The stupidity of it all. T

The Washington Post
Opinion

Catherine Rampell

How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient

It’s as though “efficiency” isn’t the actual goal.

March 21, 2025

A senior aide to President Donald Trump once said the administration hoped to traumatize civil servants, an objective it has handily accomplished through arbitrary layoffs and other indignities. But government workers are not the only victims.

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Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.

• At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.

• At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.

• At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)

I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing frustrated civil servants, whose remarks typically rotate through panic, rage and black humor. Almost none are willing to speak on the record because of concerns about purges by the U.S. DOGE Service. But their themes are easy to corroborate: Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.

For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”

What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.

One NASA employee said they were asked multiple times to scour performance plans and contracts for offending terms. The first sanitization came shortly after Trump’s Day 1 executive order regarding DEI, and resulted in deleting references to “diversity” and “equity.” Weeks later, more banned words (“environmental justice,” “socioeconomic”) were identified, and the scrubbing began anew. Mere hours after that, someone in upper management emailed staff again to say those new deletion orders were “not NASA policy and should not be used,” and told workers to simply check the contracts for compliance with the executive order.

Whatever that means. Meanwhile, NASA’s real work languishes.

Another Kafkaesque executive order requires agency heads to send the White House a list, within 60 days, of their agency’s “unconstitutional regulations” — the ultimate “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style directive.

“Obviously, no agency is going to say, ‘Whoops! You caught me! I wrote that unconstitutional regulation and had it approved through [the Office of Management and Budget] before you asked me. Sorry!’” a Department of Health and Human Services employee told me. Agencies are weighing whether to affirm everything on their books as being constitutional or offer up some token regulations as tribute. Both options could attract further retaliation.

Meanwhile, some federal payments have stopped. Credit cards used for routine purchases have been canceled or had their limits shrunk to $1. Contracts are being arbitrarily canceled midway through. DOGE officials appear to wrongly believe this saves money.

But there are costs to, say, not feeding the Transportation Security Administration’s bomb-sniffing dogs. And if contracts lapse when they could have been easily extended, projects must restart the time-consuming and expensive bid process. Again, this stops other critical work, costing both the government and the public.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, no contracts may be initiated or extended without sign-off from the commerce secretary, creating a bottleneck. One NOAA contract that expires soon is for maintenance and repair of the all-hazards weather radio network, which broadcasts tornado warnings and watches, among other life-and-death alerts. The contract has been stuck in limbo, just as an already-deadly tornado season is getting underway.

“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service (which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”

These new directives are not only wasting government manpower and taxpayer dollars. They’re also resulting in worse services for Americans.

The Social Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will require millions of people to visit their regional office in person to file claims (or use an online system that retirees might have trouble navigating) rather than by phone, as beneficiaries had been able to do. Meanwhile, the agency is laying off workers and closing those field offices. If you’re one of the unlucky Americans whom the agency has prematurely labeled “dead,” good luck getting your benefits reinstated.

The IRS, meanwhile, is deleting all non-English forms and notices, employees were told this week. This will mean less taxpayer compliance and more work for employees. Lose-lose, if you’re trying to keep the government efficiently run.

These days, that’s a big “if.”

By Catherine Rampell

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post and an anchor/co-host at MSNBC. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/21/doge-government-efficiency-federal-workers/