Summary

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) began recruiting “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” willing to work 80+ hours per week with no pay to help slash federal spending.

Appointed by President-elect Donald Trump, the panel is tasked with recommending spending cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and agency restructuring by July 4, 2026.

Musk and Ramaswamy advocate for drastic measures, including cutting grants to nonprofits and potential mass layoffs.

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    21 hours ago

    So a billionaire wants people to work 80 hour weeks for nothing. People tell him to fuck right off. As in, find a cliff and keep walking.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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      21 hours ago

      I don’t think these positions will remain empty. Corporations will send a few lobbyists to check if the cost/power ratio is beneficial and if so, just flood the department.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        I hadn’t thought of that, but this is 100% exactly what will happen. BP oil will surely pay someone VERY handsomely to ‘volunteer’ 80 hours a week toward eliminating all oversight of drilling rigs in the gulf.

      • TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz
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        20 hours ago

        My first thought was spies… because they are already on someone else’s payroll.
        Also, bootlickers and extremely desperate people that would take on any job.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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          20 hours ago

          People “desperate for any job” are actually desperate for money and willing to work for it. They won’t take an unpaid position, what are you thinking?

      • SquatDingloid@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        Drinking asbestos paste lets you escape the simulation

        And it’s delicious

        The government doesn’t want you to know this

        They want it all for themselves

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Good grief. It’s like he asked ChatGPT “how do I hire people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”

    Dear meme-lords: I need something with much more facepalm than the Picard one. A “super facepalm” if you will. Thank you.

  • 1SimpleTailor@startrek.website
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    21 hours ago

    America’s saving grace may in fact be that the fascists are too stupid and lazy to do the work required to dismantle the federal government and cause mass human suffering.

      • b161@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 hours ago

        It’s gonna be like when he fired all those Twitter staff then hire some back again. Or when we got a bunch of servers shut down without knowing what they do and locked people out of their accounts. Or like the fucking CyberCuck.

  • sibachian@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    do “high-IQ” individuals even exist on the republican isle? why would a lefty want to get involved in this shit, especially unpaid? what idiot would accept unpaid labour under a multi-billionaire?

    • laserm@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      High IQ individuals definitely exist on the republican side. The only thing is that they are the most selfish kind (hence why they are republican) and hence they won’t work for free.

      • voldage@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        IQ tests intentionally omit any questions related to empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity, so it can favour people from the top of the pile and act as accurate perdictor of success in ruthless capitalist society. It implicitly promotes lack of those traits in individuals and explicitly promotes the definition of intelligence that’s unrelated to them. While you don’t get lower scores if you’re highly creative or empathetic person, so it’s not directly a detrimental for society and can be a useful metric for some cases like specific jobs, it’s image as sole measure of intelect is manufactured to promote “specific kind of people”, to which group many republican businessmen would belong.

        I’m not disagreeing with what you said, just thought I’d expand on that.

      • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
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        22 hours ago

        I would imagine there’s a few high IQ people willing to be exploited because they get to work with their heroes: Shit Bag #1 and Shit Bag #2.

        • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          Or, as another commenter pointed out, because their corporate bosses are paying gobs of money to them to ‘volunteer’ for these positions.

          • sakodak@lemmy.world
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            17 hours ago

            Or they just use the gig to grift. Seems like there would be a lot of opportunities to take bribes in a position like that.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    1 day ago

    Ok, get this. You elect politicians to “help slash federal spending”.

    What the hell is Musk even doing and why is he outsourcing this job to unpaid idiots, when politicians already get paid to do this?

    Okay, I’ll do a few suggestions for free:

    • Stop subsidizing companies. All of them.
    • Tax the rich to boost the federal income.
    • Legalize all immigrants so they can be tax paying citizens.
    • Crack down on employers using illegal underpaid illegal immigrants.
    • Provide universal health care. Sick people don’t work.
    • Cut down on police force spending.
    • Cut down on car infrastructure spending.
    • Cut down “defense” spending in artificial oil wars.
    • Help Ukraine to defeat Russia, so Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes, so that USA can also cut down on cost for maintenance of nukes.
    • Expand renewable energy. It’s free energy yo, and it creates jobs for tax paying citizens.
    • Stop mining fossil fuels. It will cost more to clean that shit up than is earned.
    • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      23 hours ago

      I just wanted to add some context for one of these bullets.

      The US is upping the amount it spends on nuclear weapons maintenance and production because China has reentered the game as a major player. They’d been stable at 300-350 warheads for decades but is expected to ramp up to producing 100+ per year by 2030.

      So one major adversary has just been replaced by another. Everything old is new again, including the cold war arms race.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        How are they making them? Just fuel reprocessing? You can make them pretty cheap as a side effect at scale of you want to. US can’t though.

        • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 hours ago

          Reprocessing of old pits.

          It’s more a matter of precision, purity, infrastructure, and staffing.

          And you can have them effective/guaranteed to work, safe/without personnel or environmental contamination, or cheap. Pick two.

    • sibachian@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      my bingo card is almost full, just missing universal basic income - people with money, spend money, supporting businesses and thus “the economy”.

    • wildcardology@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Undocumented immigrants paid $96 billion in 2023, they don’t benefit from them but imagine if all of them get to pay taxes.

    • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      16 hours ago

      Why would Russia have to disarm their nukes? That doesn’t make any sense. Getting them to surrender the occupied territory would be enough.

