I’ve witnessed extreme cases of hubris in my years as a political reporter and editor.
There’s the governor of Connecticut who thought he was untouchable, saying in a hot mic moment “what can they do to us?” during a widening scandal that eventually would swallow his governorship whole.
He was not untouchable, in fact, as demonstrated by his time spent in federal prison after a years-long corruption investigation forced him to plead guilty to turning the governor’s office into a criminal enterprise.
And then there’s the governor of New Mexico who announced to the world that her administration had “uncovered” millions of dollars in Medicaid fraud by organizations that helped New Mexicans with addiction and mental illness.
Her accusations were found to be baseless but not before her administration had dismantled New Mexico’s behavioral health system, thrown into chaos the lives of tens of thousands of New Mexicans and forced the closure of many of the accused organizations that were ultimately cleared.
Accusing the organizations of defrauding Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the low income, it turns out, was good marketing but not much else.
I think about these two instances as I watch the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) root around in the federal government and say they’ve found waste and corruption as well as massive cost savings, including where to lay off federal workers.
Moving fast and breaking things might work in Silicon Valley, but it’s not always smart in government, particularly when the systems you’re breaking come with many moving parts. It’s prudent before you act to learn how all those parts work together.
That doesn’t seem to have occurred to Musk or DOGE. Take, for example, the hundreds of federal employees who worked on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs who were terminated last week only for the Trump administration to turn around and rescind the terminations once they realized their error.
The staff who had been reinstated could not all be reached after they were fired, and some were reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE, the Associated Press reported.
The employees terminated last week worked at plants in Amarillo, Tex. and in Jackson, S.C., a few dozen miles from where I grew up in Augusta, Ga.
Nor has it occurred to Musk and his term, apparently, that the data they are encountering in federal systems as they move fast and break things might resist easy understanding.
Take, for example, the Wired Magazine reporter who accepted the challenge of trying to answer how there were 150 year olds receiving Social Security benefits, as Musk claimed a few days ago in the Oval Office with President Trump looking on.
It turns out, there aren’t. But there are potential reasons as to why there are what seem to be sesquicentarians in the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) databases.
It has to do with the quirk of the computer language that undergirds the SSA’s databases: COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language.
“COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it,” the Wired reporter wrote.
The explanation is that when there is no birth date given for a person, the SSA system defaults to May 20, 1875, a reference point the creators of the code undergirding the SSA databases used, meaning “all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.”
That’s just one explanation. There are potentially others.
Now we come to the reason I mentioned the governor in Connecticut.
I learned from reporting on that scandal, and other public corruption investigations since, it takes years to determine whether there is public corruption. The investigations involve prosecutors familiar with the U.S. criminal code, seasoned investigators and oftentimes forensic accountants trained to ferret out wrongdoing amid the forest of numbers.
The world’s richest man and a crew of coders finding corruption in less than four weeks is a mockery of that standard. What Elon Musk and DOGE are doing is a form of marketing, not methodical, through investigating.
I’m fine with serious efforts to unearth waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. But let’s not pretend that what the Trump administration is doing is that.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet.