It was hardly necessary to consult the Delphic Oracle to learn that the Department of Government Efficiency was destined to be unpopular with federal bureaucrats. Nor was it difficult to predict that their collective response would be clueless and hopelessly inept. Still, even the most cynical student of bureaucratic bumbling will be taken aback by a new website called “We the Builders.” It was created to provide a space for anonymous government apparatchiks to whine about the depredations of DOGE, which the main page refers to thus: “They are destroyers.”
The notion that anyone in the executive branch operates “independently” from the President is ridiculous.
If you set out to create a parody — a website that looks and reads like something built by a bureaucrat — you could hardly do better than “We the Builders.” The banner at the top of the main page is a group photo of about a dozen deeply earnest and inevitably diverse federal “workers” posing with their right hands raised as if reciting the loyalty oath taken by all federal employees. Some might question how seriously these people take that oath, however, after noticing that their logo is clearly modeled after the Soviet hammer and sickle, except these characters replaced the hammer with a wrench and the sickle with a spoon.
The comedy continues with their mission statement, which boldly declares, “We don’t work for DOGE,” yet they have set up a handle on the social media site that is owned by their arch nemesis — Elon Musk. They describe themselves on their X Profile as “The official resistance team of the U.S. Digital Service.” If you have never heard of this agency, it is little wonder. It was quietly created by the Office of Management and Budget in August of 2014, after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, and inevitably became a permanent agency filled with federal employees who came to think of themselves as fire proof.
On Jan. 20, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’.” Essentially, it rebranded and repurposed the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) as DOGE. Inevitably, a number of USDS employees were fired and they immediately started going to Democrat-friendly “news” outlets and predicting that the sky would fall if DOGE was permitted to execute its mission of finding government waste and fraud. A frequent claim made by the USDS “resistance” is that DOGE has rendered sensitive personal information insecure. Their site includes this by “Anonymous.”
You should care about who has access to your data and how it’s protected. If security is weak, you are the one who suffers. It’s not just about keeping bad actors out — it’s about making sure your private information isn’t shared, sold, or misused. That’s why data stewardship is so important. The government collects and stores a lot of sensitive information — like your identity, financial records, and health history. If this data falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to identity theft, fraud, or even targeted scams based on personal details like your gender, income, or past addresses.
This heavy-handed fear mongering neglects to mention one very important datum. USDS was doing an awful job of securing government data. During the last year of the Biden regime, there were at least 11 major data breaches involving Personally Identifiable Information (PII) held by these government agencies: Department of Health and Human Services, Department of the Treasury, Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior. The breaches involved millions of Social Security numbers, names, email addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, dates and places of birth, medical records, ad infinitum.
In other words, the claim that your PII was more secure before the advent of DOGE is nonsense. But most of what you will read on “We the Builders” is just old fashioned kvetching. The latest post on the site, contributed by “Publius,” rages about an email sent from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that goes as follows: “Please reply to this email with a list of approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” It stipulated a deadline of “this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST,” and warned against sending classified information. This outraged “Publius” because it arrived shortly following this X post:
Publius defiantly declares, “First of all, we don’t take orders via X. Second, let’s get practical. There are 2 million federal employees. Elon and his operatives aren’t going to read 2 million emails this week. Let’s assume it takes 2 min to read each email, that’s 66,667 hours of reading!” Publius clearly isn’t the brightest bulb in the circuit. This X post and the subsequent email from OPM was a classic “pulse check.” In other words, DOGE just wants to find out how many of our dedicated civil servants are actually engaged enough to know that their superiors want to know what they do all day. A safe bet would be about 20 percent or so.
Federal “workers” are employed by the executive branch of the government and, as such, they are ultimately accountable to the Chief Executive or someone he appoints to supervise them. The notion that anyone in the executive branch operates “independently” from the President is ridiculous. There are, without a doubt, hardworking and conscientious bureaucrats. They do not include the people who created “We the Builders.” These creatures are parasites. They despise the taxpayers who returned President Trump to the White House and fear people like Elon Musk who will work for nothing to fumigate the federal bureaucracy.
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