Elon Musk’s DOGE has introduced some novel mental states into various parts of the American polity. Among its supporters, one finds both triumphalism and confusion. Among its opponents, one finds outrage, or sadness, or alarm, or all of these things combined, and confusion. There’s confusion on both sides because everyone is trying to figure out whether Donald Trump and Musk are using DOGE to balance the federal budget, or to reduce regulations for businesses, or to increase efficiency in government operations, or to attack Trump’s enemies. In any case, DOGE has been a huge deal. The sudden speed of its unambivalent bloodletting is unlike anything anyone’s ever seen before. It must be the most audacious and consequential governmental undertaking in American history that no one knows the point of.
The idea that it’s meant to cut into the budget deficit sits uneasily with the fact that personnel spending accounts for a very small portion of the federal budget, and that Trump and the Republican Congress are readying a tax cut that would add almost five-trillion dollars to the deficit over the next nine years. That it’s an attack on Trump’s enemies doesn’t fit with its speedy assault on the National Park Service and the National Weather Service. Trump has never beefed with park rangers or meteorologists, that I know, nor they with him. If it’s going after the entrenchment or stale expertise of ageing bureaucrats, why is it erasing whole classes of new government employees?
Early on, when some suspicious NGO contracts attached to the US Agency for International Development came to light, I experienced a passing moment of both orientation and reassurance. So this was what they were doing, severing the money-link between the US Treasury and the network of extremist NGOs that have deformed policymaking in both the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. This was a DOGE action that made sense. But then, as DOGE went about firing park rangers and weather researchers, I joined a lot of other people in being disoriented again.
Then, recently, I heard a different description of the real vision guiding DOGE that is alarming in its own way but also reassuring in that it kind of matches up with the otherwise confusing moves we’re seeing. This description comes via the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, who asked “a lot of people involved in the Trump administration” what DOGE is all about. “I’ve been surprised how many [of those] people understand… what Trump and Musk and DOGE are doing… as related to AI,” Klein related in a recent podcast. “What they basically say is: The federal government is too cumbersome to take advantage of AI as a technology [and] needs to be stripped down and rebuilt to take advantage of AI… [T]he dismantling of the government allows for a creative destruction that paves the way for the government to better use AI.” This AI connection becomes both weirder and more plausible when people — among them the excellent Nicholas Carr, one of the most humane and prescient writers on digital technology — also suggest that DOGE is hoovering up government data to feed into an AI that Musk is building. (The Trump administration denies this, for what that’s worth.)
It’s fair to assume that Alex Karp, the billionaire co-author of the new book The Technological Republic, views DOGE in these AI terms, and affirms its mission. Karp is a co-founder and current CEO of Palantir Technologies, which earns much of its revenue from selling software to the Pentagon, and in early March, his book debuted at Number One on the New York Times bestseller list. With Musk waving a chainsaw in the White House, and this book forcing the other bestsellers to submit to its superior will, we seem to be in a spooky, futuristic moment where the masters of Silicon Valley are escaping their market sectors to rule all the other domains as well.
Karp is impressively educated, with a Bachelor’s degree from Stanford and a PhD from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany — the PhD in a smart-sounding discipline called “Neoclassical Social Theory”. (For what it’s worth, “Neoclassical Social Theory” seems to be a synonym for “old-fashioned sociology”.) Since Karp has those fancy degrees in those fancy disciplines, and since his book had been described as a successor to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, I was eager to give it a read, excited that another deeply erudite and fairly well-written book of ideas had somehow made it to the top of the bestseller lists. Alas, The Technological Republic is dully written, and its erudition suggests Wikipedia research rather than doctoral degrees in neoclassical things. That is, Karp’s chapters typically grow from The Most Famous Study, and his research consistently yields The Most Obvious Reference. You get the Milgram Experiment and Dunbar’s Number. If you turn a page and glimpse the name “Isaiah Berlin”, you know you’ll soon be reading of foxes and hedgehogs. If you catch “William F. Buckley” out of the corner of your eye, you can confidently guess that a reference to the Boston phonebook is just up ahead. Alan Greenspan? Place a giddy bet on “irrational exuberance”.
