Trump’s First 100 Days: How DOGE Has Changed Government
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Donald Trump has now crossed 100 days in office during his second term. Much of what he's done has not been a surprise and was part of the broader Republican project described in detail in Project 2025. However, Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government efficiency and the way it seized control of agency systems has come as a surprise.

No one has done more to document what's happening than Wired Magazine's reporters. And this morning, they join us. They're coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Before the Trump administration began, it was not at all clear what the so-called Department of Government Efficiency would be. It had two nominal heads, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. No offices, no statutory authority. Its acronym, DOGE, suggested it could be as much a joke as anything. Maybe it would be a kind of commission suggesting cuts to the government.

But soon, Ramaswamy was gone, and Elon Musk was talking about cutting $2 trillion, basically most of the government's discretionary spending. And there were young men showing up at USAID and the Office of Management and Budget requesting access to sensitive data systems.

Things have not gone smoothly and the supposed huge savings have not materialized. Elon Musk may be retreating back to Tesla. The whole thing has had elements of tragedy, farce and horror. We know a lot of what we do thanks to a massive reporting effort at Wired magazine, developing sources inside the government and publishing what's going on. We're joined this morning by three of Wired's finest. McKenna Kelly is politics reporter at Wired. Thanks for joining us, McKenna.

Great to be here. We've got Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry at Wired. She oversees coverage of the Valley. She's also the author of Extremely Hardcore inside Elon Musk's Twitter. Welcome, Zoe. Thanks for having me. Hi. And we've got Vittoria Elliott, Platforms and Power Reporter at Wired. Welcome. Thanks for having me.

Okay, let's start with you. Like, when did you know that Doge was going to be more than a sideshow, if in fact you consider it more than a sideshow?

Right. I mean, I think as reporters at WIRED, we had a lot of questions from the beginning, even just, you know, shortly after the election, we started hearing about Elon Musk's involvement. But when, you know, I think the original assumption was that it was going to be this outside supervisory committee. He might have, you know, some reports or some memos to give to the administration. But I think it was, you know, that first week of January 20th when Donald Trump became, you know, officially became inaugurated as the president.

And I was hearing from sources of mine at USDS, which is now – it was formerly called the United States Digital Service, and now it's called the United States Doge Service. Complete rebranding for Elon Musk. But I was hearing folks there telling me that they were getting thrown into these bizarre one-on-one meetings with kids who could be no older than 25. Right.

and being forced to discuss code that they had written at their jobs and being able to point out who the best engineers were at USDS. And that's when I think it really hit me first because it reminded me so much of Zoe's reporting

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of came to that conclusion slowly and then all at once. I think back to this email that was sent very early on, supposedly from kind of a federal agency, but it really had Elon Musk's fingerprints all over it. And the subject line was a fork in the road. And they were offering...

federal employees the kind of quote-unquote opportunity to resign and get paid supposedly until September in an effort to what they called like right-size the federal workforce. And immediately I think we wrote a blog that day that was like, oh, he's running the Twitter playbook on the federal government, which means it's very much like a move fast and break things ethos where you try and run things with an absolutely skeleton crew. It's very top-down, very hierarchical.

Yeah. I mean, what happened to that September payout thing? Let's table that for now. I mean, it's one of so many things that has seemed like just a massive storyline that then kind of goes to ground and kind of disappears here. Yeah.

Let's talk first about how what Doge actually is, Zoe, like how is it evolved? What is its actual form? I mean, it's tucked under, as McKenna noted, what used to be the USDS, like that's its actual home in the government now. But what is it?

Okay, I'm going to give my best explanation and then McKenna is going to jump in as our expert if I get anything even slightly wrong. But yeah, so there's like part of the confusion stems from the fact that there are really two doges. There's the kind of rebranded USDS and then within that organization, there's like the temporary doge service where employees are supposed to work for I think 18 months in government, kind of do short stints and then go back to the private sector.

Like McKenna said, at the outset, you know, the executive order that announced Doge's existence said that they were going to focus on kind of a modest mandate to kind of...

the efficiency of the federal government and like modernize its IT. And I think all of us were kind of like, okay, let's wait and see. But over time, Doja's mandate has radically expanded, both through subsequent executive orders, things like we need to root out fraud, waste, and abuse by

eliminating data silos. And this has prompted one set of federal plaintiffs to argue like fraud, waste, and abuse are not magic words that Doge can use to get access to any database it wants to. But also because they have just taken it upon themselves to kind of

what seems like go far beyond that initial modest mandate and kind of engage, as The New York Times has reported, in even like setting up a golden visa system to like, you know, which could raise money for the federal government.

