DOGE Mismanagement Principles

Musk et al. don't know or care about the damage they are doing

Sam Rayburn, the Texan who served as House Speaker for 17 years was fond of saying:

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.

Borrowing image from this excellent piece by John Langford and Erica Newland.

Rayburn was talking about policymaking, but the point extends to more broadly to governing. Trashing government agencies is easy. Making them work is hard. DOGE, and the husk of the Office of Personnel Management that has become a DOGE zombie, are a good example.

Elon Musk has a reputation of an extraordinarily successful innovator. If you missed him devolving into a far-right conspiracy nut and hate-monger, it’s still possible to think: “well, he’s an amazing businessman—maybe he can fix government.”

The well of cautious optimism Musk enjoyed among smart people who knew a lot about government has pretty much run dry. We are moving from “maybe Elon will shake things up and reset the system” to “I really hope he does not break some deeply important government functions.”

Musk’s management style when it comes to downsizing has been to cut to the bone, and then hire back if he fired too many. This philosophy might make sense if you are running a social media company where its not a big deal if Twitter goes down for a couple of hours. It makes less sense where the a) failure of government systems has big and sometimes irrevocable costs, and b) it is not easy to replace expertise once you have eliminated it. On the latter point, many public jobs take time to develop knowledge of the policy domain, organizational practice and tasks. Those are not qualities that are easy to rebuild if you just spent a year training a new employee who has now been fired.

After 75,000 people accepted DOGE’s legally questionable deferred resignation offer, DOGE moved to engage in a mass firing of probationary employees, i.e. civil servants who have not yet received full job protections. We don’t have final numbers of those fried (you can find a tracker here), but probationary employees make up about 10% of the civilian workforce. Most of these are employees in their first year, but some were more experienced employees who became probationary when they switched positions.

Musk and DOGE are providing a real-time management case study. Unfortunately, all of the lessons are about what not to do. The quickest way to improve your management skills is to look at what DOGE is doing, and do the complete opposite.¹

Don’t fire the guys taking care of the nukes

Let me note that I feel like this lesson should not be necessary. We should not need to spell this one out. One measure of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that they could no longer afford to keep staff to secure nuclear warheads. Why would the US voluntarily downgrade it’s own capacity to manage its nuclear arsenal? And yet, DOGE fired 1 in 5 federal staff that manage the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

Have you heard about the National Nuclear Security Administration before? Probably not. It’s one of those jobs that we hopefully never need to think about, because if we do that means something has gone badly wrong. But it’s also one of those jobs that someone needs to ensure is staffed appropriately to make sure something does not go badly wrong. As a citizen, its fine if you are not aware of NNSA, but bear in mind that when the right attacks wasteful bureaucracy, these sort of invisible agencies performing important tasks are some of what they are talking about.

Apparently DOGE does not know much about the NNSA either. To be fair, when you have zero experience of government, why should you? But if you have zero experience of government, you should also probably not be in the position of firing 300 of the guys who take care of the nukes. NNSA managers were given 200 characters—about the length of a social media post—to explain why the jobs of their employees mattered. The vast majority of these pleas were denied by Trump officials who simply did not understand the positions. CNN reported that the fired staffers included “staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.” Some staff oversees emergency response plans at nuclear weapons site, or were involved in preventing rogue nations from accessing nuclear materials. Dismissal emails said “your further employment would not be in the public interest."

After enough members of Congress got upset, the firings were rescinded. Just one problem. DOGE made the firings effective the day they were received (no notice, not severance), immediately forcing employees to leave and shutting down access to government emails. DOGE did not have contact information to tell NNSA employees they were unfired. One unfired employee who was tracked down told reporters:

I will be honest, I intend to keep looking for work. I will go back, but as soon as I find another role, I’ll be leaving…[I have] no faith I will keep my job.

Given their treatment, another employee asked: "why would anybody want to take these jobs?" Another said “Honestly I’m just waiting to be re-fired.”

This pattern happened across government. The USDA scrambled to rehire employees monitoring the bird flu outbreak. Small Business Administration and Indian Health employees were also called back to work after they had been fired.

