Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. So maybe you have heard a little bit
about how all of these Doge employees have quit. They
are not working for Musk's farm no more. Right, Well,
let me give you some of the background here. And
to its credit, the Associated Press does mention what I
think is the most important piece of information. But it
is then kind of comical how the AP disregard that
and contradicts itself in its own article. This is why,
for example, groundnews dot com if you've never used ground News,
they measure the bias of not stories, but of the
publications or outlets, and AP falls on the left side,
which is accurate. So Federal Technology this is the headline
Federal Technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and Doge
story by two individuals, Brian slut Satsco slid Disco Slow
Disco and Byron Tao. Quote. More than twenty civil service
employees resigned Tuesday. You notice they never call them bureaucrats.
They never call them government workers here. It's always civil
service or public servants. Nonpartisan what do they call them?
At one point in this article they call them nonpartisan employees.
They're always carrying the water for the Democrat narrative, you know,
defending all of these government workers. More than twenty civil
service employees resigned yesterday from billionaire Trump advisor. That's the
way you always have to refer to Elon Musk. By
the way, is billionaire Trump advisor or billionaire South African
Trump advisor even though he's an American citizen has been
for a while. But they have resigned from Musk's Department
of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their
technical expertise to quote dismantle critical public services. So that's
how they saw their job under Musk and with the
DOGE people that they have to that they're being called
upon to dismantle critical public services. We swore to serve
the American people, end uphold our oath to the Constitution, which,
by the way, upholding your oath to the Constitution is
not the same as dismantling critical public services, right, They're
not the same thing. In fact, sometimes they could very
well be at odds. And also your idea of what
is quote critical may not be my idea of what
is critical. But look, you feel strongly enough about protecting
the you know, the Guatemalan sex changes, and so you
don't want to help DOGE anymore. Fine, there's the door.
Take it easy. You probably should have taken that severance
deal when it was offered, could have been paid out
through the rest of the year or whatever. But that's fine. Bye. Like,
if you don't feel like you can help with the
mission to save the country from bankruptcy, fine, I don't
want you here either. And you know what, now the
slot is open for somebody who is aligned for the mission.
I look at this as a good thing. I'm happy
that you are leaving. You can write whatever you want
to write. I don't care. It doesn't matter. You're gone,
You're you're out the door, so they say, twenty one
staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter. Although I think
they are anonymous at this point, and the AP is
protecting their anonymity. They did get a copy of the letter.
They say, it has become clear that we can no
longer honor those commitments that they swore to upholl, so
they're out, okay. The employees also warned that many of
those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size
of the federal government under President Donald Trump's administration were
political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or
experience for the task ahead of them. So that's why
we're leaving them all alone to do whatever they want
this okay. So you got a bunch of people that
don't know what they're doing, and your response is to
give them more control to protect the critical public services.
Have you guys thought this through? Rather than be there
to help explain to them, hey, you probably don't want
to cut this. Cutting this or doing that is going
to have this impact or that impact, and so you
shouldn't do this or that. But rather than be there
and help to guide the doge people that you say
are ideologues and don't know what they're doing, your response
is to walk away. I'm not so sure that's true.
I don't have any doubt that some of the people
that are doing work for DOGE or ideologues. Don't get
me wrong, they have political beliefs. They are in there
on a mission. Their mission you call it ideology, I
would call it, you know, economic literacy. They're trying to
find cuts. They're looking for waste, fraud and abuse. Things
that they may think are waste or fraud may not be.
That's why you being there might actually help inform them
that no, no, no, that's it looks like this, but
it's not whatever. But I suspect that the answers you
are giving them are not adequate and they are not
explaining sufficiently why the money is being spent. And that's
where you're running into problems, is that you're just defending
every single thing and you are against their efforts to
find the waste, fraud and abuse. That's my suspicion. I
don't know that to be true, and there are twenty
one different people, so I don't know what all of
their experiences and philosophies are, but I would say that's
probably a part of it, at least for some of
the twenty one The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists
designers and product managers. Is a as the AP calls
it here, a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican
presidents tech driven purge of the federal workforce? Is it, though?