You know, Vittoria, at a really high level, I think a lot of people are still a little bit unsure of what to make of the Doge effort. Like, is it a few tech guys wandering around trying to figure out the basics of government? Is it an evil plot to gather up Americans' data for nefarious purposes? Is it just the Republican U.S. Digital Service and this is what it looks like in an administration like Trump's? What do you think?

I think the most accurate description of it would be to call it a parallel executive branch run through managing control of IT systems, contracting and data. I think the reality is, and I think that this is sort of most evident if we look at how USAID was handled very early on within Doge.

There was an effort seemingly spearheaded by Musk because he was very public about it on X to shut down USAID. And USAID is a federal agency established by Congress, funded by Congress. That is not necessarily something that the executive branch has the power to do. But what our reporting showed was, you know, that not only did Doge attempt to get into USAID to access its systems illegally,

in order to shut down its grant-making abilities to pay out money to the partners it works with around the world. But they also, with their operative inside the Treasury Department, Marco Velez, at the time, were planning to use the Treasury Department to screen and stop USAID payments. And so I think what you can see in that is that

This goal from the executive office, because, you know, while Musk may have sort of been publicly at the helm of this, Trump has repeatedly said that everything that Doge is doing is something that he is comfortable with or signed off on. So we see this mandate coming down from the executive office and being executed really quickly through the ability to access very sensitive data and IT and payment systems

on behalf of these agencies. And it's fascinating because they've essentially generated this power because they've sort of taken site control, right? It's like who owns a property or who technically, statutorily controls some function can actually sort of be obscured, obviated by just, no, we're the ones who literally have the passwords to the paycheck system. Yeah, I think, and I think that's the...

biggest thing here is that, you know, when USDS, part of USDS's mandate was that it could go into any non-classified IT system. And that was under the Obama administration, a way to sort of bring almost a technical consultant vibe to what they were doing to modernize these systems. But with the

the sort of legal jujitsu that was actually quite smart in repurposing the USDS into the US Doge service. What that fundamentally meant was that, you know, the Doge operatives were able to go into these agencies and really grab hold of the bones of how they function, you know,

Even 20 years ago, and it may be necessarily, you might be able to say that owning the IT systems or owning the payment systems of a particular agency wouldn't necessarily mean that you had real control over the whole agency. But there is, I think, probably no part of government where technology doesn't touch. And so the mandate to go in and be able to touch any technological system that isn't classified is really giving control over technology.

of the sort of nervous system of any agency over to Doge. - McKenna, I love that description by Vittoria of this as sort of a parallel executive branch. Let's just take that as sort of what's going on here. I mean, what do you think Elon Musk's actual goal is regardless of what he said in having this parallel executive branch?

Right. Well, as Tori was speaking, it reminded me of an interview Elon Musk did on, of all things, Senator Ted Cruz's podcast a couple months ago, where he was describing that he didn't want a government job originally. He just wanted, and this is a quote, the logins to all of the computers. And then I just pulled up the other quote from that interview, which is, quote, the government is run by computers. You have several hundred computers that run the government. Everything is implemented on a computer somewhere. Right.

And so he was, honestly, I don't know if this came from Stephen Miller or if this came from Elon Musk himself or people that they associate with, but having access, right, to all of these computer systems has given them just unprecedented power to see whatever it is, right, if they're able to acquire this certain access. And it's anything that could touch Elon Musk's business.

businesses, whether that is, you know, NASA and SpaceX or any other... The IRS and immigration, which we'll talk about more later. Correct, which we've done a lot of reporting on. But just information literally is power. And I think Elon and his team with Doge, you know,

And decided to, you know, that's how they've grasped onto power. And now, you know, in this, what it feels like we're entering a phase two of Doge now where they're figuring out how to implement that power. Yeah.

We're talking to reporters from Wired Magazine who have broken some of the biggest stories on what Doge is doing. We're about 100 days into the Trump administration, so it's been 100 days of Doge as well. We're joined by McKenna Kelly, politics reporter at Wired, Zoe Schiffer, director of business and industry at Wired, also the author of Extremely Hardcore Inside Elon Musk Twitter, and Vittoria Elliott, platforms and power reporter at Wired Magazine. We want to hear from you. What questions do you have about what Doge is doing?

doing? Have any Doge actions affected your life? Give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We've got just a piece of the crack team at Wired Magazine who has been covering Doge and what they're up to, this parallel executive branch, as Victoria Elliott put it, platforms and power reporter at Wired Magazine. We've also got Zoe Schiffer, who oversees coverage of business in Silicon Valley for the magazine, and McKenna Kelly, politics reporter for Wired, who also writes the newsletter on politics there.

