What The Hell Is Going On? Part 2
Who Are These Freaks? What Do They Want?
Part 1: Anatomy Of A DOGE
Thanks to the criminals over at ProPublica, the New York Times, and WIRED, we know the names and backgrounds of 52 people currently working for DOGE.
If you follow the news even a little, you’ve probably heard about DOGE’s more surreal and horrifying characters — Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, the 19-year-old “senior advisor” to the State Department and DHS with access to the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, sits front and center for obvious reasons. But this is the Trump administration, and spectacle like this is designed to distract us from going deeper.
Let’s zoom out. There are only two reasons a comfortably well-off person would accept a (relatively) low-paying job that requires 80 hours workweeks (at minimum): you are either a die-hard fanatic or you see an opportunity for massive profit. Everyone at DOGE is there because they were promised something bigger: radical change, Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool, or both.
A few stragglers aside, we can separate DOGE employees into three main factions: Founders (13), Lackeys (28), and the Conservative Legal Mafia (6). It’s a strange, unholy alliance until you look at it closely, at which point it all starts to make a horrible kind of sense. Let’s look at what kind of changes these people want, and what swimming pools they’re eyeing.
But before we get into that…
We Have A USDS Administrator Finally
As you may recall from Part 1, DOGE is controlled not by Elon Musk but by the USDS administrator, which has been extremely convenient for DOGE since it is difficult to file suit against someone who does not exist. Last Tuesday, after a great deal of pressure from the courts, the administration “revealed” that Amy Gleason was Acting USDS administrator this whole time. The announcement surprised everyone, including Gleason, who was vacationing in Mexico at the time.
Gleason worked for USDS from 2018 to the end of 2021, back when it was still a normal agency. Afterwards, she helped start a venture capital firm with Brad Smith, and served as Chief Product Officer for their first incubated start-up. Gleason returned to USDS around December 30th and reportedly met with DOGE officials in January, back when Brad Smith was running their day-to-day operations.
Anyway: rest easy. We finally know who the fall guy is who’s calling the shots around here.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the factions!
Note: the source for any information about DOGE employees not hyperlinked is either ProPublica or the New York Times.
1) Founders
You can learn a lot about someone from what they choose to call themselves. Start-up CEOs? Takes too long to say. Entrepreneur? Who isn’t, in this age of side hustles? No, the people who use venture capital to launch start-ups are something far more serious and patrician: they are founders. The 13 founders working for DOGE have either founded a start-up, hold high office at a start-up, or run a venture capital firm that funds start-ups. None of them have worked directly for Musk before now.
On the surface, these people are here for the swimming pool. For example: Justin Fulcher, a DOGE advisor at the Veteran’s Administration, cofounded RingMD, which describes itself as “Turnkey Telemedicine for Governments.” The VA’s telehealth system is perfectly functional right now — I had an appointment this morning — but, you know. A lot of things in government are breaking. Maybe, after the dust has settled, an “AI-powered chatbot revolutionizing patient triage” can solve understaffing at the Veteran Crisis Line.
Many such cases. Jordan M. Wick, the DOGE employee who published his code on GitHub, co-founded Accelerate, which “transforms government infrastructure with AI-powered automation and software.” Brooks Morgan, currently at the Department of Education, co-founded Podium Education, which offers college students “for-credit, work-based learning” that will have them “completing real-world projects with globally recognized brands” (read: paid internships, but the student does the paying). Scott Langmack, DOGE liaison to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, helps run Kukun, an AI-fueled home equity start-up that offers “the rarest and most important home data and analytics.” It’s a bold claim, but truer than it’s ever been: as of February 10th, Langmack had full access to Housing and Urban Development databases full of sensitive information.
These founders would likely argue these apparent conflicts of interest mean they have the private-sector expertise needed to make these agencies run more efficiently, not because they want to take advantage of the situation. Even if that were true, there’s no reason they couldn’t do both, and also it’s not true. Destroying institutional knowledge by indiscriminately shitcanning workers regardless of skill and experience does not make agencies more efficient, it makes them nonfunctional.
Most of these founders have financial motivation to DOGE it up, but greed is almost never the whole story. DOGE’s wanton destruction of institutions millions of Americans depend on take time and effort that cannot be explained by the profit motive. They do, however, make sense in the context of founder beliefs.
Start-up culture is the American Dream on steroids. You come to Silicon Valley with a computer and a dream, which you pitch to venture capitalists. Once they give you funding, you develop your product with the seed money, get millions of dollars in a few more funding rounds, launch, and wait to either become the next Uber or be acquired by one of the tech conglomerates that run the world. Repeat this cycle a couple times and suddenly you’re wealthy enough to be a venture capitalist yourself. Time to throw down some bootstraps so other founders can pull themselves up (and, you know, make you a ton of money off their IPOs).
