If anyone thinks the DOGE mission is faltering, the answer is simple: it's not.
Everyone I've worked with in a DOGE context is grinding long hours, staying locked in on the mission.
I don't see Elon stepping back as abandonment. I see it as a vote of confidence in the wrecking ball he's left in place. The right people are finally in place.
I recently visited a federal office outfitted with brand-new hardware and a state-of-the-art security system including X-Ray and metal screening, likely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. The office averaged maybe five visitors a day and was located inside a building with its own private security.
And yet, the machines that actually performed the work- laptops and scanners - were over 15 years old. Presumably, that was the only way to run the outdated software.
When my appointment time arrived, the backend database crashed. All appointments were cancelled. "Come back tomorrow," they said. "The system should restart overnight." Not kidding, that's what actually happened.
The federal government needs thousands of people and contractors to do the work of twenty. There's no elegant way to untangle that. We had decades to fix it. In the private sector, this would've been corrected with layoffs. Instead, we chose to deficit spend and keep the machine humming.
Now, there's no option left but a wrecking ball. This isn't a hypothetical. This isn't a time to clutch pearls over "but DOGE is causing too much thrash." This is the only way DOGE could ever operate, because the federal government is just that big of a mess and it's going to take our children's future if we let the status quo continue.