I want to get into the phase two that you mentioned, McKenna. But first, Zoe, I wanted you to talk a little bit about what Doge has actually demonstrated that they've done on their sort of nominal task of, quote unquote, rooting out fraud and cutting costs. Like, what have they actually been able to do, given the bar that Elon Musk was setting of cutting, you know, $2 trillion? What?

What have they said they've cut and what can we actually verify that they've cut? Yeah, I mean, this is a confusing question because, as you said, they're nowhere close to their goal of cutting $2 trillion, which I think many people thought was quite ambitious, to say the least. And while they have purportedly been trying to be very transparent, you know, they post their cost savings on X and on Odoge's website.

When those numbers have been scrutinized, they simply haven't held up to the tune of billions and billions of dollars in overstated savings. In some cases, they're saying that they saved $8 billion on a particular contract when the actual number was...

closer to 8 million and maybe not even that because the way that some of these government contracts are set up is that the government can sign a contract and there's a total spend that they could spend, but oftentimes they spend nowhere near that amount and they're not actually committed to spending a single dollar. And so on those points, you know, we're still trying to figure out like what is the real number? But at the same time, they are, you know, undoubtedly canceling contracts. They're pressuring people

in various agencies to really cut costs pretty aggressively. We know that at the GSA, the leadership there has been targeting about 50% cost reductions across the agency. And so we're seeing that play out in a lot of different places. You know, so that has been what has happened so far. McKenna, let's go to the phase two and what you think is happening now.

Yeah. And so over the last 100 days, I guess we can say now, a lot of the headlines were a mix of reductions in force,

but also a ton of reporters, including, you know, my colleagues here, seeing how much access these Doge people were getting to government systems. We've done a lot of reporting on the access that they have to the Treasury, payment system, to data at HHS, DHS, a variety, right, of different agencies with sensitive government information on a ton of folks, not just immigrants, right, but you and me and a lot of people listening to this show right now.

And so now we're starting to see what it is that they can do with that information. Yesterday, one thing that stood out to me was that DOJ released a press release that they had found two Ukrainian nationals who voted in the 2024 election with the help of Doge. Doge was cited there.

But the thing that has, you know, really struck me as the most concerning thing is reporting that I did with Vittoria on immigration data. A couple, I would say a little bit about a month ago, I was hearing from sources at DHS and people close by that for some reason, you know, at DHS, there's a database there within like USCIS and people were talking about

seeing that IRS data, SSA data, Social Security Administration data was being cross-referenced with immigration data. And this is, you know, this is about the time that we start seeing folks, the Trump administration sending immigrants, many of them unlawfully, to El Salvador and Seacott, the prison there. And so there's a lot of

Even if you agree with what the administration is doing in many ways, if you agree politically, there is a risk of surveillance here that is not just immigrants, right? But this is data from SSA, IRS, systems that we interact with all of the time, you know, everyone in this country. And so...

We're seeing this being used in targeted cases in immigration. But, you know, as we're entering this phase two of DOJA, I imagine it will be used, you know, more carte blanche. And just to jump in there, you know, when we talked earlier about DOJA's kind of expanding mandate, part of that comes from this executive order that we talked about to root out fraud, waste and abuse by eliminating data silos. And I just it feels important to say out loud, like,

The idea of eliminating data silos might at first sound like maybe a good idea. That sounds like something that's a little bureaucratic, maybe slows things down. But there's actually a lot of instances where you want data, especially really private, really sensitive health data, biometrics, location, whatever, to be siloed off. You don't necessarily want it to be connected to other databases unless you're trying to do the sorts of things that McKenna was just pointing out, use it to identify people, for example. Yeah.

Yeah, Vittoria, I mean, one of the things that I have been worried about, and granted this might feel like it's a real in-the-weeds kind of inside baseball thing. Every time I run into government data in my reporting career, it has incredibly specific data definitions. It has accreted over time. These are these systems that have been put in place over decades and that actually have turned out to be fairly solid over time in cases of, say, IRS or SSA or whatever it is.

How much do we think they might break accidentally or just by not understanding the definitions of the data that are in these massive data lakes, as they're called? Yeah. So, you know, I think we don't necessarily know right now. The, you know, what we are seeing is that I

I think, you know, what McKenna and my reporting found, R.E., the sort of querying immigration data against a bunch of stuff is, you know, they seemed to be, you know, bringing in state voting data to query against this stuff. So it didn't necessarily seem like they were breaking the system so much as using it in ways that it was maybe not intended to be. Right.

