Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.
- At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.
- At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.
- At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)
I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing frustrated civil servants, whose remarks typically rotate through panic, rage and black humor. Almost none are willing to speak on the record because of concerns about purges by the U.S. DOGE Service. But their themes are easy to corroborate: Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their
actual duties.
For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”
What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.
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