For a tiny percentage of would-be founders, the Silicon Dream comes true. But the vast majority of would-be start-ups never get funding at all, and at least 75 percent that do end up failing. Founders will tell you that the Invisible Hand separates the successes from the failures, but the hands are incredibly visible: they belong to the venture capitalists who decide who gets the money. The only prerequisite for becoming the Invisible Hand is access to stacks and stacks of cash — intelligence and discernment sold separately.
Here was another reason why so many start-ups were alike in their mediocrity — they didn’t win the support of investors by creating innovative products that offered new and better ways of doing things, but by crafting formulaic, whiz-bang PowerPoint presentations to impress MBA-credentialed sheep.
“So is engineering never a factor?” I asked
Ghazi shook his head. Neither was having revenue, or customers. In fact, the last thing that mattered in Silicon Valley was technological innovation. Marketing came first and foremost.
-Corey Pein, Live Work Work Work Die
Silicon Valley is a religion. Elevator pitches are a form of supplication. The billionaires at the top are God.
As an American religion, the start-up cult is subject to C.R.E.A.M: Calvinism Rules Everything Around Me. Predestination, prosperity gospel, and free-market capitalism hold a shared core belief: wealth indicates morality. The more wealth you have, the more moral you must be. Whether the arbitor be God or the Invisible Hand, it does not make mistakes.
In the Silicon Valley start-up game, you either walk away with millions or go home broke. Not only do founders have to convince themselves they deserve more money than the people who pitched similar products but failed, they have to convince themselves they are millions or even billions of dollars better. The more money you make, the more unhinged and sociopathic these belief systems must become to justify this income inequality, which is how you end up at Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State or Peter Thiel’s capitalism without democracy, both of which could be multi-part articles of their own.
If you derive your sense of self-worth from a system that’s been kind to you, any attack on that system feels like a direct attack on you. It’s not just that founders disagree with concepts like social justice, systemic racism, and implicit bias: these concepts are personal attacks that inflict narcissistic wounds. If the system is unjust, so is their wealth. If wealth does not signify virtue, they have no virtue. This cannot be! They do have virtue, they’re the most virtuous. Everything they do is virtuous, and anything that makes them feel bad is an attack on virtue itself.
We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever…
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”…
The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Mark Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
With a paltry $1.9 billion to his name, Andreessen barely cracks the top 2000 richest people in the world. But he is also half of Andreessen Horowitz, the largest venture capital firm in the world, and if you start reading about this stuff you will see his name everywhere. He is a major deity within the Founder Pantheon, and far from the only god who believes that anything that slows technological development, up to and including safety concerns, are not just misguided, but morally wrong.
“Then why are they gutting NSF?!” I hear you asking, and it’s a great question: they do not believe NSF is funding technological advancement. To them, the NSF is a tool of the enemy. They are attempting to root out DEI Thoughtcrime, and are also very stupid. Their grant freezing method makes both of these things extremely obvious: they are ordering agency heads to comb through active grants in search of forbidden words like “women,” “trauma,” and “historically.”
Grinding scientific research to a halt based on bad parameters is what happens when you move fast and break things; a philosophy that works a lot better for, say, a telemedicine start-up than the United States government. When a start-up fails, investors lose money. When a government fails, people die. Well…poor people die. If wealth is a sign of morality, poverty is a sign of degeneracy. Are you really going to hold back the best and brightest in the name of the sick and weak?
Sounds…immoral.
2) Lackeys
The 28 Lackeys that work for DOGE are the largest group within it, and the ones that have received the most attention. These are the people who have worked for Musk or someone allied with Musk: Jeremy Lewin worked at Usha Vance’s law firm; Ryan Wunderly worked for Peter Thiel’s Anduril. I’m also including the eight people under 25 working for Musk in this group, even though some are too young to have worked for Musk (or anyone) previously, because they share the defining characteristic of the lackey: they owe their alliegance to Musk and Musk alone. Musk gave them these positions. They are the loyal footsoldiers in his war against the government, because Musk is a genius and can do no wrong.
And what does Musk want? No one can really know what’s in a man’s heart, but we can know what he tells us, and there’s one thing he says a lot:
“I’m a huge believer in the extension of life beyond earth…Life becoming interplanetary [would] be at least as important, if not more important, than life going from oceans to land.
“We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species”
“When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.””
