DOGE Catch-All
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“… An email sent to NIH staff Thursday instructed employees to ignore the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to measure worker productivity and limit travel and purchases on company cards, Politico reported.
… The move marks one of the most visible departures from DOGE’s directives by an agency yet, and comes amid reports that Trump has told his billionaire cheerleader and senior adviser to take a backseat following backlash over his role in DOGE’s draconian job and program cuts.
“Please disregard any future reminders or instructions on this directive from [Office of Personnel Management] or the Department of Health and Human Services,” one NIH email reportedly read, referring to the White House’s personnel office.
“NIH manages its own performance review processes and will notify employees directly if any information related to work duties or performance is needed.”
Another message from the agency—led by newly confirmed director Jay Bhattacharya—announced that purchasing cards would “be restored to full capacity and use,” and that travel for business would be allowed again, without the approval of the Department of Health and Human Services or the NIH director’s office. …”
Good for them.
Still waiting for them to unfreeze the funds that courts have told them to do.
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—> https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy...2d?st=k26Pd1&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink“… DOGE claims cuts of $150 billion so far, but the Journal analysis found those efforts have yet to affect the bottom line.
And while the government’s income—taxes and revenues including tariffs—is also up, it isn’t enough to keep pace with higher spending.
… The increased costs are driven mainly by nearly 1.3 million new beneficiaries in the past year and a mandated 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment. DOGE says it is rooting out fraudulent claims and cutting staff, but Trump has promised to leave benefits untouched.
… Combined, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for roughly 43% of federal spending in the last fiscal year.
… There is a chance that the buyout offers actually increased salary costs this year, said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the left-of-center Budget Lab at Yale. Some employees who had planned to retire or leave the federal government may have instead accepted a buyout and remained on payroll.
Similarly, the administration’s efforts to curb U.S. Agency for International Development costs hit roadblocks. At first, spending was dramatically cut, the Treasury checkbook shows. In March, however, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s emergency request to delay foreign-aid payouts, and in recent weeks spending has nearly returned to 2024 levels. …”
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“… DOGE notched a few victories in a handful of the more than 100 spending categories tracked in the daily Treasury statement.
“… DOGE claims cuts of $150 billion so far, but the Journal analysis found those efforts have yet to affect the bottom line.
And while the government’s income—taxes and revenues including tariffs—is also up, it isn’t enough to keep pace with higher spending.
… The increased costs are driven mainly by nearly 1.3 million new beneficiaries in the past year and a mandated 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment. DOGE says it is rooting out fraudulent claims and cutting staff, but Trump has promised to leave benefits untouched.
… Combined, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for roughly 43% of federal spending in the last fiscal year.
… There is a chance that the buyout offers actually increased salary costs this year, said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the left-of-center Budget Lab at Yale. Some employees who had planned to retire or leave the federal government may have instead accepted a buyout and remained on payroll.
Similarly, the administration’s efforts to curb U.S. Agency for International Development costs hit roadblocks. At first, spending was dramatically cut, the Treasury checkbook shows. In March, however, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s emergency request to delay foreign-aid payouts, and in recent weeks spending has nearly returned to 2024 levels. …”
Spending by the Transportation Security Administration nearly flatlined for several weeks in February and March. Since Trump took office, the agency spent $22 million less in part by delaying spending on new uniforms, as well as curtailing travel and training costs, said Joe Shuker, a regional vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees TSA Council 100. In March, the Department of Homeland Security canceled the union contract that protected TSA airport security workers’ benefits.
A TSA spokesman said spending is also down because of a pause in paying invoices until a system for reviewing them is in place.
At the Education Department … spending has dropped roughly $4 billion. …”
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“…
But at the very least, Musk isn’t really delivering on what he’s selling. And he may in fact be hampering his own efforts: Take for example the tens to hundreds of thousands of firings and re-hirings DOGE has been responsible for. All the paperwork the government does to affect personnel changes must come with labor and other costs. The indiscriminate cuts also cause waste by virtue of leaving loose ends for other people to tie up. This is just an anecdote of course, but several of my friends in the government are working in half-empty offices with no official directives because their programs have shut down, but they have not been fired.
Then, there are the indirect costs we all incur when the Internal Revenue Service cannot effectively enforce the country’s tax laws. The Washington Post reported this week that DOGE-enforced cuts at the IRS will cost us all $500 billion in lost tax income, or about 10% of federal tax revenues. That’s primarily because of staff and other tech cuts, as well as the reorientation of some organizational progress to data-sharing instead of enforcement for tax cheats. For those keeping score, that is nearly 4 times the total savings DOGE claims on its website (itself a likely overestimate). …”
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“… He [Musk] previously said his powerful budget-cutting team could reduce the next fiscal year’s federal budget by $1 trillion, and do it by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Instead, in a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk said that he anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective.
… One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that did not exist. Although the government says it had merely asked for proposals in that case, and had not settled on a vendor or a price, Mr. Musk’s group ignored that uncertainty and assigned itself a large and very specific amount of credit for canceling it.
It said it had saved exactly $318,310,328.30.
… “They’re just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings,” said Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. “What’s most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we’re watching them flail at achieving them.”
… While Mr. Musk said on Thursday that his group would save $150 billion in fiscal 2026 alone, the website does not say explicitly when its savings would be realized.
The site also gives no identifying details about $92 billion of its claimed savings, which is more than 60 percent of the total.
