Ex-DOGE Staffer Admits the Whole Thing Was a Total Bust

The DOGE bros responsible for cutting over 317,000 federal jobs and thousands of grants continue to show they had no idea what they were doing and no remorse for the damage done.

The depositions of two of the bros, Nathan Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, were published on YouTube last week by the plaintiffs of a suit who hope to restore some of the cuts made to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The nearly 25 hours of depositions are equal parts hilarious and depressing, showing how sloppy Elon Musk’s former staff—most of whom had little experience in government—were in their approach.

For all Musk’s bluster about reducing government spending by $1 trillion, federal spending increased with DOGE at the wheel. Cavanaugh outlined the irony perfectly in his deposition when asked whether he regretted that the slashing of grants had cost many people their livelihood.

“No,” Cavanaugh said. “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit.”

“OK,” the interviewer said. “Did you reduce the federal deficit?”

“No, we didn’t,” Cavanaugh replied.

The employees were mocked online for lacking any principles besides “cut every grant that doesn’t relate to white men.” Fox struggled to define DEI at all, and floundered when asked whether he considered a documentary about Jewish women during the Holocaust to be DEI.

“It’s a Jewish—specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” he said. “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”

Both Fox and Cavanaugh used ChatGPT to find grants that fell under the Trump administration’s definition of “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” The loose guidelines coupled with an imperfect chatbot and sheer idiocy from the bros meant that funding for things such as a new HVAC system for a North Carolina museum or a digital archive for Oregon newspapers were terminated in the purge. Of course, any grant containing the word “BIPOC,” “homosexual,” “LGBTQ,” or “tribal” had almost no shot of survival.

The backlash to the depositions has perhaps been too much to take for the DOGE bros. On March 13, a judge ordered that videos of the depositions be taken off the internet. They’re still quite easy to find.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has been subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to testify before lawmakers over her “possible mismanagement” of the Justice Department’s rollout of the Epstein Files.

“On March 4, 2026, the Committee voted to approve a motion directing the Committee to authorize and issue a subpoena to you for a deposition,” Committee Chairman Representative James Comer wrote in a letter to Bondi Tuesday. “The Committee has questions regarding the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates and its compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. As Attorney General, you are directly responsible for overseeing the Department’s collection, review, and determinations regarding the release of files pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” 

Bondi is set to be deposed on April 14, Comer noted. She and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will also sit for a private briefing with Oversight Committee members on Wednesday. 

While Bondi has yet to publicly reply, a DOJ spokesperson called the subpoena “completely unnecessary.” 

“Lawmakers have been invited to view the unredacted files for themselves at the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General has always made herself available to speak directly with members of Congress,” the spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday. “She continues to have calls and meetings with members of Congress on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which is why the Department offered to brief the committee tomorrow. As always, we look forward to continuing to provide policymakers with the facts.”

From claiming that the Epstein client list was sitting on her desk (then claiming no such list exists), to giving the MAGA influencers those nothingburger white binders labeled “most transparent administration in history,” to contentious congressional hearings in which she appeared extremely defensive, Bondi has only managed to put even more eyes on the Epstein files—and the connections that President Trump and other elites have to them. Expect more indignation on April 14.  

This story has been updated. 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson isn’t bothering to try and justify the SAVE Act.

A reporter asked Johnson Tuesday morning if he could point out any example of voter fraud in any previous election in any state that the bill, which would introduce extensive obstacles to voter registration, would have prevented. Johnson flippantly dismissed the question.

“Look, we’re not going to litigate all that. I can tell you what I’ll tell Democrats. You should listen to the American people. Ostensibly, we’re supposed to come here and represent the interests of the American people. This is a 90–10 issue in public opinion polling, and Democrats agree that you should be a citizen and have a photo ID to vote at a tune of about 70 percent,” Johnson responded.

There’s a reason Johnson couldn’t quickly come up with an example. In the past two decades, fraud has only been found in a tiny fraction of cases: much, much less than 1 percent.

