Mike Benz explains how when DOGE first started it was making the government work how it was supposed to work, even taking the power away from top FBI bureaucrats He says this worked because Trump deferred to Elon Musk to handle things Now Mike Benz says the cabinet has... regained much of the power and it’s back to “business as usual” “What happened with DOGE and why can't we sustain the pace? And is there any hope of getting back to a fast pace?” Mike Benz “What I know from my contacts in the admin, I was told by multiple people at multiple different agencies that DOGE was a complete game changer because whereas agencies were previously ruled by careers I was talking about this, for example, with the FBI. We have four political appointees at the FBI. There's 38,000 FBI employees. So it's 4 versus 38,000. The great equalizer in the first couple of months of the admin was that DOGE were in the building and they directly had the deputized power of the Office of Management and Budget effectively to just cut the budgets of anybody in the career class, shut down any department, freeze the funding. If you were a career and you were trying to be insubordinate against the politicals, doge could come in and make the careers have to respect the politicals because if they didn't do what they were told in the chain of command, you'd get doged. That was a game changer. My contacts at state and DHS and in the early USAID were all telling me, oh my God, the agency for the first time seems to be working how it's supposed to be working because the careers are doing what the political appointees told them to do. Not because they fear the political appointees, they fear DOGE. But I think that what was imbued in DOGE was the kind of silent power of Elon Musk and the fact that Trump, I think, before the cabinet was fully filled out, kind of deferred to Elon on most things that Trump didn't care too much about in terms of beer crack management. But I think with that power going away in DOGE no longer representing the full force of Elon Musk, it began to loop moves to the cabinet level consensus, which is a lot more business as usual.”show more

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