numbers! So much efficiency to be had!
Of course, this is a payroll Musk’s reported $383.3 billion dollar net worth could easily float.
Sure, he’d be left with a pauper’s $100 billion. But with his zeal for efficiency, I’m sure he’d manage.
And that’s the true absurdity.
Not the conflicts of interest. Not the department’s name, taken from a crypto meme coin everybody understands to be a useless scam. Not even the relocation of incredibly sensitive data to off-site, unsecure servers by a team of teenage wunderkinds whose brain implants appear to be malfunctioning.
No, the most absurd thing is a man with a net worth 4,000,000? times the average government employee’s salary, whose fortunes are dependent on government deals and subsidies, declaring there is WASTE! and FRAUD! in the U.S. Government as he arbitrarily ruins those workers lives with no thought to the damage he’s done.
