In recent weeks, many people have expressed shock and surprise at some of the effects of cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The stated goal of DOGE, led by Elon Musk, is to eliminate fraud and waste in government. It's difficult to write about DOGE without discussing politics, but my goal here is to focus on a critical point that relatively few people understand: Elon Musk is entirely unqualified for the job he is supposedly doing, and the reasons are not political. They are technical.
The public perception of Musk has been molded by the idea that he is a computer genius: Aided by his hand-picked team of brilliant programmers, Musk will dissect the systems used by government agencies, find the perpetrators of fraud, and eliminate wasteful spending.
This is absurd. It is wildly wrong, and it is based on fundamental misunderstanding of how systems work and what programmers do.
Complicated systems require expertise in many different areas, and no one understands every aspect of all those areas.
Think of a car. A modern car isn't designed by one person. There will be several teams of engineers, each working on different aspects of the machine and its components. Computer systems are the same: They don't have "a program." They have many programs which do different things, and there may be millions of lines of source code that have to be compiled to generate those programs. The programs rely on the computer's operating system for many of its basic functions, and that operating system must must be properly configured for the programs to work as intended. Additionally, those programs will not be running on single computer; they will be running on many computers, some of which use completely different hardware and operating systems. There are databases and web servers and application servers, there are directories of users and computers, there are systems to monitor performance, systems to collect logs, systems to monitor security and more. The majority of these systems are not managed (and are often not even understood) by programmers.
The connections between these systems, meanwhile, rely on other components: There will be routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers, there might be content delivery networks, there might be WAN accelerators and more. Securing these systems, meanwhile, will involve granular file permissions, network segmentation, intrusion detection systems, and strict management of auditing and logging. And above all, security requires an understanding of human behavior. No matter how well you understand the systems, if you do not understand the people who use those systems, your data will not be secure.
Here is the critical fact: Programmers work with code. The ability to write code, however, is of no use at all, because the fraud and waste are not in the code.
I will repeat that, this time in bold: The fraud and waste are not in the code.
Asking random neophyte programmers to find fraud by looking at the U. S. Treasury's systems is idiocy. It's like hiring an engineer who designs spark plug wires to drive a Formula One racer at Monaco: "Those F1 cars have spark plugs, right? He's PERFECT for the job!"
Does Musk really believe that he's finding fraud? That's doubtful. It's far more probable that his goal is to cut the budget, and he couldn't care less who is harmed by those cuts. This would explain why Musk wants to use programmers instead of auditors. If you give a programmers full access, they can do things that auditors would not do.
They may not actually understand the nuances of the code, but they can query databases. And if you can query a database, you can generate lists of employees of agencies your boss doesn't like. You can automate email notifications telling them they've been fired for poor performance. There's no need to prove that their performance actually was poor. Who's going to know? Or you could fire random people from the Department of Energy. That's a useless department, right? Oh, wait... they manage the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile? And we already fired them? Well, we can unfire them. Oh... we also disabled their phones, and now we don't know how to reach them?
A few other things programmers can do: They can delete data. They can destroy logs. They can disable system auditing. They can steal personal data. They can falsify results. So what if they break things? The beauty of being an "expert" is that you can lie to people who don't understand what you're doing. You can claim you found fraud, you can claim you found money laundering, you can make up whatever bullshit you want. Who's going to know?
Since the DOGE team is in a hurry, there will be mistakes. That's what happens when it's a Rush job. "Rush" as in Stockton Rush, that is. Rush, the narcissistic engineer behind the ill-fated Titan submersible, was a man with a deep-seated dislike of regulations, a man who disregarded repeated warnings that his designs were unsound. Elon Musk is cut from the same cloth. He's the sort of man whose arrogance leads to disaster. That was true of Rush, too, but in one sense Rush was far superior: Rush was willing to share the risk with those he endangered. The same cannot be said for Musk.
Think Musk will be eliminating any of the subsidies to his own companies? Think he'll refund the salaries paid to the incompetent DOGE flunkies who created an official government website riddled with wild inaccuracies for their "department," then left it unsecured, allowing the site to be defaced by hackers within days? This is the sort of thing that happens when "experts" venture beyond the realm of their supposed expertise.
