Which is what Putin has tasked him with.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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“Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon.”
So, mission accomplished then? I never believed for a moment it was ever about reducing waste / increasing efficiency. At best, it was scrounging the government couch for change to pay for tax breaks for the rich.
Well, yeah. He should have named it the Department of Dismantling the Administrative State, but that's not a meme.
should have named it the Department of Dismantling the Administrative State, but that's not a meme.
At least if you read the acronym backwards, SADD, it's fitting.
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The only waste in government is corruption. “Inefficiencies” are actually resiliency—a crucial trait of any social system.
Underappreciated fact.
I was listening to conservative AM radio (combo of morbid curiosity and masochism), and they talked about a social security warehouse full of documents and how inefficient that is in 2025, and we should get rid of it.
I’m just like:
First of all, there’s no way that’s their primary data source. So if you’re crying for modernization, that already happened a long time ago.
But if you’re saying we shouldn’t preserve paper copies, then you’re opening the door to all sorts of terrible things.
Like, saying we should just trust whatever the government says and not have to prove it in a court of law, or making our systems vulnerable to hackers, or making it so certain government actions can never be undone.
But uh... I guess all three of those things have become hallmarks of this administration anyway, huh?
150 billion
Yeah and if you actually believe that to be true then I have a bridge to sell you. These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
I'd be surprised if it's even close to 15 billion
These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion
Even aside from stuff like this, things they claim to be saving tend to be cut contracts. Contracts that have already been paid, but will no longer have to provided what they'd been paid for.
Also they lost like 500Bn according to the IRS due to cutting IRS staff alone, not including revenue lost as a result of cutting services that the government provided and revenue lost as a result of other nations no longer doing business with the USA such as arms sales, energy, rocketry, hospitals, and other transactions.
By all accounts DOGE is losing money.
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It also completely ignored the cost of the consequences, which is likely going to easily outpace any money "saved".
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The goal was never to save money but find ways to enrich himself.
The amount of money it’ll take to fix all this will dwarf the $150B. By several factors at least.
The CFPB people he cut were saving citizens - i.e. the very taxpayers Musk claims to represent without a mandate of any kind - $21 billion already.
He was selling our dollars for pennies.
It doesn't count unless it goes to the government. Taxes and exploitation are good as long as they come from private companies instead of the government because freedom is a vibe rather than an actual set of circumstances.
Good thing the US is trashing all their trade agreements, then. That'll make paying for it so much easier.
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He did the absolute reverse of saving. He destroyed and cost the US TRILLIONS of dollars. The IRS alone will not collect an additional +$500 billion in revenue this year and every year going forward. Over ten years, that's $5 trillion in extra uncollected revenue, and I'm sure this is a conservative estimate.
You mean the IRS alone will not steal an additional +$500 billion from the poor, helpless billionaires this year, right? /s
for half a second I thought this comment was just poor because of how late the billionaires part came in the sentence.
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People don't understand that a state isn't a private company, and you can't manage the state like in the private sector.
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$150 billion
Does this even take into account all the extra work and thus spending doge's flailing caused?
In addition to that cutting NOAA staff only saves money until the next hurricane hits, cutting the CDC only saves money until the next outbreak hits, cutting the FDA only saves money until the next foodborne contamination etc. etc.
FDA only saves money until the next foodborne contamination etc. etc.
We've already had an e. coli outbreak that the FDA tried to keep quiet.
One would think the US already has enough experience in how it does not work like that, but it seems the guys in power are determined to walk that road til the end. What's the end though?
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And lawyer time
Doesn’t matter to the supporters. They believe he has streamlined government and saved gazillions. And if you don’t like DOGE there must be something wrong with you. Why wouldn’t you want a more efficient government without fraud and waste? Do you want waste?
I feel I'm doing Me-lon a favor by comparing him to this amazing piece of internet history but there we are.
I'm possibly more worried about what he didn't destroy at this point. What's gone will at least be rebuilt largely from scratch by people that care about restoring those institutions.
My huge worry now is what backdoors are now in systems like social security that impacts us all and we may not find out about for a long time. How much identity theft and scamming will go on now that outside actors likely have access to some or all of that data?
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
Every. Fucking. Thing that doge touched has been backdoored to Russia. Doge is a front to get sensitive information to the Kremlin. Elon is a fucking traitor.
