As the head of President Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” billionaire Elon Musk wielded power for a scant four months. But it was long enough to scar the federal government for potentially decades.
More than 250,000 federal workers have lost or left their jobs as a result of mass layoffs, including nuclear safety engineers, hurricane researchers, cybersecurity experts, and many other workers vital to Americans’ health and safety.
DOGE also ran roughshod over government data, including the Social Security Administration’s massive database of Americans’ personal information. According to a whistleblower complaint filed late last summer, DOGE personnel allegedly copied government data into a private cloud server, risking the security of Americans’ Social Security numbers, addresses, and employment history. “It is absolutely terrifying,” says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the founding director of the Brookings Center for Effective Public Management.
Kamarck is also the author of numerous books and was the leader of President Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative in 1993. She recently wrote a report for the think tank Third Way, “The DOGE Time Bombs,” warning of the many risks created by DOGE’s activities. She also argues for a better path to government reform.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes.
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Anne Kim: You’re no stranger to the idea of downsizing government. After President Clinton promised that the “era of big government is over,” he launched “Reinventing Government” and tapped you to run it. But Reinventing Government was definitely not DOGE. Tell us more about what that initiative was and how it was different from what this administration has undertaken.
Elaine Kamarck: It was a very different operation in that we looked at the government agency by agency and started with the question of function: What is this agency supposed to be doing? Is it doing it as well as it could? Is it doing it as efficiently as it could? And we found lots of places to cut.
There were lots of old regulations that just didn’t make any sense anymore—there were regulations left over from Congressional reports from the 1960s that could be trimmed. We came into office in 1993, and the World Wide Web was just beginning. So we had the advantage of this great new technology, plus we had Al Gore. If there ever was an early adapter of technology, it was Al Gore.
Let me give you a simple example. A lot of people won’t realize this, but in 1993, if you wanted to get a passport, you had to call up a passport agency. Maybe you got a recorded message, but probably you had to wait to talk to somebody, or you had to go someplace. And then you’d find out you needed this and that and the other thing, et cetera.
Nobody does that anymore. We do it all online. When you start to think about the vast amount of government information that got put online between 1993 and today, you realize that’s why the federal workforce has remained constant even though you know they’re serving more people. We had the advantage of the internet, but we did it with the thought: Is this going to serve the citizen better?
DOGE was a completely random and weird operation, frankly, and every time I look back on it, it’s even weirder. They came in with no interest in what the agency did. They just came in and used algorithms and databases to cut people.
For instance, they went to air traffic control. That’s an agency that Americans care a lot about. You screw up our airplane traffic, and boy, citizens get mad. The first rumor that goes out is they’re going to cut air traffic controllers, and everybody goes nuts because they know what that means. That means delays.
So it’s no coincidence that Sean Patrick Duffy—the Secretary of Transportation—was the first person to take on Elon Musk in front of the president. He yelled at him and said, “Look, you can’t cut air traffic controllers.” And Musk said, “No, no, no, no, we won’t do that.” Well, they didn’t do that, but what did they do? They cut people who are in the ecosystem that supports air traffic controllers.
An air traffic controller without a good security system, a good communications system, or a good radar system is like a soldier going into battle with no guns. It was a terribly random and fundamentally careless attempt at cutting government.
Anne Kim: Now before we return to a more fulsome attack on what DOGE has done, is there anything that DOGE accomplished that you think was okay or defensible in any way?
Elaine Kamarck: There was nothing that was defensible. It was too random, it was too wild. But it folded relatively quickly. Musk left in the spring of 2025, and most of the people left. There were only about 128 people working on it to begin with, compared to the many, many more people working in the Clinton administration.
The federal government has had significant IT problems, and a lot of the people who were recruited to DOGE were out of the high tech world. [If they had been] helping with some of the IT issues in the government, that would [have been] a very good thing. That’s what I thought they would initially do. But then they started doing all this crazy stuff—this random walk through the federal government that made no sense.