I guess what I'm thinking of is like Musk seems to like kind of habitually misinterpret data that comes – that is output by these systems. Totally. And part of that is just not understanding the policy of the U.S. government. So for instance, like you might have someone who's 120 years old getting social security, but that might be the beneficiary of someone who's died. Exactly. Like there's all these – I think the bigger thing is that like a lot of –

These systems, you know, when you have people coming in from Silicon Valley, I know that every startup likes to say that their market is everyone, but ultimately it's not. You know what I mean? And so when you're thinking about designing a system for startups,

Specific instances. That's very different than having to design a system that literally has to work for every person in the U.S., that has to be able to consider and account for every eventuality. And I think that's like a foundational issue here, too, right, is that they are so complex.

ill-equipped to understand the variety of situations that people needing government services might face, that, you know, a lot of what is streamlining is really removing and stripping the nuance that accounts for that. And, you know, going back to what Zoe said, I don't think there's anyone on any side of the aisle who would be like, oh, yes, government

works absolutely perfectly. I don't think there should be any changes. I, you know, my own grandmother has had to like fight different federal agencies after my grandfather died to get his benefits. It is a pain. And that is so, so, so true. But I think the reality is that

Part of what makes things move slow, as Zoe mentioned, is that these these data are siloed as they're meant to be. But also like part of what makes a system move slow is that you are accounting for all these eventualities and stripping out that nuance might make it work faster, but it leaves a lot of people behind. Well, and even like the reason that your grandmother might have encountered these benefits problems are protections people put in place against fraud.

You know, I mean, some of these guardrails are there for a reason. Well, and I think, you know, a great example of this, for instance, is there's been a lot of discussion of –

replacing the call-in services, the call centers at Social Security with purely online forms. And I don't know about you, but most of the people I know who would be collecting Social Security at this point in time might feel really, really uncertain and unsafe navigating an online platform.

rather than just using the phone to call somebody. And while that online portal might be, quote unquote, more efficient because you don't have to employ as many people, maybe you're not dealing with as large of a workforce. Maybe you have to manage multiple different systems to collect data and input it because it's all coming in through these different sources. Like, yeah, that might not be perfectly efficient for people

the managerial class of the, the social security administration or for, you know, the people on the backend, but it's much more efficient, frankly, for elderly people. And so when we talk about what's efficient, you know, what are we breaking in the name of efficiency? Well, efficient for who?

I mean, there's also this, you know, I'll never forget the show we did here, and we're going to go to calls in a second, but we did show about California unemployment system. You know, somebody said, like, you know, it takes 10 years to become an expert on California unemployment data systems, and it's in part because...

There's just so much cruft that has built up over time, specific situations that have had to be addressed, statutes changed and all these things. And so an individual person needs to kind of patch over those holes with the flexibility that like human brains and experience can bring to something. And I just it doesn't feel like the kind of thing that can be automated. But anyway, let's take Yvette in Berkeley. Welcome, Yvette.

Hi. So we're all taught to guard our data, really, you know, really guard that data. And identity theft is a crime, right? So obvious question. How is it legal for these Doge engineers to grab up all our data? McKenna?

Yeah, so there are a couple of laws that govern how data can be used across government. Specifically, one is called the Privacy Act. And when you talk to a lot of lawyers, folks that we talk to, a lot of this access does seem incredibly illegal. I want to get to the first part of your question, though, which was, you know, we are taught to, you know, really safeguard who has access to the information that we and the data that we have. And

And one of those things in government systems, right, is that there are so many layers of protection ensuring that someone, whether it's a foreign government like the Chinese government or Russia or rogue hackers or someone like that. The scariest thing to me that I start hearing from folks and sources of mine at these government agencies is when we talk about centralizing data, part of that is making that data more portable. Right.

And if data is more portable, then it's a lot easier for a bad actor to come in and take wide swaths of this. We've already seen the Chinese government, or Chinese attackers, I should say, hack into OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, and get tons of data on government workers just about maybe 10 years ago. And that's with all of the layering and siloing that we've had 10 years ago now, right?

when it's maybe a little bit easier and all of this data is readily available to be extracted via an API, if we, you know, I just want to get to the point that you're making that we've been taught to protect our own data. Well,

It doesn't seem like Doge is doing a lot to help us protect it either. And so, right, I think a lot of lawyers right now are saying that this is highly illegal, but we haven't seen any, we haven't seen many decisions, court decisions done on this. Casey over on our Discord is also writing just in support of this point. You know, even if Doge isn't using the data for some nefarious purpose beyond immigration, I'm willing to bet they're submitting it over unsecured servers, putting us at risk of identity theft.