Turns out if you treat employees like garbage, they don’t always want to come back to work for you.

Don’t fire employees, unfire them, and then fire them again

The staff who were fired and then unfired were the lucky ones. Some unknown numbers of Small Business Administration employees received emails saying they were fired, unfired, and then fired again. Government Executive (which has been providing excellent coverage) told the story of one such employee.

One SBA employee who had two months left in their probationary period told Government Executive they received a termination notice on Friday that was unsigned and did not have official agency letterhead. “It was sketchy,” the employee said. “It didn’t seem legit.”

The employee’s top-level management told them they had the day before submitted a plea to retain the employee, who had already gone through one performance review cycle and received nearly flawless scores. The staffer’s supervisor expressed shock over the letter, said they received no notice it was coming and told the employee not to take any official action to leave the agency, the employee said.

On Monday, the employee received an email that the prior notices were sent in error. The employee said they were pleased with the correction, but the relief was short-lived. On Tuesday afternoon they received two more termination notices. One came at 3 p.m. and another two hours later. These were more official and signed. The notice said the employee was “not a fit” for the agency “and/or” had performance issues, though the worker had only received positive reviews.

Another SBA employee had been fired and re-hired twice.

“I'm grateful to have my job back, but I do not feel any stability,” the employee said. “It's bittersweet that I will go back to the work that I love with the thought that, with no notice, my life may be turned upside down. Again.”

The chaotic mismanagement of firing process can be seen in other ways. Many who had signed up for the deferred resignation program were fired anyway. Because such employees immediately lost access to their emails, agencies are struggling to contact them to fix the problem.

Don’t fire the guys collecting the money

Governments can’t function without revenue, so ensuring that the agency that collects taxes can do its job is pretty fundamental to maintaining state capacity. Under Biden, the IRS had received long-awaited and much needed funds that allowed it to rebuild after a period of sustained downsizing, and was becoming more effective.

The IRS represented a very simple test for the credibility of DOGE. Was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest return on investment in government, generating somewhere between $5-9 for every additional $1 spent on enforcement.

Or did DOGE want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires?

We have our answer. In the middle of tax season, the IRS was told to lay off thousands of workers hired as part of the rebuilding project.

Part of the DOGE hype is that after they fire everyone, they will figure out better ways to do the job using, uh, AI and such. But there is no second act where it gets better. They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. Breaking government is the point. It is not as if DOGE has some magical IRS plan up their sleeve. There is no plan.

In addition to making it less likely that the wealthy will have to pay taxes, the other attraction to the IRS is its data. DOGE has been hoovering up all sorts of data across government. No single entity has ever had this type of centralized access to government data. But the IRS stands alone. It is the holy grail of government data, incredibly tightly controlled. It requires an Act of Congress to share this data even within government. But when DOGE employees landed at Treasury “the main thing DOGE is asking for is extensive access to the tax agency’s information and internal systems. They’re just trying to snap up data right now." This includes access to personal bank information that political appointees, including even IRS commissioners, traditionally do not have access to because of the concern of abuse of such data. Now white nationalists who traffic in far-right hate and neo-nazi messaging will have that information.

Don’t lie to employees about their performance

Some of the employees fired were told it was due to poor performance. This would have required DOGE to look at their performance. Do you think these guys were conscientious enough to look carefully at individual employee performance? As a reminder, these are also the guys who fired the employees who took care of our nation’s nuclear stockpile.

HR officials at the NNSA resigned after they became frustrated at being forced to tell employees, falsely, that they were being fired for performance reasons. The absurdity of the situation was underlined when a Small Business Administration hire was told they were fired for poor performance, despite not yet having worked a single day in the agency. Other employees were fired despite receiving only excellent performance evaluations.

It is one thing to lie to the public about what bureaucrats do—and Musk has been doing plenty of that—but there is something deeply amoral about lying directly to individual human beings about their performance.