Meanwhile, Johnson is exaggerating polling numbers on voter identification in general, not the specifics of the SAVE Act. The bill would require all current registered voters to reregister in person at a voter registration office, and in 45 states, a REAL ID would not be enough to satisfy the bill’s identification requirement. Instead, voters would have to produce a passport, passport card, or certified birth certificate.

Only roughly half of Americans have a passport, and getting a new one costs $165, in addition to the other costs to put together the application. A passport card costs $65, but applicants again face additional costs in terms of photos and required documents if they don’t have the original copy. And all prospective voters who have changed their name after birth, including married women, have to provide proof backing up their name change, such as a wedding license.

All of this would be burdensome for American voters across the country, and create a bureaucratic mess ahead of November’s midterms. It’s quite clear that the Republican Party, led by Trump, is trying to suppress votes and create confusion to prevent big losses in eight months and beyond.

President Trump can’t articulate any semblance of a real “day-after plan” in his war on Iran. 

The president was questioned by the media after his Tuesday meeting with Irish Taoiseach  Micheál Martin at the White House. 

“You just said that Iran is just a military operation to you. But do you not have a day-after plan, and if so what is your day-after plan for Iran?” a reporter asked. 

“Well we have a lot. Look, if we left right now it would take 10 years for them to rebuild. But we’re not ready to leave yet. But we—we’ll be leaving in the near future. We’ll be leaving in pretty much the very near future,” Trump said vaguely. “But right now they’ve been decimated from every standpoint. And again, we’ve had great support from countries in the Middle East. But we’ve had … essentially no support from NATO.” 

Once again, it sounds like the Trump administration went into this war with no real plan. First Trump was saying that he’d have a hand in picking Iran’s next leader. That didn’t happen. And his call for U.S. allies to help defend oil tankers attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz went unheeded—which is why he spent much of Tuesday bashing NATO instead of talking about a day-after plan. 

“NATO is making a very foolish mistake,” Trump said, earlier in the meeting. “I’ve long said that, you know, I wonder whether or not NATO would ever be there for us. So this was a great test. Because we don’t need them.”

Ultimately, Trump’s “near future” timeline offers no hope that this war will end anytime soon. And even if it does, at least 1,444 Iranians of all ages, 850 people in Lebanon, 15 people in Israel, and 13 American service members have already been killed. Thousands more have been injured, and both cultural heritage sites and basic infrastructure have been decimated in Iran. The grim real estate makeover plan he’s trying to build over the rubble of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza isn’t a viable option here. 

Donald Trump is openly entertaining the possibility of putting boots on the ground in Iran.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday beside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Trump sluggishly claimed that he wouldn’t be afraid to put the lives of American soldiers at risk in order to continue his nonsensical war.

“The Iranian regime has told Sky News that if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it would be another Vietnam. Are you afraid of that?” asked a journalist.

“No, I’m not afraid of—I’m really not afraid of anything,” Trump said.

Moments later, Trump said he would withdraw from the war “in the very near future” but that he wasn’t ready to leave yet.

“We have a lot,” Trump responded when asked if the White House had a “day-after plan,” apparently unwilling to elaborate on the details of what that plan would entail.

“If we left right now, it would take 10 years for them to rebuild,” he continued. “But we’re not ready to leave yet. But we’ll be leaving in the near future. We’ll be leaving pretty much in the very near future. But right now they’ve been decimated from every standpoint.”

But leaving may not be a feasible option in the very near future. The president’s allies have recently interpreted a shift in power, warning that while the early days of the war may have indicated an immediate victory, prolonged U.S. involvement in the conflict has dramatically increased the likelihood of boots on the ground. The changing tide has fueled concern that Trump could draw the country into yet another open-ended Middle East conflict.

At issue is whether the U.S. can obtain control over the Strait of Hormuz, the water channel situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The strait is the single most important energy transit point in the world, funneling approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. Iran began laying mines across the strait last week, effectively sealing the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the rest of the open ocean.