Um...

Let's actually let's do this comment and I'll take this one to you Zoe as someone who's covered Musk for a long time Listener writes Musk is leaving the government because if he is a special government employee for more than 130 days He's barred from negotiating contracts with the government He has sacrificed Tesla But in return he will get the Starlight contracts with the FAA and FCC the next generation Noah and SSA contracts I'm searching but can't find any sympathy for him How much of this?

This is just to enrich Musk personally. How much of a factor do you think that is in all this? You know, I think that the conflicts of interest are definitely an important point and something we need to look at really closely, not just for Elon Musk, but the many, many Doge affiliates who he is bringing into government and inherently are supposed to work there for a short time and then return to the private sector.

I mean, one enormous factor in all of this is the fact that they do have access to all of this data, potentially competitive data, potentially data on whistleblowers. And then they'll return to the companies from which they came. And, you know, we don't have a lot of controls on what could be done with that data. Of course, right now, this is speculative, but I think it's something that we need to look at very, very closely. That said, I do want to complicate this comment just slightly, which is that I think some

saying that Elon Musk is doing this for the money or implying that is actually a vast misunderstanding of his motives. This is someone who seems...

genuinely concerned with the future of humanity, whether you agree with his viewpoint or not. And I think back to this quote from OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who said, Elon Musk desperately wants to save the world, but only if he can be the one to save it. And I think that actually plays a huge part. You know, when you talk to people close to Elon Musk, they will say, look, when he was building Tesla, he had tears in his eyes telling me completely seriously, if Tesla doesn't

succeed, the future of humanity is at stake. So I think he sees the success of his companies as actually crucial to humanity's future. Let's bring in Damien in Santa Rosa. Welcome, Damien. Thanks for taking my call. I'll try and make it quick. I'm a small business owner that's involved in a pandemic era loan program called the EIDL program. Oh, yeah. I've heard lots about it. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, big issue. I could do two hours on that. If you were a part of that program and your business is either closed or you're struggling financially, there's a hardship accommodation plan. And a lot of these loans, especially over $200,000, had a personal guarantee on them, so they're not dischargeable to a business bankruptcy and you'd have to do a Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. So a lot of people, thousands and thousands of borrowers in every single state, are involved in this program, this hardship accommodation program.

And it took a long time to roll out, and the idea was to use it to kick the can down the road and limit people's payments so that they could stay current and not go into the Treasury offset program. This is a loan program run through the SBA. So when the Trump administration came in, Doge came and closed this program down on a Tuesday night without any warning. Oh, wow.

those of us that were negotiating these programs literally woke up called our people back on wednesday given them profit-and-loss statements and they said we're so sorry the program is closed it was eliminated last night at end of day we have no further information it's closed full payments do if you go into default you're going to the treasury off that program they're taking your social security attacks payments everything

The point is that I don't think that the administration actually really knows. I don't think that they hate small business owners. I think they wanted... The rationale I heard was that they eliminated all programs at the SBA that started after the Trump administration, which includes all EIDL programs. So the point is that they just burned down the house and never checked to see who was inside it. And that there's no...

effort being made to mitigate the damage that they're doing and i assume that the next administration will have to come in and clean up the mess they made and one final point on this it was such a hard program it was really not well thought out i very frustrated with the s_b_a_ prior to this but there was an effort being made there was a government effort work

does take a week we figured four or five years we're gonna kick the can down the road we're gonna figure out a program for this and it's all up in the air so it's an easy agency to attack it's an easy program to attack all of us borrowers were unhappy with the job the s_b_a_ was doing but again you know we just wanted a a solution we're willing to work with it this is just carrying the whole thing down and then you know if it's one again the theme of the uncertainty

Nobody knows what to do now. This involves every single state. And I've contacted all of my representatives, including the governor, both of my senators, my congressperson. And there's no oxygen for this because there's so many houses on fire that no one's even willing to take the issue up. Oh, man. Damien, thanks for bringing home some of the impact of these Doge cuts to us here locally. We're talking with reporters from Wired Magazine who've broken some of the biggest stories on what Doge is doing, about what's going on.