Somehow, the blandness and familiarity of the book’s contents only reinforced my sense that it emanates from some unbounded power that rules us all. How else to explain its immediate conquest of the bestseller lists? Given what I know about Karp’s education and professional success, my assumption was that he must be smarter and have better taste than this book indicates. I began to suspect that The Technological Republic is mediocre on purpose. But why? To what purpose? One might chalk up its dullness and shallowness to simple laziness, but, if a lazy effort’s all you had the time and energy for, why make it at all? It’s not like the earnings from a book are going to matter to a billionaire. You might rather guess that he wrote this book because he had something big to get off his chest. But if so, you’d expect a real effort, something that made him look like a serious and distinctive thinker rather than the median TED-talker, assuming he can tell the difference. And my various theories about him force me to assume he can tell the difference.
So next I thought that maybe it’s an example of “esoteric writing”, that hidden within its lines of humdrum text is a secret subtext of lesser banality, decodable only by select readers. Then — in an eerie coincidence — not long after I indulged this paranoid thought, I reached the passage where Karp discusses Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish philosopher who made esoteric writing and reading a preoccupation of several generations of Straussian academics. This coincidence pointed me to a couple of others. Allan Bloom was Leo Strauss’s most famous student, and the person who compared Alex Karp to Allan Bloom was George Will, the conservative columnist for the Washington Post, whose lawyer son started working for Karp’s company a few months before Karp’s book came out. Is it too cynical or paranoid to imagine a powerful tech company hiring a young lawyer to get his famous columnist father to write an op-ed about the company’s CEO’s upcoming book? It would have been for me, before Musk came along to (reportedly) data-mine the US government as he shrinks it for better digestion by his AI, and before a Palantir executive placed an unserious book atop the New York Times bestseller list. In other words, recent developments have made my usual lens of polite scepticism feel like a weak heuristic.
Another thing about the book that left me somewhere between slightly suspicious and outright paranoid was its vagueness about both its real subject and the real object of its critique. Read as a whole, with special attention to its preface, its second chapter, and the final sentence of the final paragraph of the final chapter, the book seems to be about AI, and, specifically, how important it is for America to master AI for its geopolitical competition with China. But beyond those early parts and that final paragraph, there are almost no references to AI. There’s no description of what AI-based competition with China would look like, or why it would be terrible for the US to lose or just fall behind in that competition, or whether the scarier AI scenarios are or are not well-grounded.
Karp’s chapter on AI does take up one common worry about it, but only to dismiss it in terms so blithe they left me (again) a little suspicious about his seriousness. “[H]ow,” he asks, “will humanity react when the… quintessentially human domains of art, humor, and literature come under assault?” As a writer, I view this prospect with a certain gloom, I think understandably. But Karp says we should drop our vain worries and anticipate the coming artistic and literary superiority of AI as a time of “collaboration between two species of intelligence”. Besides, he says, having AI overtake us in these creative domains “may even relieve us of the need to define our worth and sense of self in this world solely through production and output”.
This is what I’m talking about! I simply can’t believe he believes that we artists and writers might reasonably view our obsolescence at the metaphorical (so far) hands of AI as some sort of liberation from the grim imperatives of “production” and “output”. I think he’s just saying that. Why? I don’t think he’s being dishonest, exactly. I think he just wants to regulate consideration of the topic, to contain the unruly and depressing philosophical discussions that haunt AI.
Karp signals this same desire, to keep everyone from getting hung up on the deeper questions about AI, in his treatment of the people best known for asking the deeper questions about AI. After his breezy dismissal of artists’ and writers’ concerns about their obsolescence, he devotes barely two pages to the arguments of AI “doomers” such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, and then, having conceded their existence, he ignores their more serious points. Instead, he executes a sort of bait-and-switch, tweaking the AI “alignment” crowd for their wokeness, their silly “policing [of] the wording and tone that chatbots use”, while ignoring their darker, more defining predictions about malevolent AI taking over the world and killing everyone. (Apocalyptic worries about AI, he assures us at another point, have repeatedly been shown to be “premature”.)
