Authority Without Accountability: DOGE vs. U.S.A.I.D.
Court Ruled DOGE Can’t Be Held Responsible For Agency it Helped Dismantle
Hello, welcome back to TracingVRL, the software-journalism-art project tracing the infodemic going ViRaL. Before diving into today’s newsletter, please see the note below about possible deregulation of TV news at the FCC, which would leave us with less news coverage at the local level.
This will happen … unless the agency hears from you. Read below to find out how to comment, thanks!
Quick urgent note: though there’s a lot of news right now that makes this action item seem unimportant, it’s in fact possibly more vital and urgent than all the others. This month the FCC is seeking feedback on its impending move to once again, as they did in 2017, try to remove competition for local TV news, and allow more consolidation among networks which run those affiliates. Removing competition in TV news would create monomarkets, regions where nearly all stations on the dial, through either direct ownership or “joint sales agreements” or JSAs enacted by the FCC in 2017, will only air talking points from FOX affiliates, or only Sinclair affiliates. This was vividly depicted in a Deadspin video report from 2017:
Apr 08 Broadcast television is in trouble. Stations are asking Washington for help (Los Angeles Times) - “Station owners such as Nexstar Media Group, E.W. Scrippts and Fox Television Stations say part of the answer has to be consolidation, which would allow them to better withstand the competition from huge tech firms. But longstanding regulations stand in the way.”
Apr 07 FCC considers changes to help local TV, seeks your input (RochesterFirst.com, a Nextstar affiliate) - “Nexstar and other broadcast companies are asking Carr to consider adjusting two regulations that have hampered their growth. One is the current cap on the percentage of the country’s television households that a broadcast company may reach (now set at 39%), while the other is the rule that limits the number of stations a broadcast company may own in any single local market.”
Provide your input at the FCC **this month** (before end of Monday April 28th!) if you don’t want to see this happen. The argument that TV news stations must face less competition with each other because the internet exists doesn’t make sense, since TV news stations can simulcast to the internet. And having the privilege of broadcasting across the public airwaves, even though antenna TV viewing is lower than it used to be, is an important badge of legitimacy when people have more trouble than ever figuring out which websites they can trust. Instructions on how to comment to the FCC are below.
Anne Applebaum wrote in her book Autocracy, Inc. that citizens in other countries see better results fighting tyranny when they offer options not just opposition. These FCC TV news ownership caps — a limit that will be removed if the FCC doesn’t hear from you — keep options in our media ecosystem by preventing monomarkets. Comment at the FCC, before the end of Monday, April 28th to make your voice heard. Do not comment through the deceptive NextStar-provided FCC comment link. See this clear report from veteran broadcaster Sue Wilson:
Apr 23 Trump's FCC on Precipice of Ending All Limits on Corporate Control of Local TV News Stations (BradBlog.com) - “The time to fight back is NOW, though time is short. There are two ways to do so, even if we don't have control of some 200 television stations to help us get the word out. MORE DIFFICULT, BUT MORE EFFECTIVE WAY: File an Official Comment with the FCC by 11:59PM EDT Monday, April 28, 2025. (Comments made after that date will still be received by the FCC but will not have legal standing for further action.)” Go to the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System, Fill out all starred categories. Non-starred categories are optional.
In the first section, where it reads "Proceeding(s): Select the FCC Proceeding(s) to which your filing refers" write 25-133. Then click on "In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete".
Also required is your name and address and "Type of filing." Under "Type of Filing" choose "Reply to Comments"
Tell the FCC your stories! Especially that...
We need more local TV news voices, not fewer controlled by national media corporations.
If you are seeing the same news stories replicated on 2 or more local TV stations, provide details and try to take photos or screengrabs to include with your comment.
Sue Wilson also recommends social media postings.
‘DOGE’ vs. U.S.A.I.D.