Anne Kim: You alluded just now to the very small number of people involved in DOGE. How was that different from Reinventing Government?
Elaine Kamarck: Between inauguration day and April 1993, we recruited 400 people from the government who were seconded to the White House to work on this project. In other words, they were being paid by their agencies. They kept their pay, they kept their benefits, etc., and they were brought into the White House to work on this.
The people who were brought in were assigned to an agency, but they were not allowed to work on their own agency because they would bring with them the prejudices of that agency.
So if you worked at HUD, you might get assigned to work at the Department of Education. If you worked at the NSC [National Security Council], you might get assigned to work at State or Defense or something like that. We had a very intense process of identifying problems in the agency, mostly problems with performance.
We did in fact save a fair amount of money as we went along because a lot of performance issues were caused by old fashioned bureaucratic stuff we could redesign.
Anne Kim: Let’s turn now to your report for Third Way on the DOGE “time bombs,” as you put it. There are the long-term time bombs you talk about, but I feel we have to talk about a short-term time bomb too, so to speak. I’ll just say one word: “Salad.”
Elaine Kamarck: Lettuce, right. Exactly.
Ever since I published that report with Third Way, I’ve been keeping a list of new time bombs, and the two that have hit most recently are the food poisoning from lettuce and the Ebola crisis in Africa, which we’ve seemed to have gotten a handle on, but it was scary at first because all the infrastructure to track Ebola has been dismantled.
So, on the lettuce question, this took much longer than it usually does to identify the source. It’s usually 24 to 48 hours, and they know what it is. And if you think about it, this isn’t something a computer can do.
One of the problems with the DOGE team is that they were all techie guys. How do you track down an outbreak on lettuce? Well, you’ve got to go interview as many people as you can, find who got sick, and you’ve got to talk to them. You’ve got to ask them: “When did you get sick? What did you eat? Where did you eat it?” It’s a very people-intensive process, and if you fire all the people who know how to do this, it’s not exactly easy to put it all back together again.
Anne Kim: Your report for Third Way highlighted six different areas where Americans’ health and safety and security are really going to be at risk [because of DOGE]. I have to say it was hard to choose which are the most frightening of the risks that we’re facing, but let’s start with the Social Security database. What are you worried about?
Elaine Kamarck: I am really worried about Social Security. This is so foundational to our economy and to the structure of American families. One of the reasons that Americans have some money to send their kids to college is that they’re not paying for the hospital bills of their parents. Yes, there’s also Medicare, but they’re not paying as much support because of Social Security. So this affects three generations of Americans.
The databases are mammoth and had been well protected. But the first thing that happened was that the DOGE team went into Social Security, and they got access to the databases, which had never been permitted by any political appointee.
There is now an investigation going on by the House Oversight Committee into whether or not the DOGE people took these mammoth databases and used them illegally and against protocol to give the data to private companies. And that’s just horrible. Your information, mine, our grandparents’, our parents’, everybody is in this mammoth [database].
They did this because Social Security is the biggest piece of the budget. They were convinced that somehow Social Security was filled with fraud and that they could get huge savings. They went running to the White House to say, “Wow, we found people 125 years old in the Social Security database.”
Now, what was the story here? The story was something called “Numident.” Numident is the massive database of every person in America since 1936 who has ever had a Social Security number. That’s gazillions of people. And a lot of those people who had Social Security numbers never got benefits.
[For example,] children died, especially back then. If children die when they’re 10 years old, they might have had a number, but they never got benefits. Some people maybe never worked, so they never got benefits. Having a number doesn’t equal having benefits. That was the first mistake that they made.
The second mistake, which was quickly pointed out by other techies, is that there were a lot of people, particularly from earlier years, who didn’t know their birth date. People who were old in 1936 were likely not born in a hospital—they were born at home. So there wasn’t really an accurate record of their birthdate. When people didn’t know their birth date, the Social Security Administration just gave them a birthdate—I think it was 1875 or something like that—and there were a lot of people like that.
