From their first three weeks on the job it sure looks like the DOGE gang, rather than being about government efficiency, can better be described as “BOZOs,” boys out of the zoo and in the open. Almost nothing they have done appears in any obvious way to be about promoting efficiency. Their actions seem almost entirely designed to promote confusion and corruption.

Starting at the beginning, Trump began his new term by firing 17 inspector generals (IG). These firings were without cause, in violation of the law. Also, since Trump had no cause to fire them, we can assume that they were actually doing their jobs. If the DOGE gang was genuinely interested in promoting efficiency, they might have benefitted by spending some time talking to these IGs and learning from their years and even decades of experience. The lack of interest in talking to people who know about problems of corruption and inefficiency is not encouraging.

In the same vein, Elon Musk and the DOGE gang don’t seem to have even heard of the Government Accountability Office  (GAO), an agency that has tracked inefficiency and fraud for over 100 years, saving the government many billions of dollars over the years. Even if you were convinced that the GAO and the fired IGs weren’t doing a good job, you would think that a crew interested in government efficiency and weeding out corruption would at least have some interest in talking to people who ostensibly had this responsibility.

If they had taken a few minutes to have these conversations that might have avoided some of the mistakes that have made them look pretty stupid in the first weeks of the Trump administration. For example, I’m sure that someone, either an IG or a person at the GAO, could have explained the government’s payments systems to them so that Elon Musk could have avoided his apparent shock that the government always makes authorized payment.

Most of us probably would have been shocked if the payments system didn’t make authorized payments. Imagine that the person operating the transfer system at your bank didn’t process your check to your landlord because they had decided the person was a terrorist or a criminal. If this is in fact the case, there is a process through which the bank can block the payment, but the person operating the payment system is not the one who is supposed to make the call.

The federal government operates the same way. When a payment is authorized, it goes through. Elon and the DOGE gang could have found that out if they had taken a few minutes to talk to someone who understood the system before breaking in.

Also, if Musk had wanted to verify this fact, he could have done some random sampling, say look at a few thousand payment orders and verify that these went through. I’m sure that at least one of the “super-high IQ” DOGE boys could explain the idea of random sampling to Musk. If a few thousand cases showed that payments always went through, we can reasonably infer that all payments go through.

If Musk and his gang had done this, it wouldn’t have been necessary for him to break into the federal payments systems and get access to tax, banking, Social Security, and medical records for hundreds of millions of people. And, he wouldn’t have to keep struggling to figure out if he had “read-only” access or had the ability to alter records and code.

Of course, if the point was to give Elon Musk a big boost in his efforts to turn his social media platform X into an all-purpose payment system, these personal files are likely quite valuable. So maybe it wasn’t just stupid blundering on the part of Musk and the DOGE gang.

If Musk and the DOGE gang had done a bit of homework, they also could have quickly found all the USAID programs that they decided were fraud and corruption. It wasn’t necessary to break into the agency’s computer system. These programs were all listed on the USAID website. A high school intern probably could have compiled the programs for Musk in an afternoon.

It also might have helped Musk if he took a few moments to learn what USAID does before he illegally shut it down. Then he would not have looked like such an idiot when he had to be reversed on programs providing essential humanitarian aid, most notably the PREPAR program, which has saved tens of millions of people from AIDS in Sub Saharan Africa at a cost of 0.1 percent of the federal budget.

The ill-considered decision to shut down these programs led to hundreds of millions of dollars of medicine and food to go to waste for no reason, as reported by UDSAID’s now fired IG. That doesn’t fit most people’s definition of efficiency.

Interestingly, despite repeated claims by Musk and Trump of massive fraud and corruption, they have literally failed to identify any. They have pointed to many programs they don’t like, for which they can go to Congress and ask that the funding be rescinded, but that is not the same thing as fraud.

Musk has told us about a person who supposedly is 150 years old and still getting a Social Security check. That seems unlikely since the Social Security Administration regularly reviews its files of beneficiaries and generally catches those whose deaths have not been recorded. It will be interesting if Musk ever reveals the name of this person, but the smart money says this is just another Elon Musk lie.

Musk also tried to imply that the USAID administrator under Biden, Samantha Powers, was stealing from agency because her net worth had increased by $21 million in the last four years. There are two obvious problems with Musk’s story. Powers is married to a very prominent Harvard professor, whose assets are also included in this listing. Also, as Musk might know, it is possible for people to earn money from sources other than their salaries. Ms. Powers might have a very good defamation suit against Elon Musk here.

The way Musk and DOGE boys have gone up about their little “attack the government” charade has very little obvious connection to increasing government efficiency and eliminating corruption. Much of it seems likely to benefit Musk personally, such as getting access to hundreds of millions of private tax and banking files and firing IGs who were investigating his businesses.

Those of us who are lucky enough not to be government workers or be benefitting directly from government programs may not see any dividend in the form of a more efficient government, but we can at least all take pride in the fact that Elon Musk’s net worth is likely to increase substantially from his work with DOGE.