Introduction: We’re closing out the president’s unofficial honeymoon period, the first 100 days of a presidency. In that time, the young workers of the amorphous entity DOGE, in line with sentiments of a literal chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, initiated a hostile, legally contested and nearly complete dismantling of the 64-year-old United States Agency of International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), hatcheting the 10,000-person foreign service workforce, and transferring the agency’s headquarters to the U.S. Customs and Border Control agency.
These hard-to-identify DOGE individuals cancelled on short notice thousands of U.S.A.I.D. contracts and grants for infectious disease prevention, famine prevention, election integrity services and earthquake response assistance. Someone also halted payment for services already rendered.
DOGE is a group led by either Elon Musk or Amy Gleason or Viveck Ramsaway. (The internet meme DOGE dog is also the mascot for Musk’s cryptocurrency DogeCoin.)
According to doublespeak Wikipedia entries, DOGE is either an existing but re-named and mutated government department, or a committee within the original 2014 congressionally-funded United States Digital Service. Or, based on recent statements from Gleason, it’s an informal consultancy that hires DOGE workers to other departments to initiate other firings, leaving Gleason off the hook for any illegalities occurring therein.
The independent U.S.A.I.D. agency, whose inspector general was investigating its own contract with Musk’s Starlink company to provide internet terminals to Ukraine – Musk admitted Starlink had in 2022 cut internet access to Ukrainian terminals during the country’s attacks on a naval Russian fleet, and U.S. officials in 2025 are threatening another Starlink cutoff if Ukraine doesn’t grant Americans access to their rare earth minerals – was publicly criticized by Russian officials as far back as 2012.
Hard to believe U.S.A.I.D. had a presence in Moscow in 2012, but it ended that year after Vladimir Putin accused the election monitoring group Golos, funded mostly by U.S.A.I.D. grants, of “covertly” funding protesters. Mass protests had erupted across Moscow in December 2011 when Putin won a third term as president. Many demanded annulment of election results. Under the Putin administration “the Kremlin has made USAID and the State Department its main scapegoats in the struggle against foreign-backed political unrest in part because of America’s outsize role in world affairs and the Russian popular consciousness,“ a Carnegie Endowment article from the time says.
The recent DOGE slashing of U.S.A.I.D. employees was so sudden that in Congo “workers and their families abroad had no agency help in fleeing after looters overran their homes in Kinshasa, several of the staffers said in sworn accounts to a federal court,” WTOP radio news reported. “Congo-based USAID staffers who described getting out with nothing but their backpacks wrote of now being stranded in Washington, without a home or agency payments, and facing joblessness.”
Is this the last chapter of U.S.A.I.D.’s story?
Despite the buzz from the outer rings of our media miasma, U.S.A.I.D. is likely popular in the eyes of Americans. Especially since foreign aid – of which U.S.A.I.D. is a subset – comprises just 1% of the U.S. budget.
The idea to demolish the U.S.A.I.D. agency is listed in the Project 2025 blueprint, an unpopular document even among Republicans leading up to the 2024 election. But President Trump, who denied allegiance to Project 2025 during his presidential campaign, has taken that blueprint and run with it.
What do people lose with the temporary (or permanent) U.S.A.I.D. dissolution?
Food, famine prevention & U.S. farmers: Food insecurity often precipitates violent outbreaks. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush made fighting famine abroad explicit priorities in their presidencies. But in mid-February the 40-year-old Famine Early Warning System (FEWS NET)’s rich real-time food data website went dark, and now displays a static “unavailable” message.
Kansas grain farmers in January saw an abrupt termination of the 70-year-old Food for Peace program – started by President Eisenhower in the wake of WWII, later folded into U.S.A.I.D. – and are sitting atop $500 million in grain milo and other crops suddenly with no buyers. Peanut growers in Georgia and Iowa soybean farmers also were stopped short. Already farmers were enduring farm equipment cost rises outpacing general inflation. And this is all before facing the new trade tariffs.