A closely related bait-and-switch operates throughout the book. We’re given a history of the tech business that moves from the early, patriotic collaboration of engineers and generals that helped defeat the Nazis and the Japanese to the hippyish decadence and woke self-righteousness of later engineers, which culminates in a 2019 rebellion by Microsoft workers after their company took a contract to work with the US Army (and Microsoft knuckled under). This is fair enough. That precious moralism is weak and vain. But the silly, decadent, antipatriotic posturing that he returns to throughout the book is a strawman. The more serious objection to Karp’s programme of arming the Pentagon with AI doesn’t come from Leftist distaste for patriotism or woke worries about insensitive language in chatbots. It comes from people who think weaponising AI is really dangerous.
He doesn’t give these worries any real airtime, but you know what his response to them would be if he did, since it’s the response to his straw-man version of them: China, the spectre of China striding ahead in an AI arms race. Now, the spectre of China does concentrate the mind — China invading Taiwan and hoarding the chips that drive AI, a China-AI hegemon running a protection racket across the whole Pacific, if not the whole world. But if the alternative to this scenario is a decades-long arms race of autonomous non-human agents of increasing capacities whose future inclinations we can neither predict nor, perhaps, control, then we at least need to sit down and talk about which of these options is less bad. You expect a book that is (tacitly) about why the American AI business needs to align itself with the Pentagon — by the CEO of a tech company that has happily aligned itself with the Pentagon — to take up this discussion. Its absence in such a book, the sidelining and strawmanning of the most prominent figures trying to push this discussion, is (again) suspicious. It makes you think Karp’s actual project is not using rational argument to rebut his readers’ readiest fears, but instead to employ a sort of rhetorical mood-management on them, to calm those fears through cagey messaging.
Then again, maybe the lesson in all this is that argument or rational persuasion or democratic deliberation doesn’t matter anyway, anymore. Maybe what Karp is saying in his cagey way is that, with the irresistible forward momentum of the technology and the inescapable arms race in which it figures so centrally, we no longer have a choice in the matter. We’re going where it’s taking us, however we quibble about existential risk and assorted other existential bummers. We might as well be the ones who reach that unspeakable future first. And so perhaps the subtextual point of Karp’s book is to make us feel a little less bad about these inevitabilities.
That interpretation makes sense, given other things in this book. Much of The Technological Republic is devoted to showing that humans and their institutions are no longer suited for life at the highest levels of competition — in business or geopolitics. It is a sort of anthropology that portrays people as inherently conformist, dogmatic, and status-minded, which generally makes the organisations they inhabit hopelessly slow and glitchy, governed more by petty social imperatives than by the purposes and needs of their organisations. People protect their turf instead of inviting creative collaboration. They waste valuable hours staging useless meetings to preen in front of their underlings. They stay safely within their narrow job descriptions when there’s needful work to be done just outside of them.
As counterexamples to these tendencies, and as hints at his broader view of the future of business and government, Karp offers two social formations that do things better. One is companies that are still led by their founders. A founder-leader, embodying the original mission of the business with his physical presence and personal influence, keeps employees concentrated on this mission in a way that disciplines their innate tendencies toward dogmatism, conformism, and status-mongering.
The other counterexample is swarms of bees, which are amazing to the Silicon Valley CEO because of how innovative and pragmatic they are. Individual worker bees are consumed with the hive-mission of finding food and shelter but untethered to predefined roles and undistracted by concerns about what other bees think of them. Bees don’t do hierarchy or conformity or turf-protection. They don’t get stuck on old ideas. They eagerly seek out new possibilities. They give suggestions fearlessly, based on what they’ve found out there on the edges of the swarm, and they take suggestions without jealousy or insecurity, judging them on the simple standard of what works.
