Everything that has been stolen from us will be returned

I want to point you to two stories about DOGE you may have missed.

The first is a heartwarming yarn about a hard-nosed recruit of Elon Musk's extralegal project who finds himself deep in the government he hoped to revile and instead finds himself swelled with an unexpected emotion: respect.

People who "love their jobs" 

From Ernie Smith at Fast Company:

Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.

The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a fact recently revealed in a Wired piece.

He joined called DOGE "'a glorified temp agency for software engineers,' he got in through the side entrance, offering his services to the cause of government efficiency.

"I'm basically taking Elon at his word," he admits.

He wanted to improve efficiency in the US government and avoid the vetting that usually comes with getting a government job. And what did he find inside the VA?

Now that he's there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who "love their jobs," who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.

"In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn't have to do much more," he says, implying software can replace departing employees. "We'd just basically use software to plug holes. But that's not what's happening."

Lavingia's skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he's found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn't make decisions as fast as a startup might.

Our second anecdote is a murderous tale that would make Edgar Allan Poe puke. 

Found themselves stranded 

It's about the "world's richest man killing the world's poorest children," according to Bill Gates, the former richest man alive. It offers a glimpse of our government operating "as a startup might."

We get the details from Matt Bai in the Washington Post:

Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency's interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.

But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo. A pregnant woman in an undisclosed country has sued the Trump administration because she was denied a medevac helicopter. In another case, I was told, an employee in southern Africa who needed chemotherapy was also denied a chopper because no one would authorize the money.

One night, as staff tried yet again to assemble a list of necessary payments, the agency's computer network went down for two hours. When it came back on, members of the IT team whispered to colleagues to be wary; during the outage, they believed spyware had been installed on the network to monitor communication among employees.

There's a reason the government doesn't operate like a startup. And it's not just because most startups fail.

Lives depend on the actions of those we entrust with our treasure and sacred honor.

We must demand repair

The costs of Elon Musk's holy war on the public good can only be estimated at this point.

There will be 74,000 deaths in Africa this decade, according to one estimate, just from his gutting of PEPFAR, the anti-HIV program that isn't just the best thing George W. Bush launched but one of the best things America has ever done. 

"One million children will go untreated for severe malnutrition, up to 166,000 people will die from malaria, and 200,000 more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade," Pro Publica found based on memos warning the regime of their actions.

We'll probably never be able to inventory all the corruption, malice, and harm to our general welfare that has been committed by Elon Musk directly, and because he marshaled $45 billion to elect Donald Trump. It's almost impossible to reconcile the damage they will do to our privacy by "compiling agency information on everyone everywhere into a single, easily searchable database," which is how Jill Lawrence describes the goal of Musk's effort to suck up and, likely, appropriate our data. But we must dedicate ourselves to trying.

The damage Elon Musk has done to the American people must be documented for two purposes:

1. Restitution.
   Everything looted from the American people—every program, grant, and employee working on our behalf—will be restored—all of it.
2. Accountability.
   We must demand a thorough and unflinching investigation of every wrong committed against us, with the goal of consequences in our lifetime. This will likely be impossible with our current laws and courts. While regime 200 orders have at least temporarily halted these injustices, our system has proven insufficient to prevent bad actors from bad acting. We must insist on a thorough reform and rededication to the constitutional order designed to overwhelm the Musk/Trump assault on our common good.

I know. It's a pipe dream at this point. And even if this restitution would work out perfectly, we'd be like Job, with his new family, everything that had been taken by absurd vengeance haunting him for the rest of his life. 

But there is no other option. Either we commit to restoring what has been looted and repairing as much as we can of what has been destroyed, or we will forever condemn ourselves to endless cycles of ever-worsening abuse.

And to that, we must say, "Nope. Never."

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