Stay tuned for more from McKenna Kelly, Zoe Schiffer, and Vittoria Elliott. Thanks so much for that call, Damian. Hope you get everything sorted out. Alexis Madrigal, stay tuned for another right after this break. Sergeant and Mr. Smith, you're going to love this house. Bunk beds in a closet? There's no field manual for finding the right home. But when you do, USAA homeowners insurance can help protect it the right way. Restrictions apply.

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Through June 23rd, new customers can get 400 megabit Xfinity Internet and get one unlimited mobile line included, all for $40 a month for one year. Visit Xfinity.com to learn more. With paperless billing and auto-pay with store bank account, restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Texas fees extra. After one year, rate increases to $110 a month. After two years, regular rates apply. Actual speeds vary.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking with reporters from Wired Magazine who have broken some of the biggest stories on what Doge is doing over these first hundred days of the Trump administration. Driven by Victoria Elliott, platforms and power reporter at Wired Magazine, Zoe Schiffer, who oversees coverage of business in Silicon Valley, also authored the book Extremely Hardcore inside Elon Musk's Twitter, and McKenna Kelly, who's a politics reporter at Wired.

One of the things that we wanted to get to, and maybe, McKenna, I'll start with you on this. What are some of the possible kind of long-term implications of DOJA's actions? Will this sort of flashing of federal agencies become the norm? Yeah, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot, actually, because we talk about so much of –

And importantly, you know, importantly so, like the drastic effects that this has had on federal workers, on people who require these benefits, whether that's Social Security or something else. But something else that's being imported into Washington right now is an entirely different culture. It is the Silicon Valley culture of like I think Zoe or Victoria at the beginning of this mentioned the move fast, break things. And we're seeing that in government, right?

across agencies with Doge. And I do imagine, right, that going forward, depending on, and of course this depends on whether, you know, whether it's a Republican or a Democratic administration going forward. Or a democracy or a not democracy. Yeah.

Whatever we have going forward, right? Do people think that they can just continue to operate in this way? And I feel like if we have like a J.D. Vance presidency or something like that, we'll see far more of this kind of strike force of engineers at agencies across government. But then, you know, if it's a Democrat or someone else, right, who takes over the administration, the thing that's been toiling in the back of my head right now is that to repair what has been done just in these first 100 days –

will be something almost like the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, I feel like. A digital reconstruction, basically, where people are going to have to rebuild so many of these government systems from the ground up because, A, the institutional knowledge is gone. So many of these people who built these systems and worked there for decades are gone, retired, or forced to leave, or fired.

And you have a bunch of people who don't even understand the coding languages, right, that a lot of these systems are on, whether that's assembly or COBOL and these languages that are, you know, almost, you know, well over 50 years old. And...

I mean, I was hearing from some folks in some feds recently who are still in government who are like talking about we're going to need a Project 2029 for the Democrats come, you know, come the next presidential election. And so I think, you know, this can go many ways, but neither one of them looks all that great or too easy. Right. Yeah.

We've got some wide reporters with us here. They've been breaking stories for the last 100 days on Doge's activities. If you've got questions for him, give us a call, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786, forum at kqed.org. Okay, let's bring in an anonymous caller in San Jose. Welcome. Hi. So, uh...

So I work for, I've been with the federal government as a civilian for five years, so kind of been around. First of all, I do want to go on the record and say that Elon Musk's and Doge's efforts has created more inefficiency and lots of deficiencies from my perspective. I do want to also, like you all made a comment earlier about how there are, sometimes the bureaucracy is too

to ensure that there is a product exactly what's happening i mean there are so many protections in place too to protect against broadway from the beautiful like like when a reporter said uh... where part that uh... i forgot what they're saying they helped uh... but also how old i think uh... yeah but that that i have not been like no i don't think

One of your reporters said that it's not perfect, and I agree with that. However, there is not rampant fraud, waste, and abuse. And I was in the military for 20 years prior to my service in the federal government as a civilian, and there is not rampant fraud, waste, and abuse like people are saying in the news because I don't see it.

And I would attest to that. I mean, I've seen some minor things, but nothing that needs to be fixed, but not to the degree they're talking about. Not at all. Hey, thanks so much for providing that insight.

that perspective, someone inside the government. There was another question somewhat related to this, and it was one of our listeners wrote in to say, "To what extent is the Doge model of hubristic slash and burn spreading to state and local governments as well?" Zoe, have you done any reporting on this, or has the magazine?

