Is the U.S. Government Failing?
The DOGE Experiment: How cuts to the Weather Service, veteran healthcare, and nuclear safety are pushing American infrastructure to its breaking point.
Imagine this: you’ve spent fifteen years in your job — maybe you’re a mid-level engineer at the National Weather Service or a researcher at a public health lab. One morning, an automated email from something called the Department of Government Efficiency lands in your inbox. Your position is redundant, it says. The division is being “streamlined.” Your security badge stops working before lunch. You walk home past the same government buildings, now locked, lights off, waiting for clearance from an office run by a billionaire who thinks democracy is bad project management.
That’s what the DOGE experiment did to people like you. Born as a meme, sold as innovation, enforced as policy — the $270 million tech joke that confused irony with governance.
1. Public Health & Humanitarian Cuts
DOGE begins with the body. Pediatric cancer research funding is terminated, forcing the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium to close. Meals on Wheels loses its federal backing. U.S. foreign aid freezes, collapsing HIV and malaria medication supply lines across sub-Saharan Africa. Eighty-three thousand veterans are cut from federal employment and healthcare rosters. Food stamps are halted for forty million Americans, and ninety-four million pounds of USDA emergency food are pulled back from food banks. The government declares it has no business feeding, treating, or healing its citizens.
2. Science, Safety & Environment
The country’s eyes and instruments are dimmed. Seventeen per cent of the National Weather Service is fired; storm alerts fail. Three hundred nuclear safety engineers are dismissed, then frantically rehired after a near-miss incident. NIH, NSF, and NOAA lose funding for entire research divisions, silencing projects in cancer, climatology, and planetary science. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the nation’s anti-fraud firewall, is dismantled; 1,400 jobs are gone. FEMA sheds ten per cent of its staff, with internal memos calling national disaster readiness “critically eroded.” DOGE turns science into a budget line and safety into an afterthought.
3. Social Infrastructure & Public Services
The country’s civic skeleton is collapsing. Dozens of Social Security field offices close, creating months-long delays. Two hundred and fifty thousand public workers are dismissed, from postal sorters to administrative clerks. Food-safety inspectors and air-traffic controllers are cut, risking both kitchens and skies. The Department of Education loses nearly half its employees; civil-rights enforcement and community programs are zeroed out. What once held daily life together is dismantled in the name of “efficiency.”
4. Labour & Economic Policy
Labour protections dissolve. A planned increase in overtime pay is revoked. The $15 federal-contractor minimum wage disappears. The PRO Act is shelved, and the NLRB loses funding, leaving unions toothless. Public work is outsourced under private contracts, draining what remains of collective bargaining. The working class becomes the test case for deregulation as salvation.
5. Foreign & Security Policy
DOGE extends its reach beyond U.S. borders. Internal investigators confirm that DOGE operatives access federal IT systems and disable agency funding mechanisms without congressional authority — effectively hacking the state from within. USAID, once a 10,000-person global agency, is gutted to a few hundred employees; foreign aid freezes, halting humanitarian projects on every continent. The collapse of soft power leaves a vacuum that other nations move to fill.
6. Social Fabric & Information Environment
The administration wages its war through information. The platform X amplifies anti-trans narratives and spreads discredited statistics. Under DOGE leadership, hate speech and extremist content have risen by fifty per cent. Reinstated extremists use the platform to spread open Nazism. During the government shutdown, the false claim that migrant welfare spending caused the crisis circulated through right-wing networks. Friendly media appearances complete the feedback loop. The billionaire appears as a visionary saviour, never as an architect of destruction.
7. Broader Systemic Harm
Administrative pruning becomes social deforestation. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are slashed; seven thousand Social Security employees are dismissed. Food assistance delays ripple nationwide. Medicare faces cuts of half a trillion dollars over the decade. Meanwhile, the architect’s personal wealth crosses five hundred billion dollars. The gap between citizens and their rulers widens into a chasm. The dream of AI creating a “universal high income” is sold while the institutions that could make it real are dismantled. Automation becomes the alibi for austerity.
One year on, the numbers speak for themselves: hundreds of thousands of public servants gone, agencies crippled, safety nets shredded, science silenced, and inequality cemented as national policy. Government becomes an algorithm; compassion turns into a cost.
Was this what people voted for — this machine of ruin dressed as reform?
Was this the efficiency America wanted?
Is America great yet?