The political tactic behind the DOGE resignations (02-26-2025--Hour2)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] So maybe you have heard a little bit about how all of these DOGE employees have quit. We are not working for Musk's farm no more, right? Well, let me give you some of the background here.

[00:00:48] And to its credit, the Associated Press does mention what I think is the most important piece of information. But it is then kind of comical how the AP disregards that and contradicts itself in its own article.

[00:01:05] This is why, for example, groundnews.com, if you've never used ground news, they measure the bias of not stories, but of the publications or outlets. And AP falls on the left side, which is accurate.

[00:01:25] So, federal technology, this is the headline, federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE. Story by two individuals, Brian Slodisco and Byron Tao.

[00:01:47] Quote, more than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday. You notice they never call them bureaucrats. They never call them government workers here. It's always civil service or public servants. Nonpartisan. What do they call them at one point in this article? They call them nonpartisan employees. They're always carrying the water for the Democrat narrative.

[00:02:17] You know, defending all of these government workers. More than 20 civil service employees resigned yesterday from billionaire Trump advisor. That's the way you always have to refer to Elon Musk, by the way, is billionaire Trump advisor or billionaire South African Trump advisor. Even though he's an American citizen, has been for a while.

[00:02:43] But they have resigned from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to, quote, dismantle critical public services. So that's how they saw their job under Musk and with the DOGE people. That they have to that they're being called upon to dismantle critical public services.

[00:03:10] We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution. Which, by the way, upholding your oath to the Constitution. Is not the same as dismantling critical public services. Right. They're not the same thing. In fact, sometimes they could very well be at odds. And also, your idea of what is, quote, critical may not be my idea of what is critical.

[00:03:39] But, look, you feel strongly enough about protecting the, you know, the Guatemalan sex changes. And so you don't want to help DOGE anymore. Fine. There's the door. Take it easy. You probably should have taken that severance deal when it was offered. Could have been paid out through the rest of the year or whatever. But that's fine. Bye. With the mission to save the country from bankruptcy. Fine. I don't want you here either. And you know what?

[00:04:08] Now the slot is open for somebody who is aligned for the mission. I look at this as a good thing. I'm happy that you are leaving. You can write whatever you want to write. I don't care. It doesn't matter. You're gone. You're out the door. So they say 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, although I think they are anonymous at this point. And the AP is protecting their anonymity.

[00:04:38] They did get a copy of the letter. They say it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments. That they swore to uphold. So they're out. Okay. The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump's administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

[00:05:06] So that's why we're leaving them all alone to do whatever they want. Okay. So you got a bunch of people that don't know what they're doing and your response is to give them more control to protect the critical public services. Have you guys thought this through? Right. Rather than be there to help explain to them, hey, you probably don't want to cut this.

[00:05:34] Cutting this or doing that is going to have this impact or that impact. And so you shouldn't do this or that. But rather than be there and help to guide the doge people that you say are ideologues and don't know what they're doing, your response is to walk away. I'm not so sure that's true. I don't have any doubt. That some of the people that are doing this work for doge are ideologues. Don't get me wrong.

[00:06:02] They have political beliefs. They are in there on a mission. Their mission, you call it ideology. I would call it, you know, economic literacy. They're trying to find cuts. They're looking for waste, fraud and abuse. Things that they may think are waste or fraud may not be. That's why you being there might actually help inform them that no, no, no, that's it looks like this, but it's not whatever.

[00:06:57] The philosophies are. But I would say that's probably a part of it, at least for some of the 21. The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists, designers and product managers is a, as the AP calls it here, a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president's tech driven purge of the federal workforce. Is it though? Is it a temporary setback?

[00:07:26] If they're trying to get rid of personnel, a bunch of personnel getting rid of themselves doesn't seem like a setback at all. It sounds like it's actually in line with what they're trying to do. Also, as I mentioned, it frees up the slot for somebody that is willing to come in and help them right the ship, help them do the mission. The AP continues.