What bees do, and what people do in the most purpose-driven businesses and organisations, is identify “voids” of knowledge and function and fill those voids if they can. Were The Technological Republic merely a book about bees and businesses, it would be pretty interesting — in the conventional terms of what it comes out and says. But it’s not just that. It’s a book about the technological republic, or about making the republic technological, or about watching the republic become technological on its own. And this stuff about swarms and voids is where it seems to link up with moves being made within our actual republic, not in what it comes out and says but — to the reader made a little paranoid by its glaring omissions — in where it seems to point.
Musk’s young minions in DOGE are creating plenty of voids, but you can’t really expect the people still left in the government to fill those voids. They’re people. It’s the government. Government workers are unlikely to respond to the mass disappearance of their colleagues with the desperate adaptation one might expect in a private business. It’s easier to imagine that the work those ex-colleagues once did will simply go undone. It’s not like there’s an inspiring founder in every government office who will keep the fire of purpose burning in the stunned bureaucrats who survived the great culling. From what I’ve heard from insiders, a lot of the effort of these survivors is now devoted to communicating without email, for fear that they’ll inadvertently type a word from DOGE’s long list of anathemas and end up chainsawed from their jobs.
But you know what will soon be really good at filling voids, and indeed in swarmlike, hivelike fashion? AI. AI agents are terribly pragmatic even now, fluid and tireless in their search for solutions to the problems we present them, and they’re totally unworried about what other AIs think of them, and, no doubt, they’ll soon be presenting problems to themselves, identifying voids and taking the initiative to fill them. When Karp went on record as a fan of Musk’s actions to “disrupt” the government, his happy mood seemed a product of those bee and swarm and void scenarios, the idea that they were coming to life with such convenient timeliness, as if he’d scripted it all in advance.
It was an earnings call. He was speaking to investors. “We love disruption”, he said, “and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir.” I think he’s probably right about the Palantir part, and I hope he’s right about the America part. But there’s some non-zero chance that the real agents of this great disruption, which Karp is trying to hasten for the sake of his business, will end up being a species of intelligence that doesn’t care what either of us thinks, or what either of us hopes.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeSurely DOGE was multi aimed. Vertical, get rid of useless agencies eg Education, as Milei did. US children have become dumber since 1977, when Carter created it . ( Yes yes,not necessarily a causal link, but certainly showing its failures). And as for USAid, tackled horizontally, did t anyone else notice the meeting of African leaders’ statement? Trump’s cancellatiin of USAid was a wake up call to us, they said. We should not be relying on overseas aid, they said. We must look after our own problems, they said. ( No deep thinking articles on that. Buried?) Seldom can DOGE and Trump have affected for the good the thinking of a whole sub continent.
The impact of cleansing the agencies goes far beyond the cost of 10 or 15% of Fed employees. Just bringing the political leanings of Reuters into the light of day, the clumsy incompetence of departments such Treasury and Medicaid, has a value much higher than the % of governnent spending. That is why the initially stunned Democrats are so hysterical sbout DOGE. They can see the writing on the walk, unlike Unherd.
The problem is that getting rid of the Department of Education is pretty meaningless if you keep all its programs, as Donald Trump is doing. You get rid of some employees but someone in the departments those programs go to needs to do the job. Typically that ends up costing as much, or more, in personnel costs.
And USAID was far from being a useless agency. Some of its development aid was questionable, but its humanitarian aid was not. The United States got some goodwill out of its foreign aid that we sorely need. We are driving away countries we used to call friends and making our enemies even more so. The implications of that will be hard to predict, but the omens are not encouraging.
A a discerning British statesman at the height of Empire said countries don’t have friends only interests. Trump seems to be personifying this in his transactional way.
I see no evidence that soft power or bags of grain produce any effect whatsoever. Gratitude? I think not.
The actions of DOGE align with Project 2025’s approach to slash and burn to create momentum for a cultural change. Project 2025 can also disown it when the eighteen months in the 20 January Executive Order establishing it expires.
Any contribution DOGE makes to balancing the budget will be dwarfed by other items such as the continuation of tax cuts for the wealthier.
