The long arm of DOGE

MP 135: They're focused on .gov right now, but I'm pretty sure they're coming for all of us.

I can't believe I have to use the name DOGE seriously. When I first heard a new government organization would be formed with that name, I had some small hope that people would see the mockery that's being made of the US government. But we're well past that point now, and we have to deal with DOGE and the wrecking ball that it is.

For now, DOGE is focusing on government agencies, and perhaps most visibly in the tech world on .gov sites. But I see no reason to think they'll stop there once they've worked through all the major federal agencies. Where will they go next? And what might you do now if you had the answer to that question? With the prevalence of US resources in the tech world, I think these questions are relevant to many people outside the US as well.

The DOGE wrecking ball is real

I've been a US citizen all my life. I have friends and acquaintances in all kinds of professions, in government and non-government roles. I don't have to rely on any news site to see that the damage DOGE is doing is real. They're cutting agencies, programs, and jobs quickly and decisively. I, along with many others, would argue that most of these cuts aren't entirely legal. It's important to challenge what they're doing legally, but those legal challenges will probably take long enough to play out that the damage they want to do will already have been done. It's much easier to smash something than it is to build or rebuild something, and that's even more true when the things you smash involve large numbers of people, and coordination and trust between many different players and governments.

In a draft of this post I wrote the following:

Many supporters of the new administration are only being shown "savings" and "newly-discovered fraud and waste". They're not being shown the deeper stories behind these agencies and projects, that demonstrate how many of them are pretty much the opposite of "fraud and waste". They're not being shown the lives being impacted by suddenly pulling the plug on national- and global-scale projects. They're not being shown how the people doing the plug-pulling are benefiting from having those plugs pulled.

Then I went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) home page, and saw this:

It's a coincidence, but they literally have an image of a plug pulled from a socket on the CFPB home page. If you're under any illusion that DOGE is "just rooting out waste", this is a perfect example to focus on. The CFPB is one of the clearest lines against fraud in the US. If you're a victim of fraud and your bank, credit card company, or insurance company isn't doing what they're legally supposed to in order to help protect you, the CFPB is famous for getting them to follow the law, and quickly. The only clear reason to pull the plug on this agency is if you don't want consumers to have protections against fraud.

This is happening all over the federal government. Everything I'm seeing across a range of news sources matches what I'm hearing from friends and peers, and what I'm seeing from the personal social network I've built up over two decades across a wide range of platforms.

What am I losing?

One project I expect to be impacted focuses on monitoring landslide risk in real time in southeast Alaska. I gave a talk about this project at PyCon US last year. This project depends entirely on 15-minute river data that's collected and posted through the USGS. The project also depends on other federal agencies like NOAA.

I'll keep this project going as long as I can. But I'm not going to be surprised in the least if the people who are paid to maintain river gauges and other essential monitoring equipment are told to go home, and not come back. I expect this to happen because of the indiscriminate cuts that are being made across entire agencies, and because the current administration has such a strong stance against anything related to climate science.

What's after .gov?

So where will DOGE turn its attention when they've finished squashing government agencies into whatever aligns with their vision? I'm guessing they'll turn their attention to private companies.

What happens if DOGE shows up at GitHub's doors, and demands access to their systems? What happens if they tell GitHub to scan all repositories and delete every repository containing one or more of the words they don't like? GitHub should refuse, but there's no reason at the moment to think that DOGE will have to walk away. If they do walk away, it's hard to imagine them not returning a short while later with the force and backing necessary to gain the access they want. And it's not just GitHub; any company within US jurisdictions is facing this possibility.

What do we do?

I wish I had a clearer answer to this question. But there are a few things that seem like a good idea at the moment:

Make local backups of all datasets you care about.

I'm going to try make a backup of all the historical river gage data for the landslide monitoring project. I've always been able to reach out to USGS staff with questions about their data, and they've even adjusted the data reporting timeframes to suit the needs of this monitoring project. If those people are gone, we'll almost certainly lose the real-time data, and have no way of recovering the long-term historical data set.

Make local backups of your GitHub repositories. Make a plan to do that periodically.

Like many readers, I have a lot of work over a span of many years hosted on GitHub. Most of that work is on my local system as well, but not all of it. I've made backups of my GitHub repositories in the past, but I haven't been disciplined enough to do so on a regular basis. I'm planning to do that much more regularly from now on.

Be vocal about the impacts you're seeing.

Again, many people are only seeing messages that DOGE is "rooting out waste". People who are only seeing this kind of message, and haven't been impacted personally yet, have a hard time accurately assessing what's going on. If you've been impacted directly, please share what you're seeing and how it affects you. People need to know, sooner rather than later.

Refuse to help implement damaging policies.

Good, hardworking people are being put in extremely difficult situations. If you're told to help implement a new policy you know is harmful, consider walking away if you can. I wish people like Mark Zuckerberg would just walk away. Some lines are not worth crossing, even to save your life's work. Most of us are not in such a high profile position, but we'll be put in situations where we have to make hard decisions all the same.

Consider non-US hosting services.

If you're outside the US, you've probably already used non-US datacenters. But who owns that datacenter? If it's a US-based company, you might want to consider finding a host that isn't bound to the demands of the US government from this point forward.

Conclusion

Like many of us, I'm all for efficiency, and eliminating corruption and waste. But the wholesale, indiscriminate shuttering of agencies and divisions is not how you do that. None of this is leading anywhere good. I wish I didn't have to write a post like this, but it seems to be exactly where we are at the moment.

DOGE is going to continue swinging its wrecking ball around the federal government. Let's try to keep our personal projects, and any other work we care about safe before it swings in our direction.