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DOGE's "Efficiency" Theater: Wasted $21.7B While Destroying Life-Saving Programs


We’ve talked plenty about how Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals…

In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April. He takes a generous view of the U.S. motivation: “I still believe that someone didn’t do due diligence and just terminated us.” Nuha Ceesay, Eswatini country director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has a harsher assessment. The only thing it efficiently accomplished was proving that putting conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of life-and-death decisions with no oversight, guardrails, or expertise is a recipe for disaster on an unprecedented scale.

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