An attempt to build a city on Mars would require an insane amount of resources: money, time, materials, scientists, astronauts, and will. Attemps to accomplish the project in the next few decades, if even possible, would be even more resource-intensive. We would need to push, as a species, as hard as we could, at the expense of many other things.
It makes sense, therefore, that the man who wants to go to Mars would need. Well. Everything.
Elon Musk is the de facto President of the United States. If his wealth were GDP, he’d be the 46th richest country on the planet. He controls a major social media platform and has a near-monopoly on launching satellites into space. His internet service has an exponentially increasing customer base, and Musk is allegedly already using the threat of discontinued service to influence foreign policy. Has anyone, in the history of the world, ever held this much power?
3) Conservative Legal Mafia
This faction includes only six people — because six is all they need. These are lawyers, carefully groomed by the conservative establishment for exactly this moment.
Austin Raynor clerked for Clarence Thomas. Keenan Kmiec clerked for Roberts and Alito, James Burnham clerked for Gorsuch, and Jacob Altik will begin a clerkship with Gorsuch this summer. Stephanie Holmes is a card-carrying member of the Federalist Society. Noah Peters came recommended by the Heritage Foundation, and authored one of Trump’s many executive orders that advance the Project 2025 agenda.
Project 2025 had a booth at CPAC in 2021, less than a month after Trump left office. The Heritage Foundation has spent four long years developing a plan to remake America, their actions at present are extremely deliberate. Their presence in DOGE should put to bed any notion that the agency is an ad-hoc, last-minute addition to the Trump agenda. DOGE are the shock troops of Project 2025, the engine by which they bulldoze a path to the society they’d like to see.
Speaking of which, remember those stragglers I mentioned like 2500 words ago? There are five DOGE employees that don’t fit neatly into any category: two profiteers, two Republican operatives…and Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife. According to WIRED, Katie communicates Musk’s orders and personally breaks bad news. The Millers act as “glorified babysitters,” sources say…and maybe something else:
Musk’s relationship with the Millers has become a subject of great intrigue in Washington as DOGE continues to wreak havoc on the federal government. Little is known about how often they interact outside of work and how the relationship grew over the late stages of the campaign into the transition.
“If you can find out anything about Stephen Miller’s social life, I don’t wanna know the answer,” says a longtime Republican operative who knows the couple personally.
Is WIRED implying…?
I am reminded, suddenly, of Elon Musk’s CPAC interview — not the chainsaw part, but the part where Musk, wearing sunglasses indoors like a person who is definitely not on drugs might, sat down for an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt. Schmitt starts out by asking Musk, who used to be agnostically liberal, if there was a moment that changed his mind. “Yeah, when I realized I was a fool,” Musk said after a brief pause. “But I was — I guess — uh — yeah, I’d say I was probably politically neutral for a while — you know — leaning a little Democrat…”
“How does that happen?” Schmitt asked, and when Musk again failed to articulate any coherent reasons for his conversion to “Dark, Gothic MAGA,” Schmitt changed tactics.
Schmitt: “Did they go crazy?”
Musk: “Yeah, they did go crazy.”
For the next half hour, Schmitt fed Musk his lines by asking repeat-after-me questions, which Musk mostly managed. Mostly.
In Part 3, we’re going to talk about the tactics DOGE used to seize control: tactics that have Musk’s name all over them. If the Department of Government Efficiency is waging blitzkrieg, Musk is their Erwin Rommel…but he is not the chancellor.
Holy shit. This was so long. Thanks for sticking with me. Part 3 coming soon.
First, I was struck by Mark Andreessen using the term accelerationism. Wondering if he is aware (betting he is) of the accelerationist movement in Chrustian Nationalist circles? And the Calvinist doctrine of predestination has a long history of being used as a cudgel and an excuse to abuse people's and cultures bc if your name wasn't "written in the book of life before the founding of the world" you are doomed to perdition and hell. IOW you aren't in the club and can never get in (unless of course you are able to secure start up $$$.)
Also the idea that money in and of itself confers virtue and morality and general "rightness" to a person of course also infersthe opposite, that poverty and want aren't a failure of society but a flaw in a persons character and therefore a just punishment for said flaws.
On a different note I recently watched the Black Mirror episode Joan is Awful which reminded me to always wade through the "terms and conditions" b4 hitting accept and also made me think of DOGE lawyer squad while reading bc DEAR GOD LAWYERS are the worst!
Anyway great second installment and can't wait for the next one. I always read AND tgen listen to the audio version just to hear the horror in your voice when you describe the idiocy of so much of DOGE and Elon and Trump and Vance and the beat goes on....
That "Tech Optimist Manifesto" shit literally sounds like a cartoon villain. God damn.