Well, you know, I'll leave it to McKenna and Vittoria to talk about how this is playing out at the state level. But I will just say that like the changing of norms is incredibly important and real. It was in Silicon Valley. When we look at how Elon Musk radically changed the culture when he bought and took over Twitter, he, you know, gave other companies license to eliminate a lot of the

content moderation efforts that they'd been doing. They started releasing fewer transparency reports, or the transparency reports that they released were less transparent than they had been previously. These are things that we kind of need the norms in place so that companies at least will act beyond their own self-interest at times, will do something for the public good. And when that incentive goes away, you see them retreating and making decisions purely for their bottom line.

which again is somewhat typical for companies. But yeah, I think, you know, these norms are important to us and when they change, it can have really drastic effects. Yeah.

Russ writes in to say, "I covered Elon Musk for many years at the LA Times. I know him well enough to believe he would siphon data into his own servers for reasons that range from AI training to blackmail and put in back doors so we can keep the flow coming as long as possible. The idea that Elon Musk is concerned about the fate of humanity is and has always been a self-created fiction that serves to distract from his malfeasance and any fraud he might commit." You want to respond to that, Tori?

Well, I mean, I will say on a very personal level, I think a big part of caring about humanity is caring about humans. And that, you know, part of what the government is meant to do is to understand that not everything is a market gap.

you know, part of the business sort of mindset is this idea that you're building for a market gap. You're building for something that people are willing to pay for, but they just don't have access to yet.

And that is not the purpose of government. And I think one of the ways in which Doge has really, and Musk as well, has sort of really framed the narrative on this is using that sort of language of business around efficiency, around making the government profitable or making it, you know, in some capacity like profitable.

should be running cheaper with less. And the reality is that part of the reason the government has so much of this information, part of the reason that it needs it is because it's running public services. These are not market gaps. These are not... And I think that when we go back to that conversation about destruction,

You know, when you're serving over 300 million people and if you accidentally mess something up in a system, even if your failure rate or your mess up rate is 1%, that's 3 million people. If we're talking about the sort of mass immigration database that McKenna and I were talking that we're reporting about, you know, even a small percentage of mistakes are made.

vast amount of human suffering, much larger than you might get with any particular company. And, you know, to Musk's claim that, you know, or that he sort of had that the success of his companies are really tied to the future of humanity. I think that there is a really valuable question to be asked around the kind of, um,

you know, carelessness that I think a lot of federal workers have experienced in interacting with Musk and Doge, and also the carelessness with which they have, you know, interpreted some of these systems and the people impacted by them. And I think that alone can sort of open up some questions about

What exactly the value to humanity is being brought through Doge's efforts. Anybody else want to chip in on that before we move on?

Yeah, I mean, I will just say that I don't think these two ideas are so at odds in reality. Like, I think if you take seriously the idea that at least Elon Musk believes he is central to the future of humanity, which in talking to many, many people who are very, very close with him, that is genuinely what he believes. Well, then what wouldn't you do to ensure that your companies could succeed? Yeah.

I think that potentials for fraud and abuse are things that should be looked at very, very closely. But I think the principle with which this person is operating is one that gives him enormous energy and righteousness to his cause. And because of that, I think it is worth looking at seriously, even if you completely disagree with the assessment. Yeah.

Tony on Discord writes, Claiming Doge is about efficiency is so infuriating they destroyed the original USDS and 18F. That was another governmental agency which helped create so many useful government services from login.gov, online passport renewals to IRS direct files. Losing these orgs reduces government efficiency. Let's bring in Paul in Mill Valley. Welcome, Paul. Thank you for taking my call. You could have a multi-part.

segment on this, and I really appreciate what the reporters are saying. I think it's important to note that journalism itself is among the sectors that is under attack or being challenged by this sort of chainsaw effect. And I'm going to use that metaphor because the famous picture of Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Committee is a really good metaphor because that chainsaw was given to him by the president of Argentina.

I work for a nonprofit organization that basically resources and represents humanitarian, peace-building, and human rights organizations worldwide. So you asked at the beginning of the show, Alexis, to talk to people who have been directly impacted. I'm on calls daily with people who've not only lost their jobs, but their programs to feed and clothe and provide medicine to people are shut down. And there was a gentleman from Argentina at a conference I was at recently who

who said, and this really struck me, there are programs in villages in his country that were funded by AID to literally pick up the trash. And the trash is not being picked up, and they are seeing diseases they have not seen in 20 years because of this. So talk about the links in the chain. And that chainsaw was given to Musk by, guess who, the president of Argentina, because he's in this sort of authoritarian position.

