DOGE may be gone, but the damage continues.

In yesterday’s piece, Paul Krugman writes about the lingering catastrophic effects of Elon Musk’s DOGE. According to one recent study, the shut-down of USAID caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children. After hundreds of staffers were summarily fired from the NNSA, the agency that protects America’s nuclear weapons, Musk and his team scrambled to hire them back after realizing what they’d done. Thousands of dedicated federal employees were pushed out, taking their expertise and institutional knowledge with them. Qualified employees will be much harder to recruit in the future.

Against all norms and laws, DOGE proceeded to consolidate the databases of many government agencies, including the IRS, into a single database of sensitive data on Americans. We don’t know for sure what they are doing with it, but we do know that the Trump administration has brought charges of mortgage fraud against a Federal Reserve governor, a New York attorney general, and a California Senator, all of whom have vigorously opposed Trump policies. Krugman argues that the abuses will remain until and unless Democrats make sure that the abusers pay a steep price.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/doge-was-a-harbinger-of-trumps-assault