reasonable take and insights on the current state of affairs

Some that stood out

• The people who are easiest to cut are disproportionately the better ones (young and creative, people who just got promoted, outside partnerships with industry/academia, generally non-life-tenured-deepstate people)
• Lots of the stuff “DOGE” is doing is actually other parts of the admin doing stuff they wanted to do anyways, or even tried to do already last time Trump was elected. Especially reform of particular agencies (e.g. consumer protection bureau chief very publicly wants to abolish it)
• USAID does a mix of useful and useless stuff
• Things that DOGE claims to have done have often not held up to independent scrutiny (some contracts were already cancelled, some that they said were restarted we're not)