What Does the DOGE Folly Accomplish?

"Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes. -- "Ellsworth Toohey" in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

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From Question 4 of a recent Q&A at Ask a Manager comes the following revelation about how Trump's DOGE firings are being done:

I was just fired by DOGE. I was not a probationary employee, and there is reason to believe the firing was due to political considerations and therefore illegal. I've been told that I may be a strong lead plaintiff for one of the class-action lawsuits that are being teed up...

In her reply, Alison Green adds:

... Probationary employees in the federal government are being fired and are having it documented as being for "performance reasons" even when they've had glowing performance reviews and even when their managers oppose the firing. A slew of letters doing this to people went out on Saturday night (of all times). This is not only profoundly shitty from a human standpoint -- being told you're being fired for performance when your work has been good -- but it will have practical ramifications too, since if they apply for another federal job in the future, this will come up during the background check.

This comports with Yaron Brook's recent commentary about the DOGE firings:

[T]he goal of DOGE in my view is twofold: one to distract from the fact that the real [reform] is not happening; two and maybe more importantly what DOGE is really doing ... is it is cleansing government from political opposition.

The former is plainly evident to anyone looking at the federal budget, whose largest components are entitlements Trump refuses to even entertain cutting; and the latter is certainly the result, given that any probationary employee will have been hired by the Biden Administration.

(I seem to recall, but haven't time to check that this is a strategy recommended by Project 2025 as a way for the Republicans to begin taking over the federal bureaucracy by speeding up the replacement of career bureaucrats with "our guys." Taking over something that should be phased out and abolished is worse than doing nothing.)

As I have noted already, even if DOGE isn't (or weren't) about taking over the leviathan state (as opposed to ending it), it is gimmicky in the most generous interpretation and will not succeed at all in retrenching government to its proper scope. If anything, it may well cost more than any marginal savings it realizes and will add a nasty cast to the futility it will already impute to the whole enterprise of government reform.

-- CAV