Wired roundup: DOGE isn’t dead, Facebook dating is real, and Amazon’s AI ambitions
Leah Feiger: So that’s a really good question, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I think if it’s not annoying, I’m going to read this quote from OPM director Scott Cooper and former managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz just to be clear, just reminding everyone where people are coming from in this current administration. He posted this on X late last month, and it was part of a Reuters report. So he posts: “The truth is that DOGE may no longer have centralized leadership under USDS, but the principles of DOGE are alive and well, deregulation, eliminating fraud, waste and abuse, reshaping the federal workforce, etc., etc.” That’s exactly what they’ve been saying all along, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, right? Like no, no, well, DOGE doesn’t exactly exist anymore. No Elon Musk character is leading it, as Elon Musk himself said last month on a podcast with Joe Rogan. “Yeah, they couldn’t pick anyone when I left, but don’t worry, the DOGE is still there,” he says. So, watching people fall for this and be like “DOGE is gone now” feels awful. And I say, they literally tell us it’s not.
Zoe Schiffer: I think what seems to be honest is that it’s harder and harder to tell where the DOGE stops and the Trump administration begins because they’ve infiltrated so many different parts of the government and the DOGE ethos, what you’re talking about, deregulation, cost cutting, zero-based budgeting, these have really become kind of table stakes for the manager, right?
Leah Feiger: I think this is a very good point. And frankly, at the end of Elon Musk’s reign, the thing that kept coming up wasn’t necessarily that the Trump administration didn’t agree with DOGE’s ethos at all. It was that they didn’t really agree with how the mask was done. They didn’t like him stepping on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and arguing outside the Oval Office. The optics were bad, and it also didn’t help the Trump administration even look like it was on top.