Trump then talked about these hundred-plus year olds getting Social Security checks, but it was completely bogus. The way you know it’s bogus is that it was a great story at the time. Trump told it well and had everybody laughing and I’m sure a lot of Americans were thinking, “My God, what a mess.” But it has never been told again by the president because the whole thing was just total baloney.
What is now worrying people is who has that data and what they’ve done with it. Will that data show up somehow in some company somewhere that is managing to take advantage of that data to sell things, to explore people’s backgrounds, or to even enter into the Social Security system and just decide that they don’t get benefits?
It’s a huge problem, and it’s going to take a long time for House Oversight to get through it. And if any of these allegations are proven, people will go to jail. These are serious, serious problems. And again, it’s the scope and centrality of Social Security to our economy that makes this so difficult to even comprehend.
Anne Kim: This sentence in your report frightened me a lot: “Imagine the opportunity for identity theft if the data is compromised. Not just Social Security, but every verification system in the country would be at risk.” You also wrote that there are huge national security risks because enemies could use the list to micro-target disinformation campaigns or to create an enemies list. This is going way beyond what ads show up in your feed or just getting your email address sold.
Elaine Kamarck: Most people don’t realize that when you apply for benefits, you open up with Social Security an entire database of every place you’ve ever worked and how much in Social Security taxes you’ve paid.
Imagine taking an enemies list and editing their employment history. So there you are, you’re 67 years old, you think you want to get your Social Security, and guess what? Five of the jobs that you had are not there. They’ve been erased.
It’s terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying. The unfettered access, the way that they went about this, and their misunderstanding of the system—deliberate or not—really has the potential to affect us for a long time.
Anne Kim: Another issue you write about is the reliability of the grid. And that is also on people’s minds this summer because of data centers and the heat. Can you talk about how DOGE has jeopardized Americans’ access to affordable and reliable power?
Elaine Kamarck: Well, their politics were such that they wrote these algorithms looking for anything related to climate change. That was their big bugaboo. The problem with that is that a lot of the things that were labeled “climate change” were really about modernizing the grid so that electricity would be efficiently delivered, et cetera.
So what happened is that the grid was collateral damage. When they were looking to get rid of all references to climate change, they got rid of lots of research and grants into the grid, and that is going to be a huge problem. Americans’ electricity bills are already high. They’re going to get higher. And as you say, now we have this added problem of the electricity the data centers are using. It’s awful.
Anne Kim: As long as we’re on the topic of weather, we’re headed into hurricane season, and there’s a big storm forming as we are recording this. So on this front, so to speak, what are you worried about this year?
Elaine Kamarck: Well, there’s two pieces of it. There’s NOAA and FEMA. NOAA is all about weather, and again, this is not something some algorithm can do. You actually need human beings in different parts of the country to launch the weather balloons to get data from the atmosphere and bring it back. Then you need other human beings to put it all together. Again, with the help of the computers, but you need people doing this.
Once the emergency happens, then it goes over to FEMA. And the first thing the Trump administration did when they came in is they said they wanted to abolish FEMA. Now why would you want to do that? For example, an important thing about FEMA is that it gets you help when your first responders can’t.
I once wrote a paper some time ago about when first responders are victims. So in Hurricane Katrina, there were EMTs, there were policemen, there were firefighters, et cetera, who were stuck in their houses. They were climbing on their own roofs. They were trying to protect their families. They were victims.
That’s why FEMA is so important. When the electricity trucks go down, and the people who put the wires back up can’t get out of their house, then somebody has to come from a neighboring state. Up here in New England, every time we’ve had a big storm, the first thing you see is if you’re in Massachusetts are trucks from Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island.
In other words, everybody who hasn’t been hit is coordinated, and all that coordination happens through FEMA. The fact that they even contemplated [abolishing FEMA] said to me there was no understanding of how the system works and how crucial it is.
