Technology

In 2016, I canvassed for Bernie Sanders. I spent my first day in Nevada walking door-to-door in the desert heat with a dying phone battery and a stack of printed papers delineating potential voters,

...and...

and advance the policies of my [trump] Administration.

Translation: "In 2016 I was doing the hard work of trying to advance progressive politics. In 2025 I decided to do the exact opposite and support oligarchy and kleptocracy."

Unlike private industry layoffs that target middle management bloat and low performers, the government cuts its newest people first, regardless of performance. Anyone promoted within the last two years was also considered probationary—first in line to go.

Translation: "I was surprised to learn that government employee, which earn substantially less as a tradeoff, have more guarantees that their work long tenure and lack of job-hopping will be rewarded with more job security. This prevented us from cutting people who we felt earned too much because of how long they've been with the organization even though they carry institutional knowledge or those we feel we could replace with cheaper juniors we could churn through via burnout like we do in private industry. This also prevents us from implementing 'stack ranking' which we could use to pit each worker against each other making each fear daily for their jobs as a method of extracting more value from them."

I couldn't install Git, Python, or use tools like Cursor, due to government security policies. Fixing the root of the problem–making it easier for employees to execute–would require congressional intervention, and it was more practical to continue spending lots of money outsourcing the software development to contractors.

...and...

I also learned that my frustrations with the government laptopwere solvable; Charles Worthington, VA's CTO, recommended getting a software engineering-grade MacBook.

Translation: "What I had confidently concluded on DAY 2 of my employment to be concrete evidence of the endemic corruption, waste and inefficiency of government was actually just me not aware of organizational policies I learned on DAY 5 of my employment."

Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible. In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions.

Translation: "Trump's DOGE foot soldiers were being painted as the bad guy when it was really Trump's agency heads commanders that were ordering the actions. Trump's poor volunteer DOGE foot soldiers were blameless. The only thing Trump's DOGE foot soldiers did was go through all the people, determine a methodology to fire people, then put the names on a list. It was those evil commanders that fired as many people as possible from all the names we gave them."

I attended my first and last DOGE all-hands. It felt like a candid Q&A with Elon rather than a structured meeting. When he asked the room about improving DOGE's public perception, I asked if I could open-source the code I'd been writing.

Translation: "I finally had an opportunity to raise my concerns to Elon Musk directly about the negative impacts our DOGE work was having on workers, services, most importantly the veterans we were supposedly there to serve. I could, at long last, employ my humanity to call out what I saw was how our work was being used destructively. Instead, I asked if I could open source my code so that I could legally access it later after I was done working at DOGE."