Ensuring the free flow of oil through the strait would likely require seizing control of portions of Iran’s shoreline, a war plan that would almost certainly require the physical presence of U.S. troops in Iran. But doing so could embroil the U.S. and American lives in yet another devastating and unpopular conflict—exactly the kind of action that Trump has railed against for more than a decade.

We now know why Donald Trump falsely claimed Iran struck one of its own schools, following the largest loss of civilian life in the war so far.

The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern Iran was hit by a Tomahawk cruise missile on February 28. “Dozens of seven to 12 year-old girls” were killed, The Guardian reported, with the official death toll rising to over 148, per Iranian officials. Unesco described the bombing as a “grave violation” of international law.

In the immediate aftermath, Trump asserted that Iran had accidentally bombed its own civilians.

“In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he told the press on March 7, adding: “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

But proceeding investigations have revealed it is likely that the U.S. was to blame for the bombing. Iran, for one, does not even possess any Tomahawk missiles. Even the Pentagon has since reportedly determined that the missile was fired by American forces.

The Guardian spoke to two sources who claimed that Trump had been given incorrect information by CIA officials—and then was either never briefed with the correct intelligence, or simply didn’t care to update his own stance.

The officials told Trump after the bombing that the missile seen in video did not resemble a Tomahawk. Within 24 hours, the CIA looked at more videos and realized they had actually been wrong: The missile was, in fact, a Tomahawk.

“It was not clear when Trump was briefed about the updated intelligence findings,” The Guardian reported.

Nonetheless, Trump has stuck with his version of events ever since with typical stubbornness. It’s one of many misleading narratives pushed by his administration on the war in Iran.

The war in Iran has led to a worldwide energy crisis, with oil experts from the Persian Gulf being blocked by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Despite this being a cornerstone of Iranian defense for decades, the Trump administration seems to have been caught off guard, and a major reason is that the State Department no longer has any oil and gas experts, having fired them last July as part of reduction-in-force efforts, NOTUS reports. 

A total of 1,300 people were laid off from the State Department last summer, and the Bureau of Energy Resources was hit hard. The people fired were responsible for planning scenarios if the strait was ever closed, and others had professional relationships with oil and gas companies in the Middle East as well as with foreign diplomats who deal with energy concerns. The only people left in the bureau, ironically, are people who work with clean energy and critical minerals. 

“I’m sure Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio wishes he had that expertise available today,” Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, told NOTUS. “Most of that institutional knowledge was lost with the elimination of the bureau and RIFs last fall.”

That expertise would be critical right now as oil and gas prices skyrocket around the world due to the closure of the strait and  attacks on oil and gas infrastructure in the region. Several former State Department officials who worked on energy told  NOTUS that the administration’s lack of preparedness before striking Iran is clearly apparent. 

“Before any of this should have happened, there should have been discussion about what are the implications of this, and what happens when the Strait of Hormuz turns off,” a former Bureau of Energy Resources staffer said. Other former staffers who now work for oil and gas companies said they don’t have clear points of contact in the Trump administration who they can discuss concerns with. 

Publicly, Trump has been dumbfounded by Iran’s response to U.S. and Israeli attacks. 

“They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. Those missiles were set to go after them. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that,” Trump said Monday. The president fails to realize that he fired the people who likely did expect and plan for that exact scenario. 

He worked with Russia and Republicans to build a web of lies that could incriminate President Joe Biden. Now he’s being rewarded.

Alexander Smirnov’s various deceptions about Biden and his family—which included telling the FBI that both Biden and his son Hunter had pocketed millions in bribes from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma—were central to Republican efforts to impeach the former president. Smirnov was the caucus’s star witness.

In a plea deal in 2024, Smirnov admitted that he had not only completely fabricated the Biden-Burisma connection but that it was conjured with the assistance of at least four Russian officials.

Yet Smirnov vanished mere months into his six-year prison sentence. In early March, it became clear that the Trump administration was helping him sweep the whole ordeal under the rug, despite the deleterious impacts that Smirnov’s lies and Russian collusion had on American politics.

On March 4, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche submitted a bizarre and atypical brief supporting Smirnov’s attempts to throw out his sentence and withdraw his plea, reported Mother Jones Monday. Deputy attorneys general have not historically involved themselves in such matters.