Disease: The DOGE-initiated reduction in disease outbreak response staff at U.S.A.I.D. from 60 to six employees, and Ebola response employees from ten to, now, one is … odd, given the largest Ebola outbreak in recent history, in 2014 with 11,000 deaths, was attributed by our CDC to “weak surveillance and fragile public health infrastructure”. But the improved response to Ebola after that historic outbreak, which included stronger disease surveillance and more effective treatments with monoclonal antibodies, could be short-lived if the eliminated workers aren’t replenished.
To reduce disease hunters so quickly following the world-halting COVID-19 pandemic seems unfathomable. One NGO calculates 11,000 preventable additional tuberculosis deaths have occurred since the late January funding cuts shuttered clinics and blocked TB drug procurement routes.
The recently-viable goal of ending the global HIV pandemic by 2030 now remains out of reach after the abrupt halt of 5800 of U.S.A.I.D.’s 6300 contracts choked the President Bush-created PEPFAR international HIV/AIDS antiviral distribution program.
Public health workers were still getting a handle on highly disfiguring mpox Clade 1, which is raging in Congo, when President Trump announced the U.S. was withdrawing from the World Health Organization as DOGE workers put one U.S.A.I.D. worker after another on leave.
Yellow Fever, which broke out in Columbia last week, can be contained with vaccines, but the cancellation of U.S.A.I.D. contracts effectively pulled the U.S. out of the GAVI vaccine distribution alliance.
This doesn’t even take into account recent reductions in malaria, polio and measles and mumps that are already back on the rise.
Efficiency Fallacy
These penny-wise pound-foolish cuts are happening under the guise of efficiency. But that word often serves as its own antonym. In some contexts, efficient means “minimal” and in others it means “optimal”.
In computer science, a system is robust if it is failsafe, and to be failsafe it must have redundancies. It would surprise many to know a robust system is inefficient by design.
Often, when a system involves people, efficiency is the excuse used to shift costs and risks from one party to another.
At one point, Tesla corporation stripped radar sensors from customers’ existing cars when they visited service centers for other issues, leaving only cameras to inform the vehicles’ autopilot system. That was seen as an efficiency measure for each car, as radar drew battery energy. But when accidents and Tesla driver fatalities grew more frequent after the shift to the radar-free “Tesla Vision” policy, car owners bore increased costs in dollars and lives.
To be truly efficient, these cuts to foreign aid would have to be evaluated after-the-fact to ensure the diminished monetary input is still containing as much infectious disease and still preventing as much famine and subsequent violence as before. We can see from the press that infectious disease and famine is already increasing.
A Debt-Ceiling Riser Initiative
Benjamin Black, a 40-year-old private equity scion who Donald Trump has nominated to run something called the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, is reportedly campaigning to redirect portions of U.S.A.I.D.’s former budget into “pro-market” development interests in other countries.
And billionaire business mogul Marc Cuban urges fired government employees, which include those from the foreign service, to form their own for-profit consulting companies to perform work they used to do directly for the government. Said Cuban, it’s “just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably create” adding he was “happy to invest” and/or help.
To not only complete previous work, but also return profits to investors requires more money up front. As University of Pennsylvania political scientist John Dilulio told a Harper’s reporter “the real deep state is the contractor state.”
Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight told the Harper’s reporter “far from saving money, contract workers end up costing taxpayers up to three times more than the same work done by federal employees.”
Like the beneficiaries of DHS’ immigration and customs enforcement agency (ICE), whose director recently said he wants to run the truck fleet “like Amazon Prime but with human beings” the winners of privatization are the for-profit contractors to be hired by DHS to complete the sharp increased deportations Trump is promising.
This portends continued increases of the U.S. debt ceiling.
Authority Without Accountability
The efficiency fallacy marks the ‘E’ in D.O.G.E to be misleading. So too is calling DOGE employees “officials” of a government department, implying they’re commensurate with counterparts in the Department of State. In fact DOGE is less official than even the U.S.A.I.D. agency. The original constitution required Congress to approve agencies and departments, and once established, these bodies fell under the executive branch of government.