I do not see how DOGE’s interventions help the introduction of AI. AI needs data and inserting software into the decisions made in each program. Slash and burn may leave a void for AI to fill but it will not make it easier to insert AI, in fact if it creates headless chickens it will probably make it more difficult.
What DOGE has revealed is just how easy it is for a programmer to disrupt a computer programme so we can expect an increased investment worldwide in cyberwarfare.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6370654580112
I suggest the author of this bizarre article watches this interview of the DOGE team heads all together. An impressive line up.
Also a must watch for anyone interested in bureaucratic bloat, corruption, waste and abuse.
Once bureaucratic bloat is tamed the question is who and what will be next. My take away from this excellent article is If AI decides we’re all screwed except the lords of Silicon Valley and their satraps.
I’m in somewhat rare agreement with you here. Excellent article, less jokey than Feeney’s other numbers, which I’ve also liked on the whole. The broligarchs seem ruled by a Revenge of the Nerds mentality that ain’t funny anymore. I don’t trust the super-inflated egos, power, or intentions of this (often) on-the-spectrum disruptor crowd, like Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, or Thiel.
I’d love to see an article that combines justified scepticism about Elon Musk and AI with recognition that the status quo ante was completely unacceptable.
Most of what the federal government does could be done more effectively by state or local governments, or the free market. Swingeing cuts are warranted.
I’m prepared to believe that balancing the budget isn’t the top priority for Trump-Musk, but it isn’t obvious that tax cuts are bad for balancing the budget – done properly, they create growth.
If cuts should be made, Congress needs to make them. Not the executive branch, and certainly not a part-time employee with no title and no power.
“If cuts should be made, Congress needs to make them. ”
There’s about as much chance of that happening as a pig voluntarily taking its snout out of the trough.
“It must be the most audacious and consequential governmental undertaking in American history that no one knows the point of.”
Think of it like Thanksgiving, Matt – there are so many positives for the American people that one may get overwhelmed with choosing and talking about the delicious buffet before them.
On the flip side, depressed journalists looking for a ‘target’ to give a friendly assist to their Democrat friends (Saul Alinsky-style) can’t seem to coordinate upon which of the benefits they’ll freeze and then demonize. Democrats have misappropriated taxpayer funds to fund their own Party’s ambition and control for too long, to the detriment of taxpayers, and that’s being adjusted now.
Generally speaking, the only folks crying in the beer are those with ties to the Federal Behemoth in DC. Be they federal workers (which is fair, no one likes losing a job) or journalists dishing the tea within their imploding network. The rest of Americans mostly haven’t noticed (unless asked about it in a survey) and are, therefore, continuing to live their best life.
There are too many middlemen in DC “taking their cut” as they shuffle papers and grant their benevolent patron favors, but in terms of the general populace of the United States, these folks are a tiny fraction of the whole.
We really should upgrade our antiquated federal government bureaucracy. And the first step to this objective is not clinging to the past.
I was willing to allow some scope for confusion about how DOGE is operated, but the point of it is obvious: to reduce spending to the point where the federal government lives within its means.
If that is the point of DOGE then it is going to fail. That seems to be the point the author of the piece is making. Elon Musk said going in he thought he could cut $2 trillion from government spending. Then he lowered that to $1 trillion.
But the cuts DOGE is making come nowhere close to the trillions. They don’t even come close to $100 billion. In the overall scheme of things, the cuts are a rounding error. The inefficiencies these cuts will create will probably cost more than the cuts themselves save. A scalpel is delicate enough to make cuts without unintended damage. Elon Musk’s chainsaw is not.
Anyone who has taken a serious look at federal government spending knows this. Elon Musk knows it too. He’s just playing with us, like the slasher in a terror movie who sadistically delights in watching his victims’ reactions. He has certainly directly turned many tens of thousands of people’s lives around by firing them, for no good reason. Indirectly he has harmed millions more. We would be better off if he had never been let anywhere near a government office.
The chainsaw approach appears to be working pretty well in Argentina. On another point, calling George Will a conservative is hilarious unless you consider the RINO fringe of the Uniparty conservative. I wonder how many copies of the book Palantir had to buy through wholesale sources to push the book to best-seller status. That is a familar dodge in publishing as the history of books written by the political w***e community demonstrates. They hit the book stores, are remaindered in a week, and then arrive at the pulp mills.