Yes, exactly, and once I read this yesterday I allowed myself to rule out that I was just thinking the worst.
Daniel Bertulis appeared on The Lead, joined by his attorney Andrew Bakaj, and explained the details of how he apparently uncovered a massive amount of missing data from the NLRB following DOGE’s efforts. He ostensibly mocked a White House statement touting the transparency at play, noting that none of the code used by DOGE technicians has been shared publicly.
But the most shocking allegations came from Bakaj, who not only claimed that accounts based in Russia were using newly created DOGE usernames and passwords to access sensitive data, but also directly tied the effort to Elon Musk and his Starlink concerns, which has a relationship with the Kremlin.
“There are two data points that I wanna point out that should give everybody pause,” Bakaj said. “The first thing, what Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts, i.e. Usernames and passwords, within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right username and right passwords — that is to say — the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times.”
“The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data,” he continued. “What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia.”
I think I got this link from some Lemmy post yesterday, and I don't like that I don't know the source, but it seems to fit what is being talked about in regular mainstream reporting.
The whistleblower and his lawyer were on Rachel Maddow if you want a more reputable source. He also said that they taped a picture of him walking his dog to his door that was taken via drone as a sort of threat.
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Heard of the whistleblower related to DOGE who claims the tech group hired by Musk had already tried to breach government for years or so?
And how with each DOGE visit to a given department it always followed tactics of distraction and getting stored data, then suddenly leaving?
And how there's suddenly many breach attempts by suspicious hackers linked to Russia right after DOGE visits?
Or how the biggest culprit of government bloating by hecking far, the Department of Defense, same department who has failed several audits, was never a target of DOGE?
Hm... Not suspicious at all. Sadly I can't recall the source, but I think it was on YouTube.
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NOT True! NOW that we saved a couple Million we can Afford BILLIONS in Contracts for Elon Musk and El Salvador and Greenland and my Kids is Starving because they Cut his Funding!
His goal was to get rid of regulators who dared regulate his companies, and suck up all the data for AI-BS (and possibly extortion). Quit accepting his framing and look at what he really did.
$150 billion is the target for FY 2025, not what they've actually saved.
And as the article says, we already know that their "receipts" were mostly wrong or bullshit, so even that number will be inflated.
THAT was not the point
The destruction of the Nation, was.
To put it into perspective...if Elon Musk were working paycheck-to-paycheck, he found enough money in the couch the night before payday to buy a pack of smokes.
With the damage done, it would be like he got a hernia while looking for the change only to find out how shitty his health insurance is.
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It doesn’t matter when the loads of idiots think he’s a genius. My dad is one of them. He refuses to believe anything that would call this into question calling it fake news. What am I even supposed to do?
My mother-in-law thinks he's an altruistic genius—essentially a super-hero. It seems the maga boomer internet is filled with AI generated sites that spread the Gospel of Musk. The one I saw was ludicrous: it promised that Elon has developed an amazing sci-fi wheelchair that he will soon be making available for under $200 (!). The wheelchairs pictured were obvious Dall-E level AI slop, the text read like it was translated into English by GPT. Nobody with even rudimentary critical thinking would believe these absurd claims.
But the comment section was littered with desperate old people pleading to knew where they could order these mobile miracles. A Cargo Cult of credulous, desperate fools.
The generation that warned us all growing up about how we shouldn't believe anything on the Internet will now swallow anything they read on the Internet (without any critical thinking) as long as it has a like from one of their friends.
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And we let him. I propose a sea burial. But let him try to explain fir...nah get in the box!
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I mean I've been told this is the year to fudge on your taxes since the IRS is fucked so I mean maybe there's some silver lining. Frankly Elon isn't as bad as- hold on someone's knocking on my door, I'll be back in a bit.
just FYI, its easier to audit a poor/middle class person because they dont pay 600 lawyers to play with where the money is for tax loopholes. Unless youre a multimillionaire you'll probably end up regretting fudging anything unfortunately.
Might not be the year to break laws though, considering even judges can't save you
To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15% of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash.
7.5%. He promised $2 trillion in cuts.
He saved all of our personal and national security information to give to the kremlin
The US budget is $7 trillion. Even if we pretend he saved $150 billion, that's 2% of the budget.
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