Is it a temporary setback if they're trying to get
rid of personnel A bunch of personnel getting rid of
themselves doesn't seem like a setback at all. It sounds
like it's actually in line with what they're trying to do. Also,
as I mentioned, it frees up the slot for somebody
that is willing to come in and help them right
the ship, help them do the mission. The AP continues,
it comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have
sought to stall, stop, or unwind their efforts to fire
or coerce thousand of government workers out of jobs. Huh
So is it possible that this might be in one
of the motivations They feel like, well, if we all
quit it once, it'll bog down Doge and they won't
be able to keep doing what they're doing. Right, So,
there's a there's a political strategy here too, right by
the nonpartisan employees that there is a Yeah, there's a
political tactic being employed Musk posted on his social media
website Twitter formerly known as X that the story was
quote fake news, and suggested that the staffers were quote
dem political holdovers and they should have been fired had
they not or would have been fired had they not resigned. Right,
How could he say this? How is this possible? It's Doge?
Where did all these staffers for DOGE come from? Aren't
these musketeers? Aren't they the people Elon brought in himself?
Why would he call them demn political holdovers? Well, it
could be that these were people that were brought in
to fix the Obamacare website, and they say they were
motivated to do so as a public service. I have
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So here's the key about the twenty one staffers that
quit DOGE. That Doge wasn't Doge until about a minute ago.
It was called the United States Digital Service. Now, if
you listen to this program. You know that because I
have pointed this out from the inception when people are like,
it's not even a government agency, or he needs to
be appointed and confirmed by the Senate, right like Elon Musk. Right,
We've heard all of these. Whatever argument they can make
to try to slow this thing down, that's all they're
trying to do. See, I'm old enough to remember, and
this is going back a while. When a president won,
it was understood that he had a mandate from the
population to do things that he had campaigned on. Seriously,
lawmakers recognized, bureaucrats recognized that the expression of the people's
will through the elect through the election of a president,
meant that that president had a mandate from the people,
and that you govern based on the mandate of the people.
Because if you cross the people, then you are destabilizing
the society, the society that is built on having an
elected representative government. And so when you have somebody that
says I'm going to drain the swamp, I'm going to
shrink the federal government, and that person wins and they
get into office then and they start doing what they
promise to do. I'm not saying you roll over and
you know, just allow him to do whatever he wants.
I'm not saying that. I am saying you don't gum
up the works and try to slow all of the
progress down so that person then cannot enact the will
of the people, because what you're doing is you're thwarting
the will of the people. That's not dare I call
it democracy? Right? You guys have been saying it dies
in darkness and all that, So this is it in light.
We are all seeing what people voted for. So the
staffers who resigned from what is now called DOGE, we're
actually employees of the USDs, the United States Digital Service,
but their duties were being integrated into DOGE because they
had been that department that the USDs had been created
a decade ago. And so when DOGE gets in there,
they're like, okay, well, why don't we just rename the USDs.
We'll come into that, integrate them into us and we
don't need to create a new government department. Because remember
that was the criticism too. They're like, oh, you're shrinking
government by creating a new department of Government efficiency. Hahaha. Well,
actually they didn't create a new department. They took over
one and renamed it, and the people that were there
got into that agency. They went to work for the
USDs because of a political motivation to do so. It
was established under President Barack Obama after the botched rollout
of Healthcare dot Gov. I remember this because I was
touting that I had a website that actually worked. They
did not. Their website was so terrible, and they had
so much time to create a website to roll out
healthcare dot gov. It was so bad. They created. Obama
created this whole entity in order to fix the problem.
Healthcare dot gov, the web portal that millions of Americans
now use but couldn't at first to sign up for
insurance plan through the Democrats signature healthcare law. So these
were people who took the job over there at the
USDs to help implement Obamacare. Do you think that they
have a particular political leaning. I do. I think it's
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just in from Matt what is his name? Blackwell? Matt Blackwell,
Associate professor at Harvard, political scientist researching statistical methodology and
US politics. He his that's in his Twitter profile people.
He says, I completely missed that Republicans introduced a bill
to increase the endowment tax from one point four percent
to twenty one percent if past Harvard would go from
paying about thirty five million dollars in federal taxes per
year to five hundred twenty five million dollars, which he
says is eight point two percent of its current operating expense.
And Will Upton, who is the political editor at The
National Pulse, former US Treasury Public Affairs official and former
Trump administration alumni, he says, Oh, look, we finally found
a billion dollar hedge fund that the Libs do not
want taxed. Look at that, Yeah, tax the endowments. I
got a message here from tim Oteo who says, I
recall interviews with North Vietnamese after the Vietnam War. The
overwhelming strength of the US should have so demoralized the
North Vietnamese that they should have given up, But they didn't.