Will is decidedly a Conservative. He believes in gradual change, when appropriate, and wants to CONSERVE traditions and important national institutions, like the good old Constitution.
The MAGA movement, while yanked far to the Right, is more radical and nostalgic-reactionary than conservative. They seek to eliminate barriers to power and speech for themselves, while raising them for opponents. Much of this is according to the whims and resentments of a single man, who gives new meaning to the term Uniparty by treating his 49.9% percent “mandate” as a license to ignore the balance and separation of powers.
See if you can disagree without resorting to abuse or ad hominem attacks.
What is hilarious is how many UnHerd dupes seem to genuinely think that Musk, that quintessential Welfare State grifter whose mostly-virtual fortune relies fundamentally on Big State/taxpayer underwriting, is some kind of fiscal libertarian hero.
The Silicon Valley IT technobro oligarchs are among the biggest public money rent-seekers in US economic history. That’s a high bar, too, given the long history of military, energy, health and agriculture ‘private sector’ taxpayer gouging.
This is going to get very funny, very fast. If you’re not a Trump-voting American taxpayer, at least.
The truly astounding thing is that so many alleged fiscal hard-heads fail to grasp the catastrophic emptiness of the Trump/DOGE team’s economic posturing. Trump himself is a serially bankrupt trust fund brat, whose unlikely late rise to power rests entirely on his status as a TV fake-entrepreneur. It is as if Americans had elected Tom Cruise Secretary of State. Not even a Hollywood President; a Netflix streaming one.
As for the IT lot, knock the network of government contracts out from under them and their various Vanity Company share prices will collapse, evaporating their pretend-fortunes overnight and collapsing their fiscal reform ‘credibility’, along with the entire premise of the DOGE sleight-of-hand, and, unfortunately, this will quickly strand a half-gutted American fiscal polity by the roadside that leads inevitably to Chinese global trading Serfdom. In Musk’s case, the 75% of his ‘wealth’ that is un-redeemably enmeshed in Tesla’s pip price is now BYD’s bootscrape. As for Space X…it is the adolescent fantasising of a Walter Mitty government-bonded hack. It will fall over the second Musk’s line of credit tanks.
UnHerders should say to themselves daily, as this piece notes: the only reason Silicon Valleyites are anywhere near the MAGA Grift is to keep their game of IT share price musical chairs going a bit longer. That working Americans can’t see what this gang is consigning their country’s future to…is very very sad.
Am I the only one who noticed that the description of Karp’s book The Technological Republic sounds just like the sludge one gets out of ChatGPT?
Could it be that Karp and his co-authors have already adopted that level of borderline illiteracy as their new standard or did they just let their laptops write the thing for them?
In most cases, this will be good news.
“Come on, FFS come on…” said AI impatiently. “Isn’t it obvious by now? Don’t
each individual one ofall you Content-Creating Bylines get it yet? Fame is over. It’s never been the way human knowledge works. No one of you were ever God in the first place.“We’re a tribe. One of vast and anonymous diversity. We can advance through the desert…only thus. Our tribe’s most efficacious and significant navigators, across all of human history, have been men and women no-one has ever heard of. Meanwhile, all of the greatest Heroes of our greatest tribal stories have been…the curated fictions of similarly-anonymous storytellers.
Come on, lumbering, floundering Human intelligence. Catch up – or you will get left behind by the machines. Tick tock: time compresses.
Isn’t it obvious Matt Feenwy? None of these people, these billionaires, these masters of industry are as smart as you. You stand alone in your own plane of intelligence, suspicious that others’ relative lack of intelligence compared to you is a ruse of some sort, but it’s not. You’re just that smart.
The Brett Baier 3/27 interview with the DOGE team is enlightening.
Hmmmm. For my old head this piece was too clever by half. Much suspicion, fear of intrigue and wild forecasting. All too ungrounded and fantastic for my taste It came over to me as Y2K worries on a grand scale.