Machismo cabal. So that's just the vignette I'm sharing. I also worked in the federal government many years ago on nuclear weapons issues. So this NNSA, the National Nuclear Security Administration, these sort of ham-handed entries into databases on things like nuclear weapons should give everyone pause. They are literally taking a chainsaw to do an appendectomy.

So I'll leave it there. Paul, appreciate that call and you sharing that info with us. But again, I mean, the Argentina connection has always been kind of interesting and a little bit strange. But it does seem like it did have a quite direct effect on Elon Musk's approach to cutting in the government in this way. Yeah.

I think you're right. To get to, I think it was Paul, right? Yes.

was completely gutted, was that there are programs within the CDC that are similar to what Paul was talking about in Argentina, where you just pick up the trash. One that horrified me as someone who's claustrophobic is that

At the CDC, there was a program for getting rid of ensuring that like cruise liners, right, are clean and don't become just floating piles of garbage and dumpsters on the ocean.

just imagining now, right? There's, this is, we're about to get into summertime. People are going to start vacationing. What happens now? Um, what does that look like now? What are these, what, how, at what point, right? Are we going to start seeing these cuts just affecting the way that we engage in our normal lives? And, um, I do imagine that we will see more of that if, um,

If things aren't fixed within the next couple of weeks. So it does seem like there has been there's lag built into so many of these things, right? Whether it's cuts at Doge, whether it's tariffs, whether it's all these different things that are going on, you know, we hear about the decision or you all report what's happening and then, you know, you actually see it.

show up weeks later, you know. So what do you want your team to go report on now, Zoe, that you feel like is sort of where the puck is going, where people should direct their attention going forward? Well, I just want to say one thing before I get to that question, which is I actually think that lag that you're talking about is incredibly important because

One thing that people who disagree with our reporting, who really like what Elon Musk is doing, will point to is his success in the private sector. But we have to point out that that is an area where the feedback loop from action to consequence of said action is very small.

The government has a really, really long feedback loop. And we don't have a clear understanding of what is going to happen when we have someone who's making these decisions very, very quickly and actually not hearing about them in the timeframe that they are at all used to, if they will even be able to pay attention to those impacts. And so I think...

Right now at Wired Magazine, we're definitely shifting from kind of like a rapid fire of reporting on every iterative scoop, everything that was happening at the federal government with Doge to like what is the impact of those decisions? And so what's the impact on small businesses, on consumers, on everyday people? That's really the focus right now. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, one of those, for example, Victoria, I'll throw this to you. Sue writes, so many people have quit or been laid off that the immigration department is a mess. They're trying to hire more to replace, but these new hires are totally inexperienced and immigration law is complex. I mean, maybe just one of the small ways that things have been disrupted.

Well, yeah. And like as McKenna said earlier, you know, the institutional knowledge and loss of expertise is going to be profound, I think. And, you know, I think one of the things to sort of circle back to the point about Argentina, because I've been particularly fascinated by the foreign leaders that seem to be really informing the vision for the Trump administration and for the Silicon Valley supporters.

including Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Millay in Argentina, you know, one of the policies that Millay instituted was cutting back almost all the country's social programs and its poverty rates skyrocketed overnight.

And, you know, I think that really what we're seeing in terms of both the loss of expertise into these jobs is that there's also, I think, concerns about whether or not the private sector has the ability to absorb all of these people. You know, when people are in government, they really do develop a very specific understanding about regulation, about how procedures work or, you know, as McKenna noted, specific standards.

systems like COBOL that aren't really used outside of the government. And, you know, translating that into the private sector, especially if they're deregulating to the point where maybe you won't need the expertise of someone who worked in the government, is a real concern. And it is a true waste of the training and understanding that a lot of these people have. And to McKenna's point, I think it will take years and years and years to build back. Yeah.

We've been talking with reporters from Wired Magazine. They've broken some of the biggest stories on what Doge is doing, what's going on and why. Been joined by Victoria Elliott, platforms and power reporter at Wired. Thanks, Victoria. Thank you so much. Also been joined by Zoe Schiffer, director of business and industry. She oversees coverage of the Valley for the magazine. Thank you, Zoe.

Thanks so much for having me. Check out her book, too, Extremely Hardcore, inside Elon Musk's Twitter. And we've got McKenna Kelly, politics reporter at Wired. Thank you, McKenna. Thanks for letting me be here. Thank you. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with guest host Leslie McClurg.

I just think Jesus was what we would now define as Christ.

We're not physically close and we're not like that emotionally close either. So join me and some amigas as we have easy conversations about hard things. Catch Hyphenation from KQED Studios wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning fast speeds at home and on the go. That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together. Yeah!

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