The Vietnamese said that each time they saw Americans protesting
the war, that bolstered their resolve, and they knew they
just needed to hold out a little longer. Today's Democrats,
by constantly attacking every aspect of the Trump administration, are
working against the US by showing our nation's enemies that
they just need to hold out a little longer. Right, Well,
we saw a good example of this is the Hamas Hollies,
right they you know, they just keep churning out the propaganda,
at least they did under the Biden administration, right knowing
that as long as they had a receptive audience on
the left in Western societies, that the left would pressure
Israel to a ceasefire, and so they would not negotiate
on anything. And then along comes Trump after his win,
and all of a sudden, it's like, okay, well let's yeah,
well we'll we'll start doing some stuff. I remember seeing
this stuff about Vietnam also the tet Offensive, if I
recall correctly, it's like the viet Cong general or something
that was in charge of that, and it was considered
to be a colossal disaster for the viet Cong and
he was ready to resign his post and all of
this in disgrace. And then they saw the coverage and
the way it was being reported, how it was an
American disaster, and so he stayed on, and they're like,
we can hold out a little bit longer. That's what
I remember reading. It's been a while. I wasn't planning
on talking about it. I would have pulled the I
would have pulled the actual info, but that's what I
remember of that story too. So you've got twenty one
people that were employed at the United States Digital Service, Okay,
the USDs, which was created to fix the Obamacare website
ten years ago. All of the people that quit the USDs,
which was then renamed DOGE. Right, that's why they didn't
create a brand new department. They just took over the USDs,
renamed it, rebranded it, and changed its focus. And now
twenty one people quit yesterday anonymously wrote a letter together
and handed it off to the Associated Press, who reports it.
And this is supposed to be a setback for Elon Musk,
who is trying to get people to leave the federal workforce.
So I'm not really sure why that's a setback. But
the AP then says, all previously, all of these people,
the twenty one all previously held senior roles at such
tech companies as Google and Amazon, and they wrote in
their resignation letter here it is that they joined the
government out of a sense of duty to public service,
which is precisely what the current DOGE employees are doing now.
By the way, the AP doesn't point that out, but
that's what these guys are doing too. You accuse them
of being ideologues, but they're going in there to do
a thing because they think this is the right thing
to do. You may disagree, but they're motivated by the
exact same thing you were motivated by. But they're bad.
Their motives are to be assumed the worst, but yours
are pure. Trump's empowerment of Musk upended all of that.
The day after Trump's inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were
called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive
and disruptive work of Musk's doge. According to the staffers,
people wearing White House Visitors badges, some of whom would
not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their
qualifications and their politics. Wait a minute, their non partisan employees.
So every single one of the twenty one people came
from Tech Right, went to work to help fix the
Obamacare website a decade ago, and then just stayed. And
you're calling them all nonpartisan. The thing that motivated them
to show up and help was partisan. Obamacare was forced
through in a partisan way. It was a partisan fight.
Republicans opposed it, Democrats forced it through via reconciliation. Remember
that they bribed a bunch of US senators Democrats in
red states basically or purple states. Remember the Cornhusker kickback,
the Louisiana purchase. Right, there were all these enticements inducements
to get Democrats to sign on to it so they
could ram it through. And then after like a year
that you had to build a website, you didn't build one.
You didn't build one that function correctly. The whole thing collapsed.
And then you guys are like, I'm going to join
public service to help in this noble endeavor. And I'm
supposed to believe that your nonpartisan. That's crap. That is
absolute crap. So kudos to you for quitting happy trails.
I'm sure you will end up in some Silicon Valley position.
You guys lined up all of your exit strategies. Fine, good,
get out, Happy to see you go. And no, I
don't believe you were nonpartisan. And yes, I do understand
why the DOGE employees coming in would ask you about
your politics, because I have a pretty good idea what
your politics are, and I have a pretty good idea
that you would try to stymy their efforts to save
taxpayer funds, which is actually a pretty embarrassing and shameful
thing for you guys, not dog all right, if you're
listening to this show, you know I try to keep
up with all sorts of current events, and I know
you do too. And you've probably heard me say get
your news from multiple sources. Why well, because it's how
you detect media bias, which is why I've been so
impressed with ground News. It's an app, and it's a website,
and it combines news from around the world in one
place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You
can check it out at check dot ground, dot news,
slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too.