In 2025, the DOJ filed a joint motion alongside Smirnov’s attorneys to release him pending appeal. U.S. District Judge Otis Wright tossed the effort in April, but legal experts stressed that the effort could be an early sign that the Trump administration was considering pardoning Smirnov.

Smirnov’s appeal hinges on a stipulation related to his plea deal. At the time, the arrangement stated that Smirnov was “entitled” to a credit for time served, though that credit was never determined by a judge, as specified by the plea. Smirnov and his team are now claiming that his entire sentence should be thrown out since Wright did not comply with the specifications of the plea deal, even though the Russian asset was credited for time served by the Bureau of Prisons.

Instead, Smirnov’s team has pitched that his legal arrangements should be reset to their status before the FBI plea deal. The Justice Department filing supports this sequence of events.

One of President Trump’s most extreme, Nazi-sympathizing counterterrorism officials is leaving his post over the war on Iran.

National Counterterrorism Center director and former GOP congressional candidate Joe Kent announced his resignation, in a letter on X Tuesday morning.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he captioned it.

Kent’s protest resignation is unprecedented for the Trump administration.

“In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent wrote in his longer letter. “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.”

Kent’s resignation highlights a major fault line between the anti-interventionist MAGA right wing—the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Tucker Carlsons—and the more traditional neocons. Many of the former cheered on Kent’s focus on Israel as a primary catalyst for aggression, while the latter rejoiced at his departure.

“REAL COURAGE,” wrote extremist Steve Bannon acolyte Grace Chong. “This is what putting America first actually looks like.”

“The MAGA Coalition is shattered,” commentator Tim Pool chimed. “Trump can say ‘I AM MAGA’ all he wants, and it may be true, but lost support means MAGA is meaningless.”

“Good riddance. Iran has murdered more than a thousand Americans. Their EFP land mines were the deadliest in Iraq,” Republican Representative Don Bacon said. “Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.”

The White House has yet to comment.

Read Joe Kent’s full resignation letter here.

Donald Trump can’t back up his claim that an ex-president supported his decision to wage war on Iran.

All four living former presidents denied speaking to Trump recently, NBC News reports. A George W. Bush aide told the news outlet that “they haven’t been in touch,” and one of Bill Clinton’s aides said that Trump couldn’t have been referring to the forty-second president. Likewise, “no recent conversations” have taken place between Trump and former President Barack Obama, an aide to Obama said. An unnamed source told NBC that Trump couldn’t have been referring to Joe Biden, either.

“I’ve spoken to a certain president—who I like, actually. A past president, former president. He said: ‘I wish I did it. I wish I did.’ But they didn’t do it. I’m doing it. Yeah?” Trump said about the Iran war while at a lunch for Kennedy Center board members Monday afternoon. Later, Trump said in the Oval Office that he “spoke to one of the former presidents who I actually like.”

“I actually speak to some,” Trump said. “And he said, ‘I wish I did what you did.’” When Trump was asked to be specific, Trump said it wasn’t Bush, and when asked if it was Clinton, he replied, “I don’t want to say.”

“I don’t want to say because a member of a party, a member of a party, they have Trump derangement syndrome, but it’s somebody that happens to like me, and I like that person, who’s a smart person, but that person said, ‘I wish I did it.’ OK, but I don’t want to get into who. I don’t want to get him into trouble,” Trump said. “You know, it’s interesting. And maybe he’d be proud. And I could even ask him that: ‘Would you like me to reveal your name?’”

A former president backing Trump up on this war doesn’t even make sense. Bush rejected calls from within his Cabinet to go to war with Iran while he was president, and Obama actually negotiated a landmark deal with the country over its nuclear program. Biden avoided offensive military action during his four years in office, and Clinton last year publicly asked Trump to “defuse” tensions between Iran and Israel. Trump must be feeling some kind of insecurity or pressure over his decision to attack Iran if he’s trying to claim, without anyone going on the record, that a former president supports his reckless decision to bomb the country.