Anne Kim: Now, in case people aren’t curled up in a fetal position already or diving under the covers, there’s one more major problem in your report I want to flag, and that is the nation’s capacity to anticipate and respond to potential terror attacks. This is yet another area where it seems really hard to overstate just how vulnerable we might be. What’s happened?
Elaine Kamarck: Well, the big thing they did, which David Ignatius has written about, and he’s probably our best source on intelligence matters, is they cut spies.
We have in the U.S. intelligence community massive information gathering capacity. We listen to everybody’s phone calls around the world. We have databases. We’re looking at huge amounts of information. But you need a human brain to connect the dots. And sometimes you need human intelligence to assess, for instance, not just capacity but intent. Do they intend to do this? Are they going do this? Or is this just something that somebody’s brainstorming about somewhere? And you need spies.
The bottom line is you need human intelligence to put together all the other sources of intelligence that we have. Once you cut spies, you’re in trouble. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.
The other thing that’s kind of amusing here is that no matter how you feel about DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—of all the places where you want DEI, it’s at the CIA.
Because let’s face it, I’m sure there are white Caucasian people in the world who would like to blow us up, but there are other people in the world—people of color—that also want to do us harm. You can’t decide ahead of time that you don’t want to have a person with this background and this language capacity and this skin color in a spy capacity; you need everybody.
Anne Kim: Can all of this damage be undone by the next administration? Or are we talking about a multi-administration project? How do you see the rebuilding process, provided that we have the opportunity to take that on?
Elaine Kamarck: I think it’s hard, but it can be done. If you have people running these agencies who in fact care about the performance of the agency, then I think you will be able to rebuild them. And in fact I do give credit to some of the cabinet secretaries in the Trump administration.
DOGE got in there in January and February while the cabinet secretaries were having their congressional hearings, so the DOGE kids were home alone. Nobody was there to say to them, “You can’t do that. Do you know what’ll happen?” Or to take it to the White House and get the White House to say, “Stop that. That’s crazy. It’s going to cause us problems.”
Once the cabinet secretaries started to get into their jobs, I think a lot of them realized—and I gave the example of Sean Patrick Duffy, the transportation secretary—a lot of them realized, “Wait a minute, these guys have the potential to really screw things up. And if things get really screwed up, guess who gets blamed? Me.” And then indirectly also the president, right? Because when something collapses, we all say, “Hey, why didn’t the president fix this or know this?”
So I think that the cabinet secretaries, even in the Trump administration, have stopped the extensive damage that DOGE was doing. If we’d continued another year at the pace they were starting in February 2025, I think they would have really destroyed the government.
At this point, I think that if you have a different administration, if you have cabinet secretaries—Republican or Democrat—who care about government performance and aren’t into this weird ideology that things should just be cut, I think we can rebuild.
Anne Kim: You once wrote that trust in government requires two foundational pillars—competence and care—neither of which the current administration is showing. This is a slightly different question from the task of rebuilding government, but I’m wondering what advice you have for the next administration—provided they are competent and they care—about how to restore public trust in government.
Elaine Kamarck: The first thing they have to do is show that they are reforming the government. You can’t just go back to the Biden administration. That won’t convince anybody of anything.
You have to go agency by agency and say, “Here’s what we’re fixing, and here’s how we’re doing it.” One of the things we learned in Reinventing Government is that people weren’t always interested in the details. However, when you said you’re doing it, they were awfully glad, and Bill Clinton in 1996 got a lot of kudos for it. The public wants it done. And I think if the cabinet secretaries are simply saying, “We’re going to fix this, this, and this,” it’ll build a lot of political capital for the president and begin restoring trust.
I’ll end with one final thing. If you look at that Pew chart about trust in government that everybody looks at from time to time, starting in the 1960s, it’s just a downward slope, right? But there is a period of time in the 1990s when trust in government goes up, and that was during the Clinton administration. So it can be done.
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