DOGE initially seemed a fair initiative. Improving government efficiency is something most people, regardless of political preference, would support. In the rear-view mirror, as many predicted, Musk and his team’s approach ended up more akin to a fitness trainer excitedly claiming they’ll help you shed 30 kg, only to do so by amputating a couple of limbs and removing vital organs. You’ll be dysfunctional, but hey, at least you lost the weight.
How a CEO with multiple government contracts, plus legal headaches and grievances with the very departments he culled, wound up head of DOGE is already a head scratcher.
Eliminating regulatory bodies that might hold entrepreneurs and their businesses accountable, as The New York Times points out, is just another conflict of interest. In Musk’s case, removing regulations and obstacles to his money vision for X.
Musk announced the dismantling of the CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, on X with ‘CFPB RIP’ alongside a tombstone emoji. Created in the wake of a serious financial crisis, the CFPB had returned $20 billion to everyday people. That’s true efficiency and ROI.
Regardless, putting conflicts of interest aside a moment, the amateur, unethical, approach to ‘tech support’ is like performing data migrations without bothering to map essential fields first.
Oops, we fired hundreds of workers and experts in nuclear weapons programs. Best to immediately rescind that and hire them back. Double oops: we don’t know how to contact them anymore. And even if we do, will those same workers even want to return, given the disrespect and uncertainty created amidst the total cluster-musk?
There are countless examples to demonstrate, true to Silicon Valley start-up style, how a team of hackers, including ‘Big Balls,’ moved fast and broke things, breaching a multitude of privacy and federal laws along the way, at a pace almost impossible to keep up with in terms of reporting, fact checking, investigating, or legally preventing.
The DOGE experiment stands alone in terms of scale and impact as a cautionary example of the excessive excitement and rush, by entrepreneurs like Musk, to use AI as a potential panacea for all things relating to efficiency and innovation.
In Australia too, there are plenty of reminders that ‘moving fast and breaking things’ with AI can quickly veer into ethical no-go zones. We’re already seeing warning tales crop up across public and private sectors, across industries.
In Australia, Musk’s social media platform, X, formerly Twitter, faced scrutiny from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner after it was revealed user data was being automatically used to train Grok AI, the company’s proprietary chatbot. Users were not explicitly asked for such consent, with the pre-ticked setting by default, especially with secondary data use for training, being a clear breach of informed consent.
Deloitte, for example, was forced to cough back part of a $440,000 government contract after generative AI churned out a report riddled with factual errors and outright made-up citations for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.
Meanwhile, the NSW Reconstruction Authority hit the headlines when a contractor fed thousands of flood victims’ personal details into ChatGPT: an unauthorised move that breached privacy expectations and left sensitive data dangling like a loose power cord.
These aren’t freak accidents or outliers; they serve as a warning shot that efficiency without ethics is a slippery slope, and the guardrails of governance can get shredded at high speed. DOGE just happens to be the largest, most visible cautionary tale of AI over efficiency and ethics gone awry.
Intelligence (where AI stands for both Artificial Intelligence and Adapted Intelligence for people) is one of my current trending cinematic keynotes. I’ve also hosted multiple closed-room dinners with C-suite and senior leaders from major blue-chip organisations, including those directly responsible for cybersecurity and risk mitigation. What has become clear from these conversations at the top end of town is that big corporations understand the risks of AI. They consistently favour an approach where humans are supported by AI, with guardrails, checks, and balances firmly in place.
Which brings us neatly back to DOGE: when speed, ego, and shiny tech collide in the pursuit of efficiency, the results are spectacularly messy. The Department Of Government Efficiency stands as perhaps the most visible, flamboyant example of what happens when ambition outruns oversight, and AI-powered hacks start doing the heavy lifting before anyone remembers to read, or even create, the ethics manual.
Treating AI as a shortcut to delivering professional or government outcomes, without enough human verification, remains a huge risk: not only for quality outputs, but for reputational cost, decaying trust, and the value destruction that inevitably follows.
Musk ultimately exited the White House literally black-eyed, with approximately $150 billion eroded from his own fortune and his reputation somewhat tattered at the time. His initial claim potentially saving $2 trillion via DOGE was gradually and systematically downgraded to an erroneous $170 billion in savings at best. That’s before counting the impact or payouts for a plethora of future lawsuits or the negative impact of downgraded essential services.
Whether in the public or private sector, across any department or industry, it’s important to recognise two primary reasons for ethical, constructive, value-creating use of AI: first, to find greater efficiencies; and second, to enhance experiences and relationships, whether for citizens or customers.
The pursuit of the first, without the second, also leads neatly back to another metaphor. Branding the Department of Government Efficiency after his dogecoin cryptocurrency, personified with a smiling Shiba Inu dog, was just another ruse aligned with Musk’s overzealous, entrepreneurial strategies of having the name on everyone’s tongue.
The reality of DOGE, however, is that this disastrous department, forged from a toxic bromance of convenience, is perhaps better branded as a salivating, rabid, predatory, Serengeti hyena called the Department of Gross Egregiousness. It serves as a cautionary tale for when egos collide with AI in ways that go spectacularly awry.
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