It does seem likely that the administration will try to pin blame on Musk for the chaos that the “Department of Government Efficiency” launched against the United States government.
Brandon Roberts and Vernal Coleman of ProPublica reported today on the AI prompts the Department of Government Efficiency used to “munch”—the word DOGE employee Sahil Lavingia used for “cancel”—contracts related to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Lavingia, who worked for two months for DOGE, said the idea was to go after anything that wasn’t “directly supporting patient care.” But the code was deeply flawed, resulting in wildly off-base contract values and a deep misunderstanding of what contracts actually did. “[M]istakes were made,” Lavingia said. “Mistakes are always made.”
Hannah Natanson, Adam Taylor, Meryl Kornfield, Rachel Siegel, and Scott Dance of the Washington Post took a broader view. They reported that “[a]cross the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.” They outlined how the administration is trying to patch the holes DOGE ripped in agencies: trying to rehire employees who were fired or left voluntarily and, if that doesn’t work, offering overtime, asking for volunteers, and asking employees to serve in new roles. Some new job offerings look a lot like the positions of people agencies just fired.
A White House official told the reporters: “If by chance mistakes were made and critical employees were dismissed, each individual agency is working diligently to bring these people back to work to continue the adequate functions of the federal government.” But morale is terrible, one worker at the Food and Drug Administration told the reporters. “Everyone is stressed and feels the absence of our colleagues.… I’m looking for another job.”
Still, DOGE is not the only group in the administration that has made poor decisions. Hannah Allam of ProPublica reported on Wednesday that the White House has put a 22-year-old recent college graduate with no experience in national security in charge of overseeing the government’s main center for preventing terrorism. Thomas Fugate’s main credentials for his position in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes overseeing $18 million in grants to local authorities to combat violent extremism, appear to be his time spent as an intern at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and his loyalty to Trump.
Fugate’s appointment appears to reflect that the administration is downplaying domestic terrorism to shift resources to immigration. In its budget proposal, DHS has called for eliminating the threat prevention grant program Fugate oversees, saying it “does not align with DHS priorities.” One former Homeland Security official told Allam the shift “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”