DOGE is already catastrophic and will continue to be

As Elon at least formally (although not necessarily in terms of actual influence) steps away from his government role, it’s critical to accurately summarize what he’s done:

The flood of encomiums and morality tales about Elon's turn in Washington cldn't be more predictable, vapid & sickening. If you want a story, get me the story about the crisis comms team directing this. He ran anti-constitutional blitzkrieg thru the federal government, did massive harm, violated …— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 3:57 PM

2/ a slew of criminal laws. And he tired of it when his antics started running existential risks for his companies. There's no morality tale here about Washington being a harder beast to tame or whatever other bullshit. He's a destructive crook and he needs to be held accountable.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 3:57 PM

3/ I think the idea that he "failed" is the work of some crisis communications team which is trying to end scrutiny into Musk and his companies. If he failed, you don't need to worry abt him anymore, keep scrutinizing all the contracts he hovered up for his companies, keep trying to exact …— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 5:25 PM

4/ consequences on his companies. I'd love it if Musk had failed. But he didn't. He achieved a massive amount and he's still the muscle behind DOGE. I think this is all to throw people off Musk's scent.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 5:25 PM

The last point is particularly important. “The failure of the disillusioned Elon” narrative is clearly an attempt to imply that DOGE didn’t really do much and so there’s no reason to keep investigating what it’s doen and especially no reason to continue boycotting Tesla.

And it couldn’t be further from the truth. The damage he’s already done will be catastrophic and literally fatal for millions of poor people:

On January 28, Dr. Troy Jacobs was in Ethiopia getting ready to board a plane from Addis Ababa to Washington, DC, when his phone and computer suddenly stopped working.   

Jacobs, a pediatrician and recognized expert in the field of child survival, had been a contractor with the United States Agency for International Development’s maternal and child health office for 17 years. After months of careful and expensive planning, Jacobs had landed in Ethiopia just a few days earlier, intending to spend several weeks doing rural field visits while accompanied by a security detail due to recent civil conflict.

Jacobs and other USAID contractors were about to complete a long-awaited demographic health survey, providing a detailed look at a population affected by deep poverty, long-term conflict, displacement, and hunger. It would have been the first such survey since 2019 and would have been especially valuable to show how Ethiopians were affected by Covid and how organizations like USAID could do the most to help going forward.

Instead, Jacobs and the other USAID workers crowding the airport had been called back t0 the United States. Standing in the boarding line, they quickly realized that all of their government devices had stopped working. When he looked at his phone, he briefly saw a message that he no longer had access to USAID systems. 

Jacobs hoped it was a glitch, the kind of thing that can happen when you’re traveling. But by the time he touched down in Washington, Jacobs learned that he’d been terminated, part of the first wave of cuts to federal agencies conducted by the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. 

“We were an easy target,” he says, because contractors are at-will employees. All the work they’d done “is gone,” he says. “It’s not just Ethiopia, but other countries, too.” 

Just a few weeks ago, a departing worker at the General Services Administration, another early DOGE target, needed to pass along some important files: memos, meeting minutes, items that had been flagged for more research. But they quickly realized that there was no one left to give them to. “We have people being axed midstroke,” the worker told Mother Jones, “like a movie where a neutron bomb exploded and nobody is left, but the dinner plates are still on the table and the laundry is in the washer.”

Under the second Trump administration, similar stories are playing out across virtually every federal agency as workers stream out all available doors, pushed out by layoffs, reductions in force, and “Fork in the Road” buyout and retirement packages. Thanks to President Donald Trump and DOGE’s oft-stated mission to shrink government and make it more “efficient,” the departures mean large parts of the federal government are essentially fading to black, with services, functions, and research projects going offline, one after another after another. And like areas going dark on a map during a power outage, the government is losing access to vital knowledge from longtime employees, as well as essential information, both domestically and internationally, that federal researchers have gathered over decades and is unlikely to ever be reassembled. In science, land management, international aid, emergency response, national parks, and federal infrastructure, the effect is the same: a sudden, widespread uncertainty about basic things we used to know. 

The gutting of USAID alone is enough to make Elon one of the worst Americans ever, and there’s plenty more irreparable harm where that came from.