I know, right? To think that a college-aged kid who uses the screen name "Big Balls" has access to everyone's Social Security and income tax information....
Meanwhile......
When an Inspector General (whose JOB it is to find and cut waste and fraud, by the way) at USAID (one of our best and most effective foreign aid / diplomacy programs, because as everyone knows, one dollar spent on these sorts of diplomatic outreach programs saves ten dollars on military defense) found that because of all the funding shenanigans that DOGE was doing with that agency, nearly $500 MILLION in food was going to waste (either stuck in warehouses with no plans / money to ship it anywhere, our outright spoiling), the DOGE team leapt into action - and fired the Inspector General.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/usaid-inspector-fired-trump-freeze-b2696917.htmlNo word on what happened with all the food.
Also:
"The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport . . . The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity . . . The employees were fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct,” Spero said, and the emails were “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address” — not a government email address."
https://apnews.com/article/doge-faa-air-traffic-firings-safety-67981aec33b6ee72cbad8dcee31f3437(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if USAID's investigation of their contract with Musk's Starlink company (USAID had provided Ukraine with Starlink terminals at the start of the war) (
reference) and the fact that Musk needs to work with the FAA every time he launches one of his rockets (and there's even more paperwork when one of his rockets undergoes a "rapid unscheduled disassembly") are at least in part responsible for his targeting of those agencies.)
You know, I can't help but wonder how much DOGE is costing the American taxpayer. Not just the dollar costs, what with all the cleaning up that will have to be done, and responding to all the lawsuits over wrongful termination (and I've read that President Musk is making $8 MILLION a day in his position), but all the intangible costs: the loss of expertise that comes from kicking talented upper-level management to the curb without notice, the loss of knowledge from killing research programs in the middle of the studies, the loss of trust in the federal government as something that keeps its word and lives up to its obligations both here and abroad.....