This guy's smiling photograph is appearing today, in normal news coverage of an elite gathering, as though he had done nothing wrong.
He has killed 215,000 adults and 445,000 children with USAID cuts, as of the most recent estimates. 14 million deaths are expected by 2030.
Others may forget, but I will never stop talking about who is responsible for the largest crime of my lifetime
"DOGE employees demanded control over the USAID computer system, getting Musk on the phone. Once they had it, USAID was gutted. The world's richest man was live-tweeting the demolition."
"500 metric tons of high-energy food, intended for child refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the age of five, were incinerated, as were ten million dollars of contraceptives"
Neither part is complete, yet. Of the repression machine that I feared 10 months ago, the administration has implemented to only to a midpoint. The more data they consolidate, the further we travel down this dangerous road.
Takeaway:
Any time the Trump administration says "AI" or anything about software or data, what you should hear is "repression as a service"
This has 2 parts:
1. AI as an excuse to consolidate data
2. AI to execute orders that humans would refuse
But consider how far they've already come. DOGE bros used AI tools to list thousands of "woke" "DEI" government grants for cancellation per Musk's conspiracy theories. Legitimate civil servants would have refused to compile such a list, but not AI.
I am not saying they will be able to build the fully automated repression tool of their dreams.
Bureaucracy is largely made of humans who can't be wished away by men with a near-religious belief in AI and a delusionally negative view of government workers.
In spite of their apparent enthusiasm for AI, the broligarchs within government seem to be giving up on boring, law-abiding internal AI tools like the one we built. They only want software that can dispatch goon squads.
Fascists quickly tire of safeguards. Three days ago the head of CISA (🤯!!!) got busted circumventing these safety measures, throwing sensitive government documents into the growing pile of privatized data.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/cisa-madhu-gottumukkala-chatgpt-00749361
At GSA we built an AI tool with safeguards against data consolidation to avoid violations exactly like these.
https://johnskinnerportfolio.com/blog/GSAi/
After firing the people who made it, DOGE rolled a version of it out all over government, including at DHS.
My fellow civil servants would object that the order "find the 'nexus' of Democratic voters under tax audit" is illegal. But software need not raise these objections.
Hence broligarchs dream of software allowing them to order up repression without pesky civil servants in the loop.
Something like this is already happening in Minneapolis where half-forgotten allegations of childcare funding fraud are the excuse for an occupation of the city.
With enough data ICE could find similar justification anywhere. Simply ignore the "not for mass prioritization" warning label again.
To avoid obviously targeting voters, another layer of data can be used to provide deniability, however flimsy. For example, IRS data could be used to map key voters who also owe back taxes.
Voter data unlocks the possibility of ICE targeting key polling precincts, swing districts, election officials or individual voters. ICE leadership could conceivably order voter repression up at any address, like an Uber.
The theft isn't over. ICE thugs are now demanding state-level voter data at gunpoint. If they get that data, presumably, they will throw it into the mix with all the other stolen data available to repression as a service.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/26/pam-bondi-minnesota-voter-rolls-ice-surge
As sure as walking off with hard drives is illegal, what DOGE did with Palantir is illegal. The laws they violated have boring names like the Antideficiency Act, the Privacy Act, and Federal Acquisition Regulation. These are laws the government used to enforce *on itself*. Not anymore.
A few days later, Wired reported that DOGE was building exactly this: cross-government data connections with Palantir — the literal company with that name, not just the metaphor.
https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-doge-irs-mega-api-data/
At the time of the GSA DOGE presentation I feared that the goal of this AI strategy was to make a continuous pushbutton repression system patterned on the metaphor of Palantir from LotR.
When we talk about DOGE stealing data, a lot of people picture a guy sneaking hard drives out under the cover of darkness. But that's not how you build a repression tool like ELITE. A hard drive is only a data snapshot; it will go out of date. Fascism needs a *continuous data connection*.
This leaked video of a presentation by DOGE at GSA headquarters 10 months ago outlines the plan. Couched as a part of their "AI strategy," Musk's people said they needed to scoop up all government data so AI could use it.