I started using ground News a few months ago and
more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate
because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered
and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which
stories get ignored by the left and the right. See
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I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to
every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast,
but it also supports ground News as they make the
media landscape more transparent. The Associated Press article that I'm
reading from, by the way, headlined federal technology staffers resign
rather than help Musk and DOGE, and that is accurate,
and that right there tells you the reason why they
are doing it. They do not want to help Elon
Musk or the Department of Government Efficiency with the mission.
They do not want to help DOGE find waste, fraud
and abuse. And that to me is indicative of a
political ideology. So while the AP will quote the twenty
one anonymous people from their letter of resignation saying, oh,
they're just ideologues, those DOGE do but they too are
ideologues because only left wing ideologues will be opposed to
finding waste, fraud and abuse. That's what has been the
most baffling thing in all of this is that Democrats
who claim to want to fund all of the programs
and services to help all of the people that need
all of the help, they don't want to find any
of the waste, fraud and abuse that diverts the money
away from helping all of the people with all of
the services. Every dollar that is lost to waste is
a dollar that did not go to the people that
you claim to want to help. So when you try
to stemy these efforts, be it through legislation, lawfare, or
a mass resignation out of the US Digital Service or
DOGE now under the rebrand, right, then it tells me
what your ideology is and that you are not actually
trying to help the people that you claim you're trying
to help. You're trying to help somebody else. According to
the AP quote, these highly skilled civil servants, we're working
to modernize social security, veteran services, tax filing, healthcare, disaster relief,
student aid, and other critical services. That's according to the
resignation letter, they removal endangers millions of Americans who rely
on these services every day. The sudden loss of their
technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans data less safe. So,
in other words, they have jeopardized Americans data, They have
jeopardized the critical systems right by all walking out at
the same time, they are putting in jeopardy these things, right, Yeah,
we will not use our skills as technologists to compro
core government systems, jeopardize American sensitive data, or dismantle critical
public services. They wrote, we will not lend our expertise
to carry out or legitimize Doge's actions. So rather than
trying to work with the Doge dudes, they're opting to
try to gum up the works or to slow it down.
Of the forty people, Now, by the way, there were
forty other people that were let go earlier this month,
but only one of them was an engineer. That engineer's
name was Jonathan Kmen's or Kemmen's kam ns commends, and
he is described by the AP fussly an outspoken and
politically active staffer. Hang on, say, I thought you said
these were all nonpartisan employees, right, These were noble angels
providing civil service. They had joined to try to give
back to serve the public. Right, Yet the engineer guy
was outspoken and politically active. A staffer who said in
an interview with AP that he believes he was fired
for publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris on his personal blog.
Oh and also being critical of Elon Musk. And he
did that in chats with colleagues, so probably on government service. Like, yeah, dude,
you're not behaving in a nonpartisan way. People have lost
all sense of appropriateness. This is across the board everywhere. Right,
people behaving in inappropriate ways at work. I'm just breaking
the rules. Oh, I don't really care about this. And
they have been in power in large part by not
just a permission, a permission structure that allows people to
do this stuff with a wink and a nod, but
also with outright protections. Right. I went over the story
yesterday about the NSA sex chat group where people in
the intelligence community are talking in graphic detail about their
kinks and fetishes on the intranet inside the intelligence agencies.
What are you doing? Who does that? Well, apparently it
was permitted because it was all LGBTQ plus two I
A s L Right, it was part of it was
part of the DEI efforts, And so you have to
protect this kind of conversation because you know, privilege or something.
So they got special benefits because I mean, like people,
it would be frowned upon if you were talking this
way about any other type of you know, personal sexual
relationships you were having. But these people are allowed to
talk about it on the internal intranet and they feel
like they're entitled to do so. It's really amazing. And
the same thing here, like you're in group chats with
colleagues and you're ranting about politics. You shouldn't be doing that.
You shouldn't be doing that, particularly when you work in
a government agency that you're supposed to not be doing
that particular thing at all at all. So yeah, I'm
glad they're gone, and maybe we can fill those positions
with some people that are actually on the same mission
as the doge dudes. All right, that'll do it for
this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could
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thank you so much for listening, and uh, don't break
anything while I'm gone.