When employees’ representatives sued DOGE for abrupt firings, they said the DOGE-led cuts violated the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution. The clause says principal officers of the president and courts must be approved by Congress, but “inferior” officers require no Congressional approval or review. Musk is an “inferior” officer per this clause, yet he manages to delegate the waving of the proverbial chainsaw to a posse of deputies, deputies who are speaking on behalf of cabinet secretaries in emailed pink slips.
In that court case, lawyers for Musk and his fellow “Defendants” pointed to the same appointments clause, saying “he [Musk] is a Senior Advisor to the President who may have influence on decisions regarding U.S.A.I.D. but does not have the required significant authority to carry out the actions complained of …” While the panel of judges ruled for the defendants, that cleared the way for the firings to resume.
Here’s what it says in the courtlistener notes:
“They contend that Musk is not the actual or effective Administrator of DOGE, pointing out that the President designated Amy Gleason for that position. What’s more, defendants assert the actions complained of at USAID were carried out by duly appointed Officers of the United States—more specifically, that the President designated Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s Acting Administrator, who then designated Peter Marocco as Deputy Administrator.”
Only from the three-month mark does looking at the early days of cuts to U.S.A.I.D. show how furtive this operation has been. “Initially, there was no reason given” for putting the chief economist of U.S.A.I.D. and 91 of his colleagues on administrative leave, Dean Karlan told NPR.
Other times, the abrupt firing rationales were emailed to affected employees’ supervisors from “a Musk associate.” Also, claims the funding and staff cuts were approved by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were articulated in emails in which “from” fields listed only “individuals not known to staffers,” WTOP news radio reported.
But DOGE’s culture of impunity continues. The named acting DOGE administrator referred to in the lawsuit mentioned above, Amy Gleason, on April 2nd denied responsibility for any and all firings, within U.S.A.I.D. and beyond. “Nothing about my role has been hidden,” she posted to a group chat of angry health innovators, who were contesting cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services.
And if her name is unfamiliar to readers and reporters, it’s understandable. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to name Gleason as the acting DOGE administrator on Feb. 25, but a White House official confirmed her name to several outlets later that day to Gleason’s surprise, while she was vacationing in Mexico.
As Gleason reportedly explained in the chat, she leads the U.S. Doge Service which is formerly the U.S. Digital Service. But as Wikipedia says, the U.S. Digital Service still exists. As leader of the U.S. Doge Service, Gleason said, she is not responsible for actions of the “embedded” Doge teams hired into each department and agency. And neither are to be confused for the “broader Doge policy agenda” that Musk advises President Trump on.
Apr 08 DOGE head denies responsibility for mass firings in private group chat message (San Francisco Chronicle) - “‘I currently serve as acting administrator of the U.S. Doge Service (formerly U.S. Digital Service). That’s separate from (1) the embedded agency Doge teams — who are hired directly into each agency — and (2) the broader Doge policy agenda that Elon Musk advises the President on,’ Gleason said in the post.”
The press and the Trump administration are portraying the merging of two agencies — U.S.A.I.D. and the Department of State – as a foregone conclusion. This has been a trend across the western world, in Australia and England and Canada, each time resulting in a steep drop of foreign aid funding. Critics contend both diplomacy, carried out by the State department, and development/aid carried out by U.S.A.I.D., are more effective and efficient when they’re led by separate agencies. This preserves the tension of separate missions.
Feb 04 Abolishing USAID Is Both Unconstitutional and Disastrous | The State Department isn’t ready to handle vital disease-prevention efforts worldwide. (Foreign Policy) - “But the Tanzanian government has little interest in talking to the U.S. State Department about its outbreaks. Indeed, the Tanzanian government first denied there was any Marburg outbreak—much as it has done with mpox and did previously during COVID-19.”
The president’s first 100-days honeymoon has been a whiplash. Moving forward, as to whether these staff and budget cuts should be permanent, is a vital debate worth our time and energy.