We all seemed to breathe a sigh of relief two weeks ago when it was reported the “Chainsaw” Musk’s DOGE and the DOGEbags had ceased operating inside our national government.
It was a lie.
Mike Masnick posted on TechDirt, Dec 3rd 2025, Forget Whether Or Not DOGE Exists: Will Anyone Be Held Accountable For 600,000 Deaths? [via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2025].
...The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story….
“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.
And, as Wired rightly notes, the DOGE bros are now fully embedded throughout the federal government.
“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
But Masnick does something even more important — he points to the awful death count Musk and DOGE have racked up — and asks if there will ever be an accounting.
The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system….
Masnick quotes from a recent interview of Musk by someone from The Daily Beast, in which Musk dismissed the question of the deaths he has caused by making, once again, the false claim of fraud,
“Fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They’re not going to say, ‘Give us the money for fraud,’” Musk said. “They’re going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false.
“It’s going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn’t want to save the baby pandas? They’re adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing, it’s just corruption, essentially.
Just like when Musk loudly proclaimed he and DOGE had found massive fraud in the Social Security system after they misinterpreted a half a century old COBOL computer coded programs and concluded incorrectly that 150-year old people were being given Social Security payments. It was another lie.
Masnick continues:
This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.
[These are] programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon….
The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.
So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build….
And there will be hundreds of thousands more deaths caused by the defunding and dismantling of medical research programs formerly funded by the National Institutes of Health, and other now broken agencies and departments of our national government. But unlike the programs Mesnick discusses, we will never know what the true cost in lives are.