[00:07:53] It comes amid a flurry of core challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs. Ah, so is it possible that this might be one of the motivations? They feel like, well, if we all quit at once, it'll bog down Doge and they won't be able to keep doing what they're doing. Right. So there's a there's a political strategy here, too. Right. Right. By the nonpartisan employees that there is a that.

[00:08:22] Yeah, there's a political tactic being employed. Musk posted on a social media website, Twitter, formerly known as X, that the story was, quote, fake news and suggested that the staffers were, quote, dem political holdovers. And they should have been fired had they not or would have been fired had they not resigned. Right. How could he say this? How is this possible?

[00:08:52] It's Doge. Where did all these staffers for Doge come from? Aren't these musketeers? Aren't these the people Elon brought in himself? Why would he call them dem political holdovers? Well, it could be that these were people that were brought in to fix the Obamacare website. And they say they were they were motivated to do so as a public service.

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[00:10:44] That Doge wasn't Doge until about a minute ago. It was called the United States Digital Service. Now, if you listen to this program, you know that. Because I have pointed this out from the inception. When people were like, it's not even a government agency. Or, he needs to be appointed and confirmed by the Senate. Right? Like, Elon Musk, right?

[00:11:13] We've heard all of these, whatever argument they can make to try to slow this thing down. That's all they're trying to do. See, I'm old enough to remember, and this is going back a while. When a president won, it was understood that he had a mandate from the population to do things that he had campaigned on. Seriously.

[00:11:39] Lawmakers recognized, bureaucrats recognized, that the expression of the people's will through the election of a president meant that that president had a mandate from the people and that you govern based on the mandate of the people. Because if you cross the people, then you are destabilizing the society.

[00:12:09] The society that is built on having an elected representative government. And so, when you have somebody that says, I'm going to drain the swamp. I'm going to shrink the federal government. And that person wins. And they get into office then and they start doing what they promised to do. I'm not saying you roll over and, you know, just allow him to do whatever he wants. I'm not saying that.

[00:12:35] I am saying you don't gum up the works and try to slow all of the progress down so that person then cannot enact the will of the people. Because what you're doing is you're thwarting the will of the people. That's not, dare I call it, democracy. Right? You guys have been saying it dies in darkness and all that. So, this is it in light.

[00:13:02] We are all seeing what people voted for. So, the staffers who resigned from what is now called Doge were actually employees of the USDS, the United States Digital Service. But their duties were being integrated into Doge.

[00:13:29] Because they had been, that department, the USDS, had been created a decade ago. And so, when Doge gets in there, they're like, okay, well, why don't we just rename the USDS? We'll come into that, integrate them into us, and we don't need to create a new government department. Because remember, that was the criticism too.

[00:13:55] They're like, oh, you're shrinking government by creating a new department of government efficiency. Ha, ha, ha. Well, actually, they didn't create a new department. They took over one and renamed it. And the people that were there got into that agency. They went to work for the USDS because of a political motivation to do so.

[00:14:19] It was established under President Barack Obama after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov. I remember this. Because I was touting that I had a website that actually worked. They did not. Their website was so terrible. And they had so much time to create a website to roll out healthcare.gov. It was so bad.

[00:14:45] They created, Obama created this whole entity in order to fix the problem. Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans now use, but couldn't at first, to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrats' signature healthcare law. So these were people who took the job over there at the USDS to help implement Obamacare.

[00:15:12] Do you think that they have a particular political leaning? I do. I think it's pretty clear. Stories are powerful. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life. And our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in 1997 in Mint Hill, North Carolina.

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[00:16:36] Political scientist researching statistical methodology and U.S. politics. He, his. That's in his Twitter profile, people. He says, I completely missed that Republicans introduced a bill to increase the endowment tax from 1.4% to 21%. If passed, Harvard would go from paying about $35 million in federal taxes per year

[00:17:04] to $525 million, which he says is 8.2% of its current operating expense. And Will Upton, who is the political editor at the National Pulse, former U.S. Treasury public affairs official and former Trump administration alumni, he says, Oh, look, we finally found a billion dollar hedge fund that the libs do not want taxed.