Don’t fire the guys keeping the planes in the sky

You might have noticed that since Trump became President a number of aviation fatalities have occurred. This happened after Musk pushed the head of the Federal Aviation Administration to resign, and Trump fired its safety advisory board. This likely had little direct effect on the crash at Reagan airport, but the crash highlighted staffing shortages, causing the Trump administration to tell FAA employees they could no longer apply for deferred resignation offer they had received days earlier. Safety first, it seemed.

FAA employees therefore had some reason to believe that they would be exempt from the purge of probationary employees, but this is not the case. Hundreds of FAA probationary employees were fired. While they were not air traffic controllers, many worked directly on safety, such as personnel working on radar, landing, charts, and navigational equipment.

On Reddit, which has become a site where federal employees are anonymously sharing their fears, one said:

I was an FAA probationary employee that supported the National Airspace Defense Program…I got my email at 12:30 am today. Less than a month away from the end of my probation and 6 months pregnant.

Don’t tell employees to return-to-office and fire them once they get there

Many employees took federal jobs on the assumption they did not have to work five days a week in an office. Then they were told they had to. The DOGE geniuses assumed they would be much more efficient if they could do their Microsoft Teams online meetings in a cubicle after a long commute, rather than from their home. So some of these employees upended their lives to satisfy the new return-to-office policies, and were promptly fired for doing so.

You are not a credible employer if you cannot make simple commitments to employees who are making extraordinary sacrifices to work for you.

Treat the people who work for you with a modicum of dignity

Some employees noted that their supervisors cried when firing them. This at least conveyed some semblance of recognition of what was going on. But thousands were fired via videos or group calls. Some were told to look for an email that would fire them, which never came. Some were told to leave their building within 30 minutes.

OPM staffers were told, via video, the reason for their dismissal was that they didn't take the Trump administration's deferred resignation offer. Telling employees that they have to leave because they did not agree to leave is not exactly performance-driven HR practice.

One federal employee on Reddit summarized the sense or anger among employees about the sheer indifference to the value of their work by people who could not be bothered to figure it out:

I know I’ll bounce back and land another job. Im grateful that im young and that I have support and I’ll be OK. The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.

Who would want to work for a company that degrades its employees like this?

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The grim reality is that I could write countless variations of this post for some many different jobs across government. People who deal with cyber threats to our elections are fired. I don’t really understand the full consequences of these firings, but there is the thing: neither do DOGE. They have not done any serious analysis of the need for such positions.

On Bluesky, Chris Hayes said: “They are just swinging sledgehammers in the dark.” That feels about right, except they are also in a china shop. By the time other people have to put it all back together (if that time ever comes) the Doge bros will be long gone, having extracted whatever value they were seeking from the federal government.

This is just the first wave. It will get worse. Way worse. The probationary employees were the easiest to fire. Now Trump has told federal agencies to prepare reduction in force (RIF) plans that would go after employees with more protections, focusing on hundreds of thousands of federal employees deemed non-essential during government shutdowns. The order promises that only one new employee will be allowed to join for every four that leave. It also specifies that DOGE approves any new agency hires, adding a new level of politicization to not just the firing process, but also hiring.

It is a fundamental error to believe that DOGE is a government efficiency project. Cutting 1 in 4 federal employees would cut federal government spending by 1%. Cost savings are incidental. DOGE is a political control project. Firing and terrorizing public employees is a means to weakening state regulation of private interests and strengthening a personalist presidency.

Sometime soon, some big stuff will start to break in observable ways. It will be important to trace those failures back to decisions being made now. For example, firing 1,300 CDC officials, including disease trackers, could become a disaster very quickly. The US Forest Service will do fewer preventive prescribed burns in the immediate aftermath of catastrophic fires in LA. The head of food safety at the Food and Drug Administration quit, saying that the mass layoffs made it fruitless for him to continue in his position.

In other cases, there will be no single moment of failure. Here, I am thinking about the broader disinvestment in US science signified by the firing of government scientists. Instead, we will have to simply accept a long and slow decline of actual American greatness in the name of making America great again.

1. DOGE is the George Costanza of public management.