WIRED reports: DOGE isn’t dead, Facebook dating is real, and Amazon’s AI ambitions

Leah Weiger: So it’s a really good question, and one I’ve thought about for some time. I guess if it’s not annoying, I want to read this quote from Scott Kubor, director of OPM and former managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, just to be clear, just to remind everyone where the people in this current administration are coming from. He posted this on X late last month, and this was part of the Reuters reporting. So he posts, “The truth is that DOGE may not have centralized leadership under the USDS anymore, but the principles of DOGE remain alive and well, deregulating, eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse, reshaping the federal workforce, etc., etc., etc.” And it’s the exact same thing, the thing they’ve been saying all this time, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, isn’t it? It’s like, oh no, no, well, DOGE doesn’t exist anymore. There is no Elon Musk character driving it, which is something Elon Musk himself said on the podcast with Joe Rogan last month as well. He’s like, “Yes, once I left, they couldn’t bother anyone, but don’t worry, DOGE is still there.” So it’s fun to watch people fall in love with this and say, “DOGE’s gone now.” And I’m saying they’re literally telling us that’s not the case.

Zoe Schiffer: I think the one thing that honestly rings true is that it’s very difficult to differentiate where DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins because it has infiltrated so many different parts of government and the spirit of DOGE, what are you talking about, deregulation, cost-cutting, zero-based budgeting, those things have really become kind of stakes on the table for the administrator, right?

Leah Weiger: I think that’s a good point. And frankly, by the end of the Elon Musk era, the thing that kept coming up wasn’t necessarily that the Trump administration didn’t agree with the spirit of DOGE at all. The reason was that they didn’t really agree with the way Musk was handling the matter. And they didn’t like that he was stomping on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and picking fights outside the Oval Office. It was a bad sight, and it didn’t help the Trump administration look like it was on top of it either.