DOGE isn’t making government more efficient—it’s just destroying people’s lives

We need strong leadership now more than ever. Instead, we’re getting reckless, inhumane budget cuts, mass layoffs, and a government left in total disarray.

Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claim they’re saving taxpayer dollars by gutting the workforce. But efficiency isn’t firing half the people who actually get things done and expecting the same results. Efficiency isn’t forcing employees to justify their existence in a two-paragraph email. Efficiency isn’t replacing real leadership with an anonymous, big brother-esque email address that no one reports to.

This isn’t about streamlining the government. It’s about slashing, burning, and watching what happens next.

Musk’s playbook: fire first, ask questions never

We’ve seen this before. Musk bought Twitter, laid off most of its employees, and left the rest scrambling to keep the platform functional. Nearly 90% of my colleagues and I left the app--partially in protest, partially because the platform devolved, just like Musk's reputation.

Now, he’s doing the same to the U.S. government.

DOGE has already laid off more than 110,000 federal employees, and agencies like the IRS and VA are preparing to cut tens of thousands more. Meanwhile, those still employed are being forced to submit regular productivity reports to an anonymous inbox—one that isn’t even managed by their direct supervisor.

Nobody knows who’s reading them. Nobody knows what they’re looking for. But everyone knows they could be next.

The chaos for those left behind

Imagine coming into work and half your department is gone. There’s no plan. No communication. No reassurance that your job is safe. You’re just expected to keep everything running at full capacity with half the people and no leadership.

Worse, there’s no transparency about what’s happening. Managers don’t have answers because they weren’t given any. Employees are panicked, scrambling to prove their value to faceless decision-makers while dealing with impossible workloads.

How do you function in that environment? You don’t. You just survive. And that’s not efficiency—it’s an absolute disaster in the making.

This isn’t about efficiency—it’s about power

Musk and DOGE aren’t making things better. They’re gutting agencies and calling it innovation. There’s no long-term strategy, no plan for sustainability, no thought about the consequences.

Leadership isn’t about firing people just to prove you can. It’s about building teams, providing clarity, and ensuring the work is still done. But instead of leadership, we got a billionaire’s social experiment disguised as government reform.

What happens when government teams fall apart?

Government work isn’t just paperwork and meetings. It’s infrastructure. Public safety. The systems we rely on every day without even realizing it.

And now, many of those systems are dangerously understaffed.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lost nearly half its team regulating autonomous vehicles. That means slower oversight, fewer safety checks, and potentially dangerous technology hitting the road with little regulation.

The Inter-American Foundation now has only one employee. A federal agency run by a single person. That’s efficiency?

Regulatory agencies are putting critical projects on hold because they literally don’t have the staff to complete them.

And Musk doesn’t care. Because none of this affects him.

He’s not the one waiting six months for a tax refund because the IRS just lost half its staff. He’s not the one stuck on hold with an understaffed federal office. He’s not the one suddenly out of a job, competing in an already flooded job market, with no severance, no transition plan, and no idea what’s next.

Where do we go from here?

Honestly? I don’t know. But I do know government teams need help. The ones still standing are overwhelmed, unsupported, and expected to keep functioning under impossible conditions.

This is precisely the kind of breakdown that Teamangle was built to fix. (Yes, I'm plugging the products we built at Same Team Partners. Sorry, not sorry.)

When teams go through massive disruption, they need alignment, clarity, and a survival strategy. Right now, government teams don’t have that. They’re being told to "figure it out" with no direction. If they had a playbook for survival, they might actually have a shot at making this work.

But let’s be real—that’s not what DOGE wants. If they cared about efficiency, they’d be investing in people, not discarding them.

Final thought

Some people will read this and think, well, the government was bloated anyway. Maybe. Maybe not. But tell me this—what happens when the systems you rely on stop working?

What happens when government services you take for granted aren’t there anymore? What happens when an algorithm decides your job doesn’t matter? What happens when you lose your job, and suddenly you’re the one trying to navigate this broken system?

Musk isn’t fixing the government. He’s burning it down. And when the fire spreads, we’re all going to feel the heat.