[00:17:36] Look at that. Yeah, tax the endowments. I got a message here from Timoteo, who says, I recall interviews with North Vietnamese after the Vietnam War. The overwhelming strength of the U.S. should have so demoralized the North Vietnamese that they should have given up, but they didn't. The Vietnamese said that each time they saw Americans protesting the war, that bolstered their resolve,

[00:18:03] and they knew they just needed to hold out a little longer. Today's Democrats, by constantly attacking every aspect of the Trump administration, are working against the U.S. by showing our nation's enemies that they just need to hold out a little longer. Right? Well, we saw a good example of this is the Hamas holies. Right? They you know, they just keep churning out the propaganda,

[00:18:32] at least they did under the Biden administration. Right? Knowing that as long as they had a receptive audience on the left in Western societies, that the left would pressure Israel to a ceasefire. And so they would not negotiate on anything. And then along comes Trump after his win, and all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, let's, yeah, we'll start doing some stuff. Um,

[00:19:03] I remember seeing this stuff about Vietnam also. The Tet Offensive, if I recall correctly, the, it's like the Viet Cong general or something that was in charge of that. And it was, it was considered to be a colossal disaster for the Viet Cong. And he was ready to resign his post and all of this in disgrace. And then they saw the coverage and the way it was being reported how it was an American disaster and so he stayed on.

[00:19:32] And they're like, we can hold out a little bit longer. That's what I remember reading. It's been a while. I wasn't planning on talking about it. I would have pulled the, uh, I would have pulled the actual info. But that's, that's what I remember of that story too. Um, so you've got 21 people that were employed at the United States Digital Service. Okay. The USDS, which was created to fix the Obamacare website. 10 years ago.

[00:20:02] All of the people that quit the USDS, which was then renamed Doge. Right? That's why they didn't create a brand new department. They just took over the USDS, renamed it, rebranded it, and changed its focus. And now 21 people quit yesterday, anonymously wrote a letter together, and handed it off to the Associated Press, who reports it.

[00:20:31] And this is supposed to be a setback for Elon Musk, who is trying to get people to leave the federal workforce. So I'm not really sure why that's a setback, but the AP then says all previously, all of these people, the 21, all previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon. And they wrote in their resignation letter, here it is, that they joined the government

[00:21:00] out of a sense of duty to public service, which is precisely what the current Doge employees are doing now, by the way. The AP doesn't point that out, but that's what these guys are doing too. You accuse them of being ideologues, but they're going in there to do a thing because they think this is the right thing to do. You may disagree, but they're motivated by the exact same thing you were motivated by. But they're bad.

[00:21:30] Their motives are to be, you know, assumed the worst, but yours are pure. Trump's empowerment of Musk upended all of that. The day after Trump's inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk's Doge. According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the

[00:21:59] nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and their politics. Wait a minute, they're nonpartisan employees? So every single one of the 21 people came from tech, right, went to work to help fix the Obamacare website a decade ago and then just stayed. And you're calling them all nonpartisan. The thing that motivated them to show up and help was partisan.

[00:22:31] Obamacare was forced through in a partisan way. It was a partisan fight. Republicans opposed it. Democrats forced it through via reconciliation. Remember that? They bribed a bunch of U.S. senators, Democrats, in red states, basically, or purple states. Remember the Cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana purchase, right? There were all these

[00:23:00] enticements, inducements, to get Democrats to sign on to it so they could ram it through. And then after like a year that you had to build a website, you didn't build one that functioned correctly, the whole thing collapsed, and then you guys are like, I'm going to join public service to help in this noble endeavor, and I'm supposed to believe that you're nonpartisan? That's crap. That is absolute crap. So, kudos to you for quitting.