The rest of the savings are itemized, attributed to cancellations of specific federal grants, contracts or office leases. But these detailed listings have been plagued with data errors, which have inflated the group’s savings by billions. …”
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“… The second-largest savings that the group lists on its site comes from a canceled I.R.S. contract that DOGE says saved $1.9 billion.
But the contract it cites was actually canceled when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president.
The third-largest savings that the group claims comes from a canceled grant to a vaccine nonprofit. Mr. Musk’s group says that saved $1.75 billion. But the nonprofit said it had actually been paid in full, so the savings was $0.
… Mr. Musk’s team says it saved $2.9 billion by canceling a contract for a huge shelter in West Texas to house migrant children who crossed the border alone.
… assumptions [about maxing out potential costs under the contract] seem less than guaranteed, given that the number of unaccompanied child migrants began falling last year.
… By canceling the contract, the government did save the cost of keeping the facility ready until it expired later this year. But only a fraction of that money — about $27 million — would count as savings in fiscal 2026. That was about 1 percent of the savings that Mr. Musk’s group had claimed.
… In another example, Mr. Musk’s group said it had saved $285 million by canceling a contract with a South Dakota company, Project Solutions Inc., to perform safety inspections in federally subsidized apartment buildings.
But that presumed the government would spend money it had not promised to spend.
Robin Miller, a Project Solutions manager, said that the higher figure was calculated using a “ceiling value” — the maximum amount that the government could pay. In reality, she said, the government had agreed to pay only $29 million, of which $1.8 million had been disbursed, and another $3 million was owed for completed work.
Ms. Miller said her company supported Mr. Musk’s mission, but his group had its facts wrong in this case. …”
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It also looks like they canceled an open RFP, with no contracts signed or even agreed as to terms and claimed $318,310,328.30 in savings.
“… Details about this particular request were scarce: Mr. Musk’s group provided a tracking number for the request, 47QFEA24K0008. But The New York Times was not able to find that number in databases of previous government solicitations. The Office of Personnel Management declined to release the request, or say what it had planned to spend on the contract, nor would the office say when it planned to choose a contractor. …”
“… Details about this particular request were scarce: Mr. Musk’s group provided a tracking number for the request, 47QFEA24K0008. But The New York Times was not able to find that number in databases of previous government solicitations. The Office of Personnel Management declined to release the request, or say what it had planned to spend on the contract, nor would the office say when it planned to choose a contractor. …”
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In the first days of March, a team of advisers from President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency initiative arrived at the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board.
The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.
The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB's internal systems. They've said their unit's overall mission is to review agency data for compliance with the new administration's policies and to cut costs and maximize efficiency.
But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.
Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.
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This is a much larger story than Albrego Garcia and one that should be the focus of all media outlets.
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HHS Systems Are in Danger of Collapsing, Workers Say
The purging of IT and cybersecurity staff at the Department of Health and Human Services could threaten the systems used by the agency’s staff and the safety of critical health data.
As a result of a reduction in force, or RIF, in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), the sources say, staff who oversee and renew contracts for critical enterprise services are no longer there. The same staff oversaw hundreds of contractors, some of whom play a crucial role in keeping systems and data safe from cyberattacks. And a void of leadership means that efforts to draw attention to what the sources believe to be a looming catastrophe have allegedly been ignored.
...
“Pretty soon, within the next couple of weeks, everything regarding IT and cyber at the department will start to operationally reach a point of no return,” one source, who was part of a team that managed these systems at HHS for a decade before being part of the RIF, alleges to WIRED.
Like many across the agency, administrative staff found out they were part of the RIF on April 1 in an email sent at 5 am Eastern, though a number of employees only realized they had been let go when their badges no longer worked when trying to access HHS buildings.
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DOGE begins to freeze health-care payments for extra review
DOGE is putting new curbs on billions of dollars in federal grants, requiring officials to manually review and approve payments that were previously routine.“… The effort, which DOGE has dubbed “Defend the Spend,” has left thousands of payments backed up, including funding for doctors’ and nurses’ salaries at federal health centers for the poor. Some grantees are waiting on payments they expected last week.
The Trump administration is pushing to cut federal spending and crack down on grants that political officials say conflict with White House priorities.
…The process has been abruptly instituted at the National Institutes for Health, the Administration for Children and Families, and other parts of HHS, with inconsistent instructions on how to proceed, said the people familiar with the arrangements, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. They also described immediate backlogs in processing payments.
HHS said in a statement that the DOGE effort would not threaten “support for critical programs” and was intended to root out fraud and abuse. “The era of rubber stamping is over,” the HHS statement said.
…Some officials have been told that only Trump political appointees can sign requests to disburse funds, even if a career official has already approved it, adding an additional layer of review. The justification for each payment also must include an explanation of how the money will be used to advance Trump administration priorities, according to two employees in separate agencies who received high-level briefings on the process.
…Among those immediately suffering consequences are federal health centers, which provide services for low-income people and those who lack insurance, the employee said. Those centers rely on regular drawdowns for their operational expenses, such as doctors’ and nurses’ salaries and basic medical supplies.
If the funding delay continues much longer, the situation will grow dire for such centers, imperiling their ability to assist the poor, the employee said.”
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TangledUpInBlue06
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So a Russian assett is working inside DOGE - not too surprising. Helli, I wouldn't be surprised if Elon handed off the credentials himself.
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I would.
The notion that Elon has any actual day-to-day responsibility within DOGE is hard to square with is busy schedule of fighting child support, shitposting, and desperately seeking approval from terminally online CHUDs.
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IIRC, Big balls is the grandson of a former KGB agent.