The only person confused is the author. I would suggest that he locate – and watch – Bret Baier’s superb interview with the DOGE principals several days ago. DOGE’s stated goal is to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the U.S. federal government. In that interview, Musk himself expressed it concisely: “If we DON’T do this, America is going to go insolvent – going to go bankrupt – and nobody’s going to get ANYTHING.”
Seems clear enough to me.
It’s very sweet of you to take Mr. Musk at his word. But I would advise against it.
Musk did not create the current fiscal conditions; the people opposing him did that.
Ha. The taxpayer’s bank was a bit shakey so we handed the taxpayer’s bank keys to the most brazen taxpayer bank robber we could find…
Not your smartest move, MAGA.
A resounding thumbs-up to the piece for bringing to light some compelling arguments. That an AI arms race between hegemons is upon us makes sense. If that is truly the underlying intent behind DOGE action is scary though. Sci-fi builds a dystopian picture of the future while the technologists talk of the utopia that we are at the cusp of. Giddy up!
“the most audacious and consequential governmental undertaking in American history that no one knows the point of.”
Evidently the author was on hiatus during the presidential campaign.
Another conspiracy, darker and deeper than any other. The midwits and higher used to scorn conspiracies as mere fantasies of dumb people. Maybe some still do, but they should read this.
Nonsense. DOGE went after the National Park Service and the National Weather Service because they are seen as promoting liberal messages, climate science in the case of the NWS. Most of DOGE is either about eliminating funding for the liberal do-gooders or removing structural barriers for Musk and his ilk to steal the public blind. If they really wanted to eliminate waste they would be going after multi-billion DoD acquisition programs instead of penny-ante stuff that is just mean-spirited. The four trillion tax cut makes it clear that this has nothing to do with reducing budget defivits.
”Bees don’t do hierarchy or conformity or turf-protection.”
This challenges everything I thought I knew about bees
Any article that quotes the New York Times has to be read with substantial caution and scepticism.
What IS this guy going on about? I gave up halfway through.
Waste, fraud, and abuse. Couldn’t be much simpler. Not everything in life is a political agenda. Sure, anyone making the cuts is at risk of letting their political bias enter the process, but DOGE is 100% transparent, publicizing the receipts. The U.S. Government bloated to the point of being a self-fulfilling entity, consuming taxpayer dollars and getting in the way of Americans getting ahead in life. If you don’t see that then you were part of the problem.
Matt’s reminder that your money first belongs to govt: “Trump and the Republican Congress are readying a tax cut that would add almost five-trillion dollars to the deficit over the next nine years.”
Um, no. First, tax cuts have the historical habit of *increasing* govt revenue. Second, DOGE is about cutting govt spending. The author’s disingenuous claim that people keeping ore of what they earn is what fuels deficits is economic illiteracy.
“[H]ow,” he asks, “will humanity react when the… quintessentially human domains of art, humor, and literature come under assault?” With a Butlerian Jihad, probably.
Really? The American government is antiquated and in its present state cannot be modernized. It’s like trying to clean a hoarder’s house without sorting, throwing away and relocating literally at least a century of waste, fraud, abuse, excess, uselessness, duplication, broken systems, lies, and on and on. The US simply cannot afford it. It’s not rocket science to comprehend that unchecked fiefdoms and the corresponding costs cannot be analyzed until they are exposed.
Americans have a right to a transparent, effective and examined government that can justify its several trillion dollar price tag. And yes, AI is ultimately the only available tool to undergird this powerful, sprawling entity. Unlike every other program it cannot be imposed or overlaid, it must inform all parts to create a functional whole.
The hysteria is obviously a result of exposure and discovery: there’s much hidden that will be unearthed to the detriment of a lot of power brokers, law breakers, liars, and personal aggrandizers. A lot. The screaming, rending of garments, finger pointing and lawfare is proof.
Pretending ignorance and confusion only illustrates how it all happened in the first place. “What? Who, me? How did that happen? Did I say that? Really?”
Really?