[00:23:32] Happy trails. I'm sure you will end up in some Silicon Valley position. You guys lined up all of your exit strategies. Fine. Good. Get out. Happy to see you go. And no, I don't believe you are nonpartisan. And yes, I do understand why the Doge employees coming in would ask you about your politics. Because I have a pretty good idea what your politics are, and I have a pretty good idea that you would try to stymie their efforts

[00:24:02] to save taxpayer funds, which is actually a pretty embarrassing and shameful thing for you guys, not Doge. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, and you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's an app, and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage

[00:24:32] and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago, and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The Blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link, and you'll get

[00:25:02] 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. The Associated Press article that I'm reading from, by the way, headlined Federal Technology Staffers Resign Rather Than Help Musk and Doge. And that is accurate. And that right there tells you the reason why they are doing it. They do not

[00:25:32] want to help Elon Musk or the Department of Government Efficiency with the mission. They do not want to help Doge find waste, fraud, and abuse. And that, to me, is indicative of a political ideology. So while the AP will quote the 21 anonymous people from their letter of resignation saying, oh, they're just ideologues, those Doge dudes, but they too are

[00:26:02] ideologues. Because only left-wing ideologues will be opposed to finding waste, fraud, and abuse. That's what has been the most baffling thing in all of this is that Democrats who claim to want to fund all of the programs and services to help all of the people that need all of the help, they don't want to find any of the waste, fraud, and abuse that diverts the money away from helping all of the people with all of the services.

[00:26:31] Every dollar that is lost to waste is a dollar that did not go to the people that you claim to want to help. So when you try to stymie these efforts, be it through legislation, lawfare, or a mass resignation out of the U.S. Digital Service or Doge now under the rebrand, right, then it tells me what your ideology is and that you are not actually trying to help the people that you claim you're

[00:27:01] trying to help. You're trying to help somebody else. According to the AP, quote, These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize social security, veteran services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services. That's according to the resignation letter. Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their

[00:27:30] technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans' data less safe. Right? So, in other words, they have jeopardized Americans' data. They have jeopardized the critical systems. Right? By all walking out at the same time, they are putting in jeopardy these things. Right? Yeah. We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise

[00:28:00] core government systems, jeopardize American sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services, they wrote. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize Doge's actions. So, rather than trying to work with the Doge dudes, they're opting to try to gum up the works or to slow it down. Of the 40 people, now by the way, there were 40 other people that were let go earlier this month, but only one of them was an

[00:28:29] engineer. That engineer's name was Jonathan Kamens, Kamens, K-A-M-E-N-S, Kamens. And he is described by the AP thusly, an outspoken and politically active staffer. Wait, wait, hang on a second. I thought you said these were all nonpartisan employees. Right? These were

[00:28:59] noble angels providing civil service. They had joined to try to give back to serve the public. Right? Yet the engineer guy was outspoken and politically active. A staffer who said in an interview with AP that he believes he was fired for publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris on his personal blog. Oh, and also being critical of Elon Musk.

[00:29:28] And he did that in chats with colleagues. So probably on government service. Like, yeah, dude, you're not behaving in a nonpartisan way. People have lost all sense of appropriateness. This is across the board everywhere. Right? People behaving in inappropriate ways at work. I'm just breaking the rules. Oh, I don't really care about this.

[00:29:58] And they have been empowered in large part by not just a permission structure that allows people to do this stuff with a wink and a nod, but also with outright protections. Right? I went over the story yesterday about the NSA sex chat group where people in the intelligence community are talking in graphic detail about their kinks and fetishes on the intranet

[00:30:27] inside the intelligence agencies. What are you doing? Who does that? Well, apparently, it was permitted because it was all LGBTQ plus two IASL. Right? It was part of the DEI efforts. And so you have to protect this kind of conversation because, you know, privilege or something. So they got special benefits because, I mean, like, people, it would be frowned

[00:30:56] upon if you were talking this way about any other type of, you know, personal sexual relationships you were having. But these people are allowed to talk about it on the internal intranet. And they feel like they're entitled to do so. It's really amazing. And the same thing here. Like, you're in group chats with colleagues and you're ranting about politics. You shouldn't be doing that. You shouldn't be doing that, particularly when you work in a government agency,

[00:31:26] that you're supposed to not be doing that particular thing at all. At all. So, yeah, I'm glad they're gone and maybe we can fill those positions with some people that are actually on the same mission as the Doge dudes. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here.

[00:31:56] You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.