Weaponized transparency at DOGE makes a mockery of good governance
Good afternoon from rainy Washington, where I’ve been mourning on behalf of the thousands of civil servants across the United States and around the world who have been fired over the past 48 hours. Glad to see more new subscribers today: welcome.
Breaking the backbone of good government
Additional firings this week “came after the Trump administration directed agency heads to terminate most trial and probationary staff“ in soft guidance from the Office of Personnel Management.
There are roughly 200,000 federal workers who “started work within the past two years and have little protection from being fired without cause. It is unclear how many will actually be let go.”
As I’ve said directly to far too many civil servants this week, thank you for your service.
Your country is failing you. Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, captured a sentiment worth amplifying:
For nearly 25 years, the Partnership for Public Service has trained, recognized and engaged with tens of thousands of federal leaders to be more effective managers and stewards of taxpayer dollars. Through that work, I've seen firsthand the professionalism and dedication of our career federal workforce. Our apolitical, expert-based civil service is the envy of the world, and its vital work touches the lives of every American.
I want to use this space to speak directly to those civil servants and share my thoughts about the unfolding changes over the past few weeks. What I want to say to each of you right now – what I think you need to hear – is this:
Your skill matters.
Your commitment matters.
Your work matters.
You matter.
Government can and should work better. It should be easier to recruit, hire, train and retain top talent. It should have a greater emphasis on accountability. It should have better technology and a stronger focus on excellent customer service.
Fixing those things doesn't require a sledgehammer to the civil service. We can't afford to break things first and figure out the consequences later. It takes having a conversation about what's not working and how to fix it, while recognizing the importance of getting it right and the value of the people doing the work. Because when government can't do its job well, the American people suffer.
Just so. For those of you subscribing or reading online: Your dedication, professionalism, sacrifice, and loyalty to our Constitution have been a source of constant inspiration to this American since before he first pledged allegiance to our flag. 🇺🇸
The false, defamatory descriptions of you and your work online or in media do not reflect the reality of your work and service to our union that often has no idea of what you prevented, protected, helped, nurtured, guarded, grew, built, delivered, or inspired across our vast nation and the world.
You and your families do not deserve to be suddenly pulled back from your posts around the world, put on administrative leave for insisting that everyone in an agency follows the law, or to suddenly lost an opportunity you uprooted a family to move for or depended on for financial support.
You didn’t deserve it, nor do people who will suffer as a result of cruel, capricious maladministration.
I passed by federal workers & Washingtonians — significant crossover — protesting DOGE outside of the Department of Health and human Services in Washington on Friday. I heard them singing from blocks away and posted video.
I wonder if we’ll see the spoon 🥄 emerge as a symbol of the American civil service, in response to Musk’s ”fork in the road.”
I never tire of seeing my fellow Americans exercise our First Amendment rights in these civic spaces. (I would be happy to never experience another insurrection.)
The road ahead of all of us remains long and uncertain now, but I know that our union was stronger because of you and your work, and will be weaker in your absence.
If I can be useful to you on any level, please reach out directly to Alex@governing.digital or on Signal (below).
DOGE’s DEI purge now, civil rights next?
As Steven Levy reports, “for those who spent a good chunk of their lives pushing for reform, and ultimately concluded that only radical measures could tame the bureaucratic beast, Elon Musk’s youth crusade represents a heartbreaking squandering of a generational opportunity.”
Here‘s a data point in DOGE’s actual goals and how they’re approaching firing workers from the General Services Administration from NextGov:
“Supervisors didn’t have input into who was let go or why and leadership hasn’t sent any agencywide communications about the impending dismissals, according to several current GSA employees.”
“The way they are making cuts shows they are not for efficiency nor to make services better, but to create further dysfunction. The cuts to technical talent today are going to hurt the American people.”
Trump’s order to eliminate “all DEI” workers was always going to disproportionately affect women 8 minority workers because the (vast?) majority of these roles are not white men or women. That could be part of the story at GSA; there could also be overt discrimination and prejudice that will only get litigated in courts months on if people sue, as we are now seeing.
But Saturday’s Washington Post reported the DOGE team’s initial focus on any offices or roles related to diversity, equity, & inclusion or probationary workers “aims next to target hundreds of non-DEI workers and what they called ‘corrupted branches’ of offices required by law, which protect civil and employment rights.”
If the focus on civil rights is mystifying in 2025, sometimes it’s clarifying to see who’s vehemently against something. People who ascribe to Neo-Confederate ideology hate diversity and inclusion programs, favor a return to the segregated pre-Civil Rights era of segregated America, and currently are angry about reforms in South Africa.
As with the ongoing purge of officials in the Justice Department who prosecuted President Trump after he was indicted for criminal conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, this initial focus on DEI and civil rights strongly suggests DOGE isn’t about effective programs or modernizing government, which is crushing for folks like me who have written about or advocated for better governance for the past two decades.
Transparent Illiberalism
I was walking by the Predict-It offices on Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday morning & saw CNN showing video of Elon Musk at the White House, falsely claiming DOGE is the most transparent organization ever.
I paused to see what their analyst would say, started recording, & saw Will Oremus quote…me. Truly kismet.
Oremus and I had been discussing the strategy Musk was pursuing on X, which I suggested was a notable example of weaponized transparency.
If you’re no longer on the platform formerly known as Twitter, you may be unaware of how wildly inaccurate Musk’s claims have become.
Participatory mass delusion is now a daily phenomenon on X, washing and rinsing novel conspiracies into cable news and partisan media, as Musk and his fellow travelers co-create alternative facts and bespoke realities — to borrow Renee DiResta’s phrase — that then live on as zombie falsehoods in the Fox Cinematic Universe.
But there‘s something more sinister happening here than spinning up a conspiracy theory about Reuters.
As I told the Washington Post, Musk is distorting and then weaponizing open spending data using social media, which Trump is then picking up and validating as “corruption.”
This is what the Sunlight Foundation warned about in 2017, but on steroids. Authoritarian governments on the far-left (communism) and far-right (fascism) use weaponized transparency to intimidate civil society organizations and the press, create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and cloud public understanding of public facts and policy outcomes.
We defined weaponized transparency in 2017 as the use of data disclosure as a tool for division and public intimidation, rather than a means for achieving transparency and accountability. That holds up.
In 2017, we observed that “the disclosures ordered by the Trump White House support a political and racial narrative advanced by an administration that has repeatedly dissembled about violence, fabricated narratives about vulnerable populations, and explicitly vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States of America.
Modern history has repeatedly demonstrated that vilifying vulnerable populations, racial minorities or minority religions has led to the worst chapters of our shared history.”
This remains true.
But we never anticipated one of America’s tech CEOs going this deep with a presidency, turning a platform into state social media, gaining direct access to government data, and then weaponizing selective disclosures to undermine public trust and justify mass layoffs.
If we see dehumanizing speech paired with propaganda about immigrants or dissidents, stochastic terrorism is the least of the risks of associating already marginalized minority communities with crime, child trafficking, or corruption.
On that count, WIRED’s coverage of the new DOGE.gov is superb, but misses a key trend I flagged to you in my last dispatch and to the Washington Post. DOGE.gov isn’t just an ad for X: federal agencies and the White House are governing there.
We are no longer just seeing state power on social media, but the emergence of state social media in the United States that will superchange propaganda campaigns, crowd out journalism, & drown democracies in mistruths.
There is ample historic precedent for merging state power with mass media of the day, from radio to television, leading to state media around the world.
I expect the rapid emergence of state social media in the US will catch lawmakers & regulators off-guard. As law professor Lawrence Lessig says, code is law.
US officials and agencies create forums for protected speech on X with unique official statements there.
For now, “special government employee” Musk can deny access to those civic spaces if he wants with suspensions, blocks, & bans — which would violate the First Amendment rights of any American citizen.
Official U.S. government communications should always be cross-posted in an accessible format to a .gov website so no American has to sign up for a commercial service nor agree to Terms of Service to read laws, court rulings, orders, or other edicts of government.
What lies ahead
Putting legitimate public access, participation, & records preservation issues aside, the underlying existential risk of state social media isn’t just a private platform hosting civic spaces — though X & Facebook are far more like a mall than a “digital town square.”
It’s dehumanizing speech at scale that incites offline violence or normalizes state violence against marginalized minority communities. This isn’t a theoretical risk, in 2025.
Remember: “Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree” that Meta played a key role in “the death & displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.”
Remember: Nazi propaganda on the radio played a key role in the Holocaust, stoking hatred and deceiving Germans until the Allies liberated Europe.
Remember: Radio played a key role in the genocide in Rwanda.
Almost immediately after the peace deal was signed in August of 1993, and the U.N. force was commissioned, many of the people around the president and in the Hutu power leadership established a second radio station. Up until then, Rwanda had had one radio station, Radio Rwanda. Now they established a second major radio station with a powerful signal, called RTLM (Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines). And this became the genocidal radio. It was a radio dedicated entirely to entertainment and genocidal propaganda. And it was highly entertaining. It had pop music. It was very much in keeping with the kind of youth movement spirit of the militia movement. And people loved this radio station. It was very popular. And it mounted this increasingly virulent, exclusionary and exterminatory rhetoric in the period during the so-called peace implementation.
Following the president's death, it became almost Genocide Central. It was through there that people were instructed at times, "Go out there and kill. You must do your work. People are needed over in this commune." Sometimes they actually had disc jockeys who would say,
"So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street." And they would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was apparently quite dramatic. And it was a rallying tool that was used in a tremendous way to mobilize the population.
... To understand how powerful radio was, or how powerful the message was, it's interesting to contrast [to] neighboring Burundi, [which] has the same ethnic mix as Rwanda. The president of Burundi was a passenger on President Habyarimana's plane, and was also killed on the night of April 6th. But in that country, the U.N. leaders there helped organize the political leaders to plead on the radio for calm. So a message of calm was sent out, and people responded to that. Here, a message to lather up the population to kill was sent out, and the people responded to that.
Lies that immigrants have killed pets & wildlife or are driving violent crime parallel years of Trump’s dehumanizing claims, despite evidence that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
As James Poniewozik observed, the Trump administration is now producing federal immigration raids as if they are reality TV shows — like “COPS” — & flooding local news and social media with videos that connect undocumented immigrants with crime.
That’s 21st century propaganda. (Or “Copaganda.”)
Trump has echoed Nazi rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country & has announced plans for militarized mass deportations of immigrants.
It can happen here, too, if Americans don’t awaken to the authoritarian threat, aided by politicians & press willing and able to risk the backlash from doing so.
No President of the United States, past or present, should ever call their fellow Americans vermin, enemies or “human scum.”
Calling someone a fascist, Communist, libertarian, socialist, neoliberal, progressive, conservative, or anarchist may be hyperbolic, false, or apt. That does not incite violence.
Remember: Dehumanizing rhetoric primes people for violence: animal, vermin, scum, cockroach. Don’t use it.
