DOGE v. ELCA, DOGE v. DATA

DOGE v. ELCA

              One of the things I noted in my previous post about DOGE going after the Lutheran religious tradition was laziness on the part of Michael Flynn and Elon Musk’s interns. As I pointed out, all they needed to do to understand the numbers was to do a quick google search and they would have been able to read all the Lutheran Social Ministry Organization’s 990s. Instead, they jumped straight to libel about money laundering and false accusations of illegal activity, all leveled at 2am on a Sunday morning.

              And, the more you look at their data, the lazier they seem.

-On one hand, they lump several Lutheran Universities in with their spreadsheet about Lutheran Social Ministry Organizations, making no distinction between them. The only reason I can think that someone would do this is to inflate the numbers.

-On the other hand, and more damning, they are making the claim that this 600-million-dollar figure is 3 months of payments. In the instances I’ve looked into, these figures account for 7 years of federal payments to Lutherans for everything from running orphanages and senior housing to resettling refugees and helping people out after natural disasters.

              There are consequences for this lazy and reckless behavior.

-To my knowledge at least 20 people have been laid off from Lutheran Social Services because of this tweet.

-Additionally, services provided by these organizations are being disrupted. Here in New Jersey the first place this has hit is hospice care.

DOGE v. DATA

              And that would be enough—people losing their jobs and the dying not receiving dignity in their most vulnerable moments, all on account of interns not being able to understand (or purposefully fudging) the difference between 3 months and 7 years, as well as the difference between colleges and social ministry organizations—That. Would. Be. Enough.

But this kind of sloppiness isn’t confined to attacks on the ELCA. In a bunch of different ways, it seems like DOGE is getting their data wrong.

-The DOGE website was put together so poorly that it is editable by anyone and has leaked classified information.

-These interns were so reckless with how and who they fired, that we’re finding out that some of the people they fired were essential for US nuclear safety, and now DOGE can’t get ahold of them to fix major problems.

-Perhaps most alarmingly, as DOGE has started to mess with social security accounts, they are confusing a data entry error code with fraud.

So, I imagine that means a bunch of people on social security will start to get the same treatment as the Lutherans. Out of the blue they’ll be accused of illegal activity and fraud and suffer the consequences, when in fact the only dodgy thing going on is that DOGE interns were too lazy to understand the data they were looking at.