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        15 hours ago

        That would be nice, but they won’t suddenly surrender.

        Russia already lost 500000-700000 men. This war only ends when Moscow is in ruins or when the nation is bankrupted.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes,

      Interesting. During the Cold War, that was unthinkable, mostly because there’d be nobody to counterbalance a US monopoly on nuclear arms. Things have proliferated considerably since then, so perhaps a nuclear Russia isn’t as important. If anything, they’re proving themselves to be a liability.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    There are only two types of “Super High-IQ” people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:

    • Very naive young things, hence very inexperienced and who are going to do all mistakes in the book and then some for the next couple of years as they learn the ropes. By the time they know enough about the job they’ll be burned out from working for a guy like Musk not to mention knowing enough to know they’re better of elsewhere.
    • Grifters looking for making maximum money from being in politics. Since they’re not getting paid, that means corruption, lots and lots of corruption.

    Also, even amongst the “very naive young things”, in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really “super high”-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his “buttons” were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.

    Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren’t is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying “you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can’t deceive most people all of the time” - they can be swindled but they’ll figure it out faster than most.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      Also, most actual intelligent people understand that IQ is incredibly flawed at best, and put little stock in it.

      But I guess if your goal is “anti-DEI” or whatever, then of course you’re cool with intelligence tests that make white people seem smarter.

      • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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        24 hours ago

        I’m a guy with a high “test IQ”, and my sister, who is in the normal range is way more succesful that me in most aspects of life. You don’t want high “test IQ”, you want “smart people” not the same, and far more difficult to measure. High IQ basically means you are good at solving certain types of puzzles

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          23 hours ago

          Exactly. Yes, I can tell you the chronological order of these images very quickly, but good luck getting me to do it.

        • Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          And smart people don’t often work for free. Unless it’s at gunpoint or similar. Though that might be in the plans of fascist assholes like Elongated Muskrat.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

    –Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

  • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Fun idea: Flood their contact addresses with fake applications and fake credentials like certificates with high scores on made-up IQ tests or Mensa membership cards.

  • unmagical@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    No high-iq individual will work 2 weeks per week with no pay in a society that requires money to live.

    • meco03211@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      That’s a common tactic in scams. You want to weed out the actual intelligent people as early as possible lest they disrupt your scam. That’s why scam emails tend to have misspellings and grammatical errors. Smarter people instantly ignore that. Dumb people click on through.

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      No they won’t… but rich people who can afford to support themselves while indulging in their love of making poor people suffer will be lined up around the block.

      Making a position unpaid is a classic tactic to keep out the poors.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It’s disappointing so many aren’t getting this…

        It’s the same as “unpaid internships” being advantage to rich kids who can afford to work without pay.

        Like, there is an inordinate amount of rich assholes that would love to spend 80 hours a week finding way to cut taxes, regulations, and the social safety net.

        If you’re rich enough to begin with, this could pay a hell of a lot better than anything else you would spend your time on. Couple hundred million in the bank or stock market, and it would be more profitable than any actual job.

        And let’s be honest, Musk and Trump aren’t judging IQ by the freaking Wechsler exam, when rich idiots talk about IQ, they mean zeros in a bank account.

        • would_be_appreciated@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          People with that kind of money don’t work, they own. They’ll hire somebody to do those 80 hours while they rape underage trafficked girls.

        • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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          1 day ago

          So, if you own a coal plant and the government is spending time and money on regulating your livelihood, then that would be an obvious thing to cut from the budget.

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            As a hypothetical sure…

            But we broke fossil fuel production records under trump, we broke them under Biden, and there’s no reason to think trump won’t break them again.

            For fucks sake, they had both of the only two options be pro-fracking this time…

            Billion dollar fossil fuel corporations don’t have to worry, they already bought both parties. And have been lobbying trump to leave Biden’s “signature climate change legislation” intact, because it makes them a bunch of money and comes with zero negatives.

            So as a hypothetical you’re example would fit.

            Except no one is doing this but currently:

            the government is spending time and money on regulating (fossil fuels)

            • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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              20 hours ago

              Right, but stick with me here… what if they could make MORE money? All they need to do is stop requiring them to clean out the lead in the toxic waste that they dump on their worker’s towns and the owners can put that money into another vacation house.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      They’ll get paid by conservative think-tanks under the table so the Dept of Efficiency looks good and can pretend that it’s efficient.

      • Vash63@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        This is what I was thinking also. It will be filled with people getting paid by corps and special interests.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        Or corporations who want to have a say. BP Oil will happily drop off a shipping container of cash at a “volunteer’s” house if it means that they eliminate inspections of oil platforms in the gulf.

    • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Can you think of any other types of people who might be financially able to volunteer their time here…?

      Maybe those who have a vested interest in any number of outcomes that may result from their work there…?

    • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I want to believe this, too. But considering how there are smart people clubs with upwards of 50,000 members in the US that treat “passing” an IQ test as their sole entry criterion, I am sure there are some. Not all who have intelligence also have the wisdom to use it well.

    • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      This isn’t aimed at the idiots who would line up around the block and work for free to be called high IQ by Musk. Doesn’t really matter though, it’s all performative

      They already know exactly what they want to cut, and billionaires don’t need a salary to realize profits from deregulation.

      The job being “no salary” isn’t indicative of how cost effictive a volunteer public servant could